(no subject)
Hello, I'm back again, with another question, again mainly born out of just morbid curiosity.
I was wondering, if you are eating disordered, what is your relationship with numbers?
I often find myself 'blaming numbers' for the development and continuation of my ED. I’m not sure how ridiculous/rare this is, or if it even makes any sense.
I just mean, that when I first developed disordered eating, I was obsessed with numbers: calorie content, fat content, weight, body measurements, etc etc. Completely addicted, dependent on knowing my weight, the calorie content of whatever I was eating… I also took a notebook round with everywhere, in which to record my food/weight and it reads like some crazed mathematician’s secret diary- it’s literally all sums and percentages. Number obsession isn’t rare in AN sufferers I don’t think (?) but I’m diagnosed with Bulimia Nervosa (although chances are I fit the ED-NOS criteria better).
I also remember thinking (I was taking GCSE Statistics which I was really struggling with at the time, when I first starting starving myself) “I mightn’t be able to do these numbers (incidentally, I’m still terrible at maths, excluding perhaps my ability to hold ED-related numbers in my head) but I can still count calories, work of percentage of fat, etc etc”.
I think I used to have fairly severe OCD (never diagnosed) especially in early childhood. I’m still a little bit ‘odd’ nowadays although it’s completely under control and I can function completely normally in everyday situations. This also revolved around numbers- turning lights on and off specific numbers of times, holding my breath for a certain number of seconds, checking things numerous times. I wonder if this could account for it to some degree?
And to this day, I find numbers really, really triggering. Stupidly so. I have never known anyone else with an ED react so badly to them. My mind somehow manages to distort any sort of numeracy into something ED-related. For example, I was listening to my iPod today on the bus, and seeing the length of the song made my stomach lurch, because somehow I read it as a weight. There’s a sign in my village that I can’t walk under because it says “200 metres” and I read it as “calories” so must avoid it. I feel so stupid writing this as it sounds so pathetic and I’ve never told anyone about this before because it seems so strange.
But basically I was wondering if anyone had experienced anything similar? (Sorry if this makes no sense, I think my writing style is even less cohesive than my thoughts at the minute, which seems impossible, but obviously not, eh?)