From Behind Bars, Part I, On Getting Weighed and Breakfast

I’ve had a couple of requests to write a blog about a day in the life of an inpatient eating disordered junkie.
I know, I know. Really, it’s quite fascinating. But fascinating in a creepy, horrifying way.
Or something.
It’s kind of like watching a car wreck. You know how you want to pull your eyes away, but they irrevocably, irrefutably, refuse to move? That’s what this post will be like: riveting in its humor and simultaneous revulsion.

I’ll be writing it in several installments. You breathlessly await, I’m sure. So here goes:

6 am

This is the blasphemous hour in which the care techs (i.e. fellow girls who were apparently “normal” because they didn’t have an eating disorder, which somehow made them qualified to flush our feces and boss us around) would wake us up. We had an hour to shower and get ready for the day, before meeting in the living room at 7 am. Being even one minute late meant all sorts of horrible punishments that included, but were not limited to, Chinese Water Torture, Hail Mary’s, and whippings.

Upon waking up, before we were allowed to relieve our distended bladders of Boost and urine so hydrated it wasn’t even yellow; we had to don a very becoming hospital gown to get weighed. We even had to take off our underwear, and trust me, they checked for those lines! Apparently underwear weighs approximately .036 pounds and could therefore drastically throw off our accurate weight. Naturally, we anorexics loved taking off our underwear, so that we could in any way lessen our weight. We were made to stand on the scale backward, and trust me – no peeking was allowed. I tried on many (nay, scores) of occasions, all without luck at seeing that evil number.

After that humiliating task was over, and after we had gotten ready, we waited for breakfast. This was an interesting time of day, because it was the time in which we had all gone the longest without eating anything, (approximately ten hours, yes, ten!) and most of us tried to talk loudly over the gurgling demands of our stomachs to be fed so that others might not hear our embarrassing need for food. For those of us who were used to going days without a decent meal, this was horrifying. To think that our bodies actually needed, even wanted food? Humiliating! But we couldn’t help it. We were eating so much, and our metabolisms were revving up. We were hungry, though most of us hated to admit it.

7:15 am – Breakfast
This was by far the easiest meal to eat because my stomach was not yet full from a day’s worth of weight-gain food portions. Now, this is my perspective, and since the majority of my (coughthreeinpatientstayscough) at the Center For Change were spent on weight gain, I will describe to you what an average meal for someone who had a great deal of weight to gain was like. It was gluttonous, really. I’d walk into the dining room and claim my tray that comprised something like

-1 large bowl of cereal with 1% milk
-1 container of yogurt
-1 large bowl of fruit
-2 pieces of toast with butter and jelly
-1 large glass of juice
-your firstborn

So, as you can tell, it’s a lot. And that, by comparison of what’s to come, was easy! Seriously, my gag reflex is acting up just thinking about everything I had to eat. Eating as much as I had to was not easy, physically or emotionally. It was incredibly painful. Tums and Gas X were taken in voracious abundance.

After exactly thirty minutes to consume our entire tray of food, we were able to go back to the unit - that is if we had actually, in fact, eaten everything on our plate(s) and did not need to wait around to argue with a tech about how much Boost she was substituting for the calories we hadn’t eaten:

Me: No, I had half of that toast! You’re giving me more Boost than that. It was just half. Half!
Tech: You’re not supposed to argue with me. Just drink the Boost I gave you.

Me: Noooo! There’s, like, fifteen more calories in there than there should be. This isn’t fair. You’re trying to make me fat!

Once said argument is over, and I have lost, (You always lose, by the way. Never has an argument, especially about food, been won at Center For Change. It’s maddening.) You get prepared for the morning group, which was either 12 Step (EDA) or Open Group.

We’ll get to that little gem in the next installment.