Fifty Percent Content

A couple of months ago I thought I had truly left anorexia behind.  My weight was normal, I felt well, I had stopped counting calories, weighing food, compulsively exercising, abusing laxatives and I didn't get overly anxious about eating anymore.  'Fearfoods' were a thing of the past and I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, which, in turn, prevented binging.  

I can't believe how quickly my mentality has changed.  I think about  little other than food, but the amounts and types of foods that I allow myself to eat has dwindled dramatically.  Carbs have completely gone out the window.  I live on fruit, 0% yoghurt and 10 calorie jellies.  Strangely my usual porridge for breakfast has morphed into a chocolate bar; one of the foods that I would have feared the most in the past.   

My mind-set is very anorexic, but my body isn't.  I might be less physically ill now than I was, but the thoughts and feelings from when I was most physically ill have returned.  I look like a healthy  person, but a healthy person does not shudder at the sight of a slice of bread.  No one would imagine what's going on in my head by looking at me.  My family have noticed that my eating habits have gotten a little odd, but they think that everything's okay because I eat chocolate.  Obviously people with eating disorders do not eat chocolate...  Bollocks. 

I know I've lost a little bit of weight, but nothing dramatic.  I fit into old clothes that had grown too tight and my finger span is only about a millimetre, as opposed to a centimetre, from encircling the girth of my arm, just above my elbow.  I want to loose weight.  I know it won't help, but I can't help hoping that it will.  Weight loss is the lure of an eating disorder, but it brings along so many other unwelcome side effects.  Of course, I know that anorexia will never be the answer, but, despite that, I can't break my attraction to it's magnetic pull.  

I don't understand it, but a part of me just wants to be ill and suffer.  I'm terrified of wasting my life and achieving nothing, but I can't decide if that's more or less terrifying than the thought of being well.  My therapist told me recently that a part of me is very well now.  I felt instantly nauseous after she uttered those words and instinctively I wanted to kill the part of me that she was talking about.  I feel like the battle between being ill and being well will rage on forever; there will always be one part of me that wins and one part that loses.  Whatever way it falls, I will only ever be 50% content.