taken to wearing my father’s old flannel shirts, designer jeans in a size that were much too large for me, and clunky Dr. Martins. I was 16, was 5’6”, and weighed 118 pounds. I knew I was thin, but I wasn’t thin enough. I wasn’t the thinnest. I felt sick, my low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence convinced me I was not normal, not like everyone else, and ugly on top of it all. So I wanted to look how I felt, to have an excuse, when people looked at me and saw how unattractive I was. I wanted people to be able to say, “If she wasn’t so thin, she’d be pretty.”
But my full-on fasting days were not consistent. My attempts at self-starvation were always eventually foiled, either by McDonald’s, or Taco Bell, or Burger King. I would feel like a complete failure afterwards. Every night, I dreamed of food.
Although my symptoms may sound like classic anorexia nervosa, I did not actually meet the requirements. There is no room for failure where anorexia is concerned. The National Alliance on Mental Illness states that The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders– 4th Edition (DSM-IV) identifies two types of eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The two types have strict criteria that the patient must meet in order to earn the descriptor “anorexic” or “bulimic,” the former being almost a badge of honor among patients in the ED world, as the need to be thin far outweighs the want to be healthy. It is an elite group, an “I am in control, you are out of control,” on-going battle between Anas (anorexics) and Mias (bulimics) in the disturbing culture of the eating disordered.
I knew that I wasn’t thin enough to be anorexic. I was not a “good” anorexic (I was so uncommitted, in fact, that I didn’t even know the proper term for someone suffering from the disease is “anorectic”). I lacked discipline. I was actually pretty bad when it came to flat-out anorexia. Because of this, I thought I could not have a problem. So what if I skipped meals even though I was hungry? I still occasionally got a period. So what, I thought, if I equated eating a meal in public to going to the bathroom in public? I always eventually gave in to my hunger. And so what if I hid my body in clothes that were too large for me, in clothes that were designed for boys? It was the mid-90’s, and grunge was in.
What I actually had was an EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified). An EDNOS is an eating disorder that does not meet the criteria for anorexia nervosa (defined as: the inability to maintain one’s body weight within fifteen percent of their ideal body weight, based on height and age; and the absence of a menstrual period for 3 consecutive cycles), or bulimia nervosa (defined as: binging and purging at least twice a week for at least three months, or purging by vomiting, excessive exercise, fasting, or misuse of laxatives, diuretics, enemas, or other medications). To have an EDNOS means you have some of those anorexic or bulimic traits, whether it is the obsessing over food, the periods of restricted food intake, or the occasional binging-purging cycle. Fifty-two percent of ED sufferers fall under the EDNOS category, and EDNOS have the highest mortality rate of all the EDs, whether it is heart failure or suicide. EDs are sneaky, quiet, and destructive.