1) Turn off all the heat in your house and open the windows wide. Walk around in short sleeves and dip your fingers and toes in bowls of ice water every 10-15 minutes. This will do nothing to help you lose weight, but it will help train you for the misery that anorexia brings in the form of being constantly cold. You are not allowed reprieve from this “feel the cold” stage as you will never be warm again until you recover.
2) Visit your hairdresser and ask her to pluck 25-50% of the hair from your head. While you’re at it ask her to overprocess your hair with whatever chemicals she has on hand. If the overprocessing makes you lose even more hair that’s even better. This step will get you used to the dry, brittle, falling out hair you’ll have once you’re nutrient deprived.
3) If you plan on purging you should visit your dentist and ask them to grind all the enamel off your teeth. While there also ask if they can pull out a couple of existing fillings. Your teeth will be wrecked soon anyway, so you may as well get a head start and learn what it feels like to have super sensitive teeth once your enamel is gone.
4) Ignore all your friends. Don’t tell them why. Don’t do anything that would give them a chance to try and stop you from cutting them out. You will likely feel utterly miserable. Learn to expect that. You will feel miserable during every day of your eating disorder anyway. The loneliness is a key part of this misery.
5) If you’re in school you should throw away all your textbooks and order their equivalents in a foreign language. This stage will get you started on the cognitive difficulties you will suffer once malnutrition sets in. In a few months of anorexia you will feel like everything is in a foreign language anyway since you can’t read it because your malnourished brain has made you stupid.
6) If you have a job ask your boss to start withholding half your pay. With the amount of sick days you have once your ED is bad you’re going to lose half your pay anyway. This will help you get used to that. In 3 months you should quit your job with no backup plan. This will let you know what it feels like to be fired because your ED made you a lousy employee.
7) Throw away your calendar. Stop asking people their name. Leave your backpack and purse at home every time you go out. You need to learn what it’s like to live without a memory. As well as making you stupid malnutrition will rob you of your memory. Stand up every ten minutes to make sure you turned off the kettle/iron/tap. You know you are forgetful and you are anxious about that. Do this all day every day. You will soon forget why anyway as your memory becomes utterly useless.
8) Throw away all your moisturizer, body wash, anything that makes your skin soft and lovely. Like your hair you need to feel what it’s like for that to be dry and fragile. Think back to the last time you fell down a flight of stairs. With your malnourished body and skin you will feel like that every single day. You will wake up bruised, and aching, and scraped, and you won’t know why. The answer is your ED. The answer to all misery is your ED.
9) Lock yourself in a dark room. Put up spotlights everywhere else in the house. Do not shower. Do not even wash your face. Play music that makes you sad. When it’s time for bed play a CD of a jackhammer. The ED will rob your ability to sleep well, and you need to experience that. If all of this sounds like torture…it is. With this ED you will be sad, and scared, and panicked all the time. This emotional hell will rob you of the ability to do tasks as simple as brushing your teeth.
10) Write a list of every good thing you want out of life. Burn it. As long as you have an eating disorder that is all you will have. You will watch every good thing go up in smoke.
Or, you could just stop going down the road right now. Eating disorders are not glamorous. Losing weight won’t necessarily make you any happier. In fact, it makes you so miserable.
With an eating disorder, everything that is good about your life eventually slips away. Soon, the only sense of accomplishment that you get is from seeing the scale drop. And as the scale drops more, it becomes harder to drop. This makes you work harder and harder. And don’t think, okay, I’ll lose a few pounds and I’ll be able to like what I see in the mirror. I’ll be happy with myself.
Not quite. Welcome to the mind games. Your ED likes to betray you. You will never see how thin you are. You will always see yourself as fat. Huge. Every adjective that people would use to destroy someone. That’s what you see in the mirror, whether you’re 80lbs or 180.
You will never realize how sick you are. You like it when people play tricks on you? No? Then you won’t like an ED. Welcome to the master of tricks. Let’s play a game, shall we? Who’s the biggest person in the room? Is it you? Oh, not good at all. Work harder. Run for hours a day. You have failed if you can’t keep your daily intake at 500. I should point out, if your body gets below 900-1200 calories a day, it goes into starvation mode. So what is 500 calories a day? A suicide diet. You didn’t listen to me, so now, because I love you, because I am your best friend, I will make your life a living hell. But we’re still playing the game. Now you are the smallest person in the room. Good job, you’ve listened to me. But you see, if I let you go now, then you’ll just be mediocre and average. And we don’t want that, do we? No, work harder. Let’s reduce the intake to just 250 calories a day. Let’s only eat yogurt every day. And coffee. And cigarettes. Oh, you could leave if you wanted. But we know you don’t want to. We know that I’m just here to make you better, stronger. Pretty.
For your edifcation, it’s all bull.
You want to live in a fun house mirrored hell? Develop an ED. You wanna get low grades at school? Develop an ED. I can assure you, even if you never become visibly sick, you will lose more than you ever thought possible. You will live every day in total hell.
So, let me ask you again. Do you still want an Eating Disorder?
Walk away now. This is a road of darkness you need to stay away from. Stay on the right path. Keep in the light. If you’re already in an ED, please know, you are beautiful, and you are lovely, and you are WORTH recovery.
Good luck to you all.
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