impRAWvise 

Well, this post right here today is going to be a long one, I feel like I have to give you a special gentle warning from the start. This is also (full disclaimer) a very personal, as in terms of a very subjective one, and it is not supposed to substitute any kind or type of medical advice. Also this post, even though I did my best in order to reflect and best use psychiatric terms and other medical terms, is written by a human, by myself, so if you do encounter any so to speak errors, I excuse myself from the start for what might have escaped my exigent eye, but trust me that my intentions are good. Therefore, please let me clarify my own intentions for this blog post first. I would like to share my own experience, very biased and subjective, yes, with eating disorders. Yes, it’s a plural because what I was manifesting at the time was a mix of tendencies that included anorexia, bulimia and orthorexic behaviour. Orthorexic behaviours are obsessions with one’s perfect or super clean eating. So, here for example the intentions are primarily good at the start, but because of excessive strictness and rigidity they do go down a rabbit hole. So, this is also very present in our modern world that encourages us to do things perfectly but it is also very often overlooked as like many other disruptive patters, simply because we might think that “oh, its not so bad” and so on and so forth. But then, when it happens over an extended period, it becomes corrosive and disruptive, not just on the mental level but on many other levels too.

I started being preoccupied, in a healthy way at first, with health and wellness when I was about 14 years old. It started with a conscious intention to exercise on a daily basis and another focused intention to eat more veggies and healthy, balanced foods. Now let me mention one more thing before we move on to the beginning of it taking a toll on me: I was never into dieting or trying out diets to loose weight. I didn’t needed to loose weight, so I only wanted health and wellness at first. But then, right after my 18 birthday it all shifted drastically and dramatically. I have been able to manage my eating patterns into a pretty normal range until that point but then, I do not know exactly what triggered it, but it did happen and it continue to happen for another ten years on a constant, sometimes daily basis, before I could even think about getting back to what we would define as normal. So what did actually happened when I was 18 years old? Well, it’s not a particular thing, but a mix of ingredients that contributed to developing a mix of eating disorder patterns. And that mix included the following things: a sudden change – meaning drop in my body weight from 54 kg (normal BMI as a reference) to 46 kg (at its lowest, which is in the subponderal range from a BMI perspective, BMI is not the best parameter, but its one of them, and honestly when we experience high fluctuations in body weight, then it is a part of the whole process and becomes very relevant indeed, in addition to other parameters of course, but for now I am just referring to it as in drawing a point in this). I was probably just very exited about moving for the 1st time and renting an apartment and not having to share my space (I left in high school for a school that was in a different city then my hometown, and I had to stay first in a dormitory, which was an extremely stressful and depressing experience for me personally. There were definitely shits in my eating patterns at the time, from a dietary perspective but I did not notice them, until I saw the numbers changing so quickly and dramatically on the scale. This drop of weight was happening over a duration of maximum 2 months, so, yes pretty quickly and dramatically indeed.

What was my own reaction to this? Well, it was indeed a very interesting reaction. I got a very palpable high from losing weight, and from constantly seeing those scale numbers go down. It started to manifest itself like an addiction basically, and I started to get a lovely hit of feeling great when I did see the number so down. My neurotransmitters, were definitely pretty excited about the changes, as I experienced what felt like a surge of dopamine when the numbers got down, then a refill but also a mix of serotonin – feel good and GABA release that was calming and reassuring. It felt so good. So, even if at first it happened by itself, and it was not intended, then I got caught up in this blend of neurotransmitters and actually started to pursue this feel good feeling and actively reach out and try top reproduce it. What started as a legitimate good intention, we all want on a biological level, of course not all of the time, but most of the time, is to feel good and avoid pain, ended up turning itself into a full blown pattern that mimicked not only anorexia traits (not wanting to eat in order to maintain ones body to extreme lows), bulimia (fluctuations in terms of eating too low and them binge eating and then throwing up in order to try to keep ones weight to as low as possible numbers), orthorexia (remember I was very focused on health and wellness form an early age, so now I just took it to a next level, which was quite stressing for the body and turned out into an obsession over time and with constant receptions of certain patterns that reinforce this dysfunctional behaviour and last but not least, a result, but also a part of each one of those patterns or tendencies, whichever way you want to call them is what makes everything aggravating and starts to affect not only physical but also mental health of ones body is the distorted body perception, often called body dysmorphia. This is a real problem, and for me it was a huge problem for many years, as when it is also combined with anxiety, depression or panic attacks, it makes you simply not even able to leave your house, because you cannot deal with the pressure built inside yourself and any other outside pressure as well, be it at this time either real or perceived.

This unhealthy pattern, which was a significant part of my life for almost 10 years, on a regular basis, as then over the last years I have started to gently shift back to a so called normal, and I started to see actually changes and integrate progres on a constant basis, is a complicated thing to approach in therapy, especially without, I would say the support of a nutritionist and a psychiatrist and any other medical specialist that might need to get involved along the way depending on which body organs get affected with time, by these type of eating disordered patters. I personally started out with a therapeutic intervention at first which has no real success, and this was not because the therapist was not good or that I was not willing to make the changes (well, I mean there was resistance for sure from my side, but this is not the point), the real reason, I found out with time and by discussing with medical professionals, was that when you are malnourished and depleted from a physical perspective on the body, there is not really much that you can do on the “cognitive” level, until you at least redress and address some of the body biochemical dysfunctions so that you can actually be receptive to a shift of perceptions so to speak. For me, the intervention that made the most sense and helped me make real progress, was from the a nutritional perspective as I was starting to feed myself properly both in terms of quantity as well as quality. You might have already connected the dots if you read my about me section, that this time interval that I am speaking about overlaps perfectly (and if not, I am telling you now, no worries) with my raw vegan journey and discovering and integrating this on a day to day basis in a healthy, balanced and meaningful way. It was really ugly and really bad at times, but somehow I managed to focus on the things that I loved to eat and start to make progress steadily and gradually.

Nutrition by itself, meaning in my case the implementation of gradual changes while moving towards vegetarianism at first, then veganism and then finally positioning myself in between the vegan and raw vegan area, simply because this is were I truly and fully feel at my best, has represented in my case I would say about 70-80 percent of the recovery process. But, of course, as we all know, it’s not a magic pill that solves it all. So the rest of 20-30 percent of the recovery process that actually led me pretty close to not only a full recovery, but a better place to be at is as I mentioned before, a mix of therapeutic interventions (that include both somatic and cognitive approaches) as well as as psychiatric intervention, that was at first supposed to address my anxiety and panic attacks, but it ended up also regulating my neurotransmitters levels, by addressing certain receptors that work for serotonin and GABA, and with this approach (taking into consideration as well that serotonin is regulating appetite as well, which it makes sense now) medication has also helped me regulate not only my eating patterns, by addressing appetite issues, but also regulate my body weight by bringing it lets say closer to a normal, healthier range. Nothing needs to be perfect or super perfect on the grant scheme of things, but those things, together as well as individually has functioned amazingly for me personally and this is the reason why I am talking about this subject today. This as well as bringing my own unique and humble contribution to not only destigmatisation of mental struggles and diseases but also destigmatisation of eating disorders and related topics, as this one tends to be a still pretty triggering subject for many people, this again, speaking from my own personal experience. And last but not least, on the topic of personal motivation for speaking on the topic is the simple yet profound fact that at some point I have had the beautiful a-ha moment in therapy when I realised that this, overcoming and healing from disordered eating is one of my greatest achievements in life, and I know that for someone who has not been through this it might seem unnecessary but for me this experience has profound significance and meaning, and that is my friend, all that matters by the end of the day, to be ok and know that you are ok with yourself.

I am also shocked when I read about medical cases of anorexic patients and other eating disorders, especially when it comes to force feeding them (there is actually a point when the patient if they drop a significant about of body weight and gets to a critical state needs to be hospitalised, which hopefully was not my case but still its out there a possibility for people struggling with these health matters), just because it could be many times prevented by addressing it early on along this disruptive way. This is also the reason why, when I started to feel better and approach the so to speak normality, about 2-3 years ago I decided to attend a nutrition school for an official degree, simply because I wanted most of all to help people who might be struggling with these very unpleasant by products that one gets as one fall along this path of disorder eating, but unfortunately I was not able to get through with the university nutritions problem (more about this in another future post) simply because it is complicated to have a full time jod and attend a medical specialty program that included (and so it should included) classes with mandatory presence percentages in order to be able to take the final exams and move on with the studies. After two years of struggle and back and forth with this nutrition program, I have come to the realisation that even though this is something that I really like and I am super passionate about, it is just generating, at that moment, more stress than it is actually worth it, and this disturbance not only of my mental health, out of many stress related reasons, but also my physical health is not ok for me. Therefore this May, right after my birthday, I have made my conscious choice to detach myself from this, as it no longer serves me and drop out of the program. It was a thought decision for sure, but one that needed to be taken at the time. I have no plans for this for the near future, but we will see how it goes, maybe at come back visiting this decision at some point maybe not, we shall see.

This being said, I know its a very long post this one for the day, but I did experience a great feeling from writing it, so I do hope you will enjoy reading it too, once again, as I like to do at the end of the longer blog posts that I do here on the blog, I would like to thank you for your patience and your interest in reading about this topic and my own experience with this very sensitive topic as well. As already mentioned I do believe that we need to have more mindful and meaningful conversations about not only mental health topics but also about this topic that I am addressing today here on the blog, the eating disorder topics as these tend to be just as stigmatised as anxiety, depression, suicide or many other mental health topics. This is again a very humble and unique contribution from my self to this cause, and I do hope and like to dream that things will shift and change dramatically with time and within the right context, and that we are globally as well as individually moving towards a more free of judgement experience of our day to day lives as well as a more conscious living on a daily, weekly, monthly, and so on basis. Feel free to share this with anyone who might be going through this at this moment, or if you yourself have resonated with my story have the courage and faith to reach out for help and support from medical and therapeutical professionals. It is really going to make a huge difference in your own life as well as in the lives of others, as we are both individuals, but also representatives of a colective that ranks its own overall health based on the actual health and wellness of its individuals. One last thing, its the little steps that you take that account for constant progress and then eventually lead to a wonderful shift of the things that you might be struggling with at the moment, so don’t worry about doing ti all perfect or all right from the start, just trust the process and enjoy the journey along the way. I wish a wonderful and amazing day ahead. Thank you!