Battling COVID When You Have an Eating Disorder

Content Warning: Please be advised that the following blog addresses the emotional impact of having an eating disorder that some readers may find triggering. If you or someone you care about needs help with an eating issue of any kind, please contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) by calling 1-800-931-2237 or texting (800) 931-2237. They are there to help you!

Right now there are two concurrent sicknesses in my body. They complement each other and exist in opposition. One keeps me confined to my bed and the couch; the other shakes me by the shoulders and says that if I do not move, something terrible will happen. I imagine them in an old Western film with their rusty pistols burning holes in leather holsters – instead of firing, they encircle each other, staring into their opponent’s eyes with an expression that straddles the line between hatred and envy. Every so often, a new chemical is released here or there in the rivers of my veins, irrigating me with worry, energy, or pain at random. They aim to shrink me in their unique and specific ways, divergent members of the same political party.

Like so many others, I am at a loss for health in more than one way: I have an eating disorder and Covid.

My particular brand of the Omicron variant (or the OMG Icon variant, as my funnier friends have been calling it) is, so far, marked by fits of sneezing. My dad’s is the same, but with coughing. I sneeze in my bedroom and I hear my dad cough from across the hall in a contagious call-and-response, like an Abbott and Costello bit but more disgusting. The two of us mill about the house, trying to strike a balance between performing little activities so we feel semi-adjacent to our healthy selves and resting enough that the virus will become as bored as we are and bid us goodbye. Our ability to live in our own respective ecosystems even as we coexist means that nobody is monitoring how much I eat or if I eat or if I exercise or if I bang my head against the wall and ask why it hurts. I know that, should I choose to go rogue and become a double agent for the voice in my head, this would be the easiest time in the world to lose weight.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find comfort in my body as it is. To resist the desire to shrink. To be still.

I want to mention that my disorder runs completely at odds with my actual opinions on fatphobia, body image, and the beauty standard. (I am by no means an authority on the subject, but I recommend the work of the brilliant Aubrey Gordon, especially her book “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.”) The idea coursing through our society that fatness is somehow a moral failing or an epidemic and that it is an issue to be corrected is, in a word, despicable. I will write something else about the beauty standard, but please know that it is one of my least favorite things, surpassing even the most recent Joker movie and people who are unkind to customer service workers. All things considered, I believe with my whole heart that body size has zero correlation with anyone’s value.

…except for mine.

It’s like I can hear Hayley Williams now: “youuuu areeee the only exception.” My cognitive dissonance is like Whack-a-Mole, if the moles were bullying you: I deal with one thought and then another one springs up, and another, and another, and then my arm is too tired to keep bringing down the hammer and so I just let them pop up and say mean things to me. Favorite examples include “if you gain weight, nobody will like you” (ridiculous) and “if you eat those mixed nuts, you will die” (???).

So I have been forbidden by my nutritionist to go running. I’ve broken this rule four or five times (I can’t remember if the fifth was too early to be illegal yet). I have been helped or hindered, however you choose to look at it, by my complete and utter inability to lie about it – I’m like a little girl forbidden from sugar with a shaky leg and chocolate on my chin. I feel my secret emanating off of me like the jagged black lines of a bad smell in a cartoon.

I blurt it out to my partner – “I went running today.” They look at me with a mixture of emotions, love being the baseline: gratitude that I’ve told them, disappointment that I felt the urge to go, determination to help me adhere to my treatment plan. Last week, they sat me down and squeezed my hand and made me promise to go a full week without running. I nodded my head. They said, “no, you need to say it out loud.” Reluctantly, I formed the words and heard myself say them: “I promise not to go running for a week.” And I am terrified of breaking promises. This is attributable to my mixed bag of a strong moral compass, K-12 Catholic school, and OCD. So for one whole week, I left my Hokas in the closet and suppressed the urge to scream. Even the Chloe Ting ab video could not silence the voice breathing down my neck that my remaining sedentary was somehow a death sentence.

Now I am bound to stillness by my body and its sickness. Now I have a particular sickness that requires me to stop.

To lie down and rest and take care of myself, something I have steadily been avoiding for months now, since the beginning of this particular relapse (transition, change, and emotional upheaval all being triggers). This week is testing a belief that I am only now beginning to understand in my bones: that my thinness is not more important than my health. And soon, I hope to graduate to its big sister belief: that my thinness is not important at all. I have had pockets of restriction that make me feel worse, without fail, because that is what depriving your body of food will do every time. The serotonin spike that comes with starvation is punctuated immediately afterward with so much unpleasantness that I always, always wonder why I’ve done it in the first place.

But my eating disorder is not something that I can logic away, or shame myself into leaving behind, or erase as easily as a word in my journal.

It’s as much a part of me as all of my internalized opinions about my body, ideas I learned in my adolescence about why I mattered. Why I matter even now. I’m finding out that it requires a fundamental shift in my relationship to myself, which is not a quick process, nor is it anything close to easy. Because I have spent my whole life being praised for thinness, craved validation for something meaningful and spoon-fed the fact of my smallness instead as a consolation prize, my self-worth has long been inextricable from my size. But I have the dexterity now to untie that particular knot, and my fingers work, if not quickly, thoughtfully; I know the rope so well, and I am becoming callused from its coarseness. Less sensitive to the shifts and vacillations of my body. Less inclined to pray at the altar of perfectionism. Less afraid.

If I try to ignore the thoughts and feelings that hurt me, they will only increase in size, the only plants I know that grow without water. If I give in to their mandates, I will make myself miserable. I have discovered in my healing that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. I’d always heard that I was not defined by my thoughts, that they would arise however they wanted and that I could only control my responses; but I’ve never taken that to heart until now. I do not believe I will ever be able to kick them all the way out, but I am learning how to coexist peacefully with my unwelcome houseguests. I can decide how much gravity they hold, and in doing so, I can give my energy to the things that matter to me. It has taken immense practice and required the building of an uncomfortable muscle, but now, I can sit with an urge without acting on it.

I can stare down the desire to be small and decide just how much it matters. Not always, but often, and for now, that is enough. There is a way to get better. This is the way that I get better.

I wonder if healing from one sickness will help me heal from the other. I wonder if I can befriend both and learn to make the best of my maladies. I am not a doctor, but I hope that when I go to sleep tonight, I feel my body under the blanket and thank it for its blood, its muscle, its bone, the way it holds me and has held me since before I was born, and try to love it back.

Author’s Note:

I wrote this with Covid this winter, not to compare my situation or detract from the incredible difficulty of so many who have suffered through its tragedy, but to provide educators, counselors, and other non-ED sufferers an understanding of what it might be like for those of us who suffer from eating disorders. Perhaps this can be a way for you to understand how important it is to help those who you care for avoid the trap of eating disorders early by fighting societal body image influences when they are young and by continuing to help those who already have that voice in their head. – Caroline Reinstadtler February 2022