Diagnosis

One thing I have needed to do, probably my whole life is focus on me for a bit. I have always been on the go looking for someone to love me or looking for that new job with career progression & lately renovations.

So when I finally realise with the help of my Doctor that I have to work on myself, not the outside of myself but the inside, I actually start to get proper diagnosis. Now depending who you talk too, diagnosis are sometimes helpful & sometimes not… I guess I have to wait & see what way it goes for me. However you all know I have had a weight struggle, ever since I can remember I have been on some sort of eating plan, supplement regime or some sort of prescribed drug to lose weight.

I have been so Psychologists before, counsellors & healers but when my GP referred me to a health psychologist, I googled her & I wasn’t sceptical, I was excited… For the first time in a long time I was excited about seeing someone… But her wait was almost 7 months to get into her! FUCK…

Our first session we just set the scene & history, by the second session she went though on her white board – a cycle. A cycle which I have been in for over 20 years of eating healthy, exercising – getting results & putting too much pressure on myself to get “skinny” (whatever skinny means). When she sits down & tells me I have an eating disorder & she has a plan to recover from it my first thought is ‘Fuck, how are we going to do that in 10 sessions’ (you get 10 sessions covered on a mental health care plan with Medicare) & as if she read my mind she says that Medicare covers 40 sessions for an eating disorder. WOW.

I have always said I have some sort of eating disorder, it’s not anorexia because I don’t loose weight like someone who’s starving themselves but I also am not bulimic as I don’t vomit my food up however I do have compulsions to gorge on food, particularly when I do my grocery shopping, I will eat all 4 ice creams I buy to ‘get them out of the house.’ but this diagnosis (I wish had a completely different name) is Atypical Anorexia Nervosa.

Now we all know Anorexia is an eating disorder of starving oneself & nervosa just means loss of appetite so essentially starving by intaking little to no calories daily & rapidly losing weight to a scarily low BMI (not that we should use the BMI for ANYTHING!).

Atypical anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder where you do everything an anorexic person does or thinks, including all the body image disturbances & a history of restrictive eating & weight loss, except that they are not currently underweight & can have an overweight BMI. That’s me!

So while I am only at the beginning of this diagnosis, I initially was happy to have a name for it. I only wanted a name so I knew how to treat it. Luckily for me my gut was right with this Psychologist & she has been AMAZING. While she’ll allow me to talk about shit at work & my love life etc, we focus mainly on health with little goals that most people don’t realise are a huge struggle for me, such as only weighing once a week – not daily. Eating three meals a day & planning food so I am not just eating a packet of chips when I do eat…

Very small steps but recently I found my weight watchers card when I was 21 years old & I was 64kgs, with a goal weight on 55kgs. As I broach my 42nd birthday, I know that this weight watchers card was not my first attempt at losing weight back then, though high school it was a struggle & there was always a fad I was doing. So for over 20 years, I have been dieting but not getting the results of that of an anorexic person so I never believed I had an eating disorder.

I am obviously not here to give medical advice in anyway, I am not on the same journey as someone with the same behaviours as I have but I do think that there are many of you reading this thinking, fuck I have done the same… So I urge you to get some mental health assistance because weight loss is not about the weight. There is an underlying issue for why I eat the way I eat, why I exercise the way I do & why I think the way I think…

Which leads me into my second diagnosis of 2023…

#IBD4U