Recovering From Anorexia and Creating a Nourishing Life

  This is the first episode of the second season of the podcast. And I am so excited about this guest lineup. If you haven't listened to the first season, I do hope you go back and check it out. All of my guests, both seasons are lovely, inspirational people who have persevered through challenges in their lives and turn their experiences into beautiful, creative endeavors.

So turning to my interview today, my guest today is Shani Raviv. She's the author of a book called Being Anna, a memoir of anorexia nervosa. In our interview, Shani discusses what it was like for her to live with anorexia for 10 years of her life and how she was able to recover and create a full nourishing life. 

It's so nice to have you here. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Beth. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks. You've written the award winning memoir, Being Anna, which is a memoir about your experience with anorexia. And I want to jump in right away to what sort of childhood did you have before this became a part of your life?

I come from a divorced family. My parents divorced when I was nine. My mom struggled with mental health with bipolar disorder. My dad was Most likely undiagnosed ADHD and very much unavailable. And  once they divorced, I grew up just with my mom and my sister in a house. Like the three of us were a triangle.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa, which was a very tumultuous time. Lots of political conflict, state of emergency. South Africa was. Banned from, they would get sanctions against South Africa. So we weren't allowed to get any international TV or shows coming to the country. So it was very restricted and just a lot of political turmoil and political strife.

And in my personal life. I struggled a lot. I was at a Jewish school and I struggled a lot to fit in. I was born with a skew eye, with a lazy eye. And that was always the bane of my life because I just felt like a freak and that was very difficult for me. And I just didn't feel like I belonged and I didn't feel like I had a purpose.

And I think I was probably depressed from the age of eight. We had moved to, we'd immigrated to Israel and then my mom had a breakdown and we had to return home to South Africa. Yeah. And I feel like I lost my happiness when I returned to South Africa. So that was very difficult amongst other things.

Yeah, but that is a lot. I think the moving from country to country as a child, especially when there is a lot of upheaval, that is certainly not necessarily. A sense of stability, so I can understand how that would shake foundations for a child. Yeah, it was, I feel like in Israel, it was the only time where I really felt happy.

And in those days, Israel is completely different now. But in those days, there was a lot of independence for children. Compared to in South Africa, you had to live behind closed walls and there was a lot of danger and your safety was always at risk. But in Israel, there was so much freedom for children.

You weren't at risk in those days. So it was just a very fun and free childhood for the two years that I was there. How did you end up with your parents in South Africa to begin with and then go back there? What was the draw or the attachment that your family had there? My mom is South African and her father was born in South Africa.

So she's second generation. My dad was Israeli and he was born in Israel. And once he left the army in Israel, he moved to South Africa and they met when she was way too young, 19, and then had me when she was 23. Okay, okay. That, that is really interesting. I think people in the U. S., that's tough to imagine living like that, as you describe in South Africa, behind these walls and afraid of your safety.

What kind of things were, I know there's political upheaval, but what sorts of things were literally right outside the door that you guys had to be afraid of there? There was a lot of crime, a lot of violent crime. So you couldn't walk at night on your own for fear of getting raped or stabbed. A lot of break ins to the houses.

So every house had either an electric fence around it or barbed wire or some sort of alarm system. So my mom's actually an artist and she painted a painting called. She waters the garden with a panic button in her hand because she literally watered the garden with this panic button where she would press it in this private security system.

People would come with machine guns or whatever with guns. If she pressed it. So it was that kind of thing where you just, people were desperate. A lot of people were desperate during those days and to this day too. So  they were trying to survive themselves. So that was the crime rate. And then as you got older, you were back in South Africa and I know from your book that it was at age 14 that you started to fall into a different relationship with food.

And so what, what was your sort of experience and journey through that? I once had a psychologist tell me that 99 percent of anorexics begin with the diet. So mine did too, began with the diet. When I was 14, I was really victimized at school, I would say, and singled out. And I had a lot, not bullying, but I just felt like a pariah at the school.

I never fitted into this Jewish school. And I created an opportunity to leave that school and go to a different school, which was a Catholic multi racial convent. And that's actually where Nelson Mandela's grandchildren went to school. It's called Sacred Heart College in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was the very first multi racial school in South Africa.

It was up until that point, all schools were segregated completely. African kids, black kids went to their own school and white kids went to their own school. There was no mixed races. And that really appealed to me. My mom was an activist, not political, but she was in her painting. She really was painting about the struggle in South Africa.

So that would had a big influence on me. And I wanted to leave the school where I felt like I was not accepted and moved to this other school. So I moved to that school and I fell into this clique of girls, like so many girls at that age who were dieting. And it was not something that ever occurred to me.

I didn't even know really about dieting. My mom never dieted. We all had really good, healthy food in the house. And she wasn't. like that at all. It was completely shunned. And I think I was just looking to be accepted and looking to be good at something. So I started dieting along with the other girls.

And while most of them, it fell by the wayside or it didn't continue, it continued for me. And very soon, like within nine months, it had completely stopped. completely spiraled into a full blown eating disorder. I cut out sugar and carbs, which is what most people do. I think I just have quite a type A personality and I'm very strong willed and I think I didn't know where I was going with it and I didn't know that it would take me down that road.

I really didn't. I was honestly just trying to be healthy at the time. Not that I wasn't healthy, but I remember saying to my friends, I'm just trying to be healthy. So I don't think it was an attempt to harm myself. I know that it wasn't, I think it was just an attempt to create some sort of structure in my world and something that I could latch onto.

A lot of people say that anorexia is a coping mechanism and it's a control thing. So I agree partly with that, but it was definitely more than that. I spiraled into so much more than that. It was just, it overtook me. And by nine months later, I had. Lost my period, which is amenorrhea and I was in complete denial and the denial continued for about six years.

So that was the beginning and interestingly enough, that was in  1991, I think, long time ago. And in those days, especially in South Africa, there was no such thing as anorexia in the media and we had no internet in those days. It was unheard of. There was one other girl in my school who was really skinny and I think that's where I learned the term.

So I didn't even know which is so interesting because a lot of people think it's Molded by the media or it's because of social media, which I definitely think contributes, but it's really interesting that anorexia dates back thousands and thousands of years. I have a book about the history of it. So it's just interesting.

So, 9 months and you felt that you were already in the thick of it. What was your family's reaction to this kind of sudden change, pretty sudden change?  My dad wasn't living with me at the time, and his reaction was just lock her in her room and force her to eat, tell her to snap out of it, I don't think he understood.

And my mom also didn't understand at all. She didn't know what it was. Like nowadays, had she been more educated about it, I think she would have approached it very differently, and she might have seen it as an addiction, and seen it as separate from me.  But in those days, she was bewildered. She just used to say, Hey, eat.

She used to scold me and say like, why aren't you eating? And it's not going to kill you to eat and you have to eat, which made it worse because it just stoked the fire. And she just was desperate. She tried everything to try and reach out to me in those days because there was no internet. And like I said, nobody knew what it was.

She didn't know where to turn, so she was phoning friends of hers who were doctors to try and find out what was wrong with me, and she took me to a psychologist to try and find out what was wrong with me. She found this video, this VHS video in those days that she had seen on TV. It was this like documentary about girls in Canada or something struggling with eating disorders, and she managed to get hold of that video and find it for me.

To try and watch it, but of course it didn't reach me because I was in denial. She did everything she could and she literally thought I was gonna die so many times. So many times. I don't know how much weight I lost, but I lost a lot of weight in those nine months, and she thought she had lost me forever.

And those nine months continued to 10 years. But I'm just talking about the first nine months when it was acute. And my sister, she was younger than me, but she was always very supportive and standing by my side and just believing that I would be okay. I don't know. She was also probably in some sort of denial herself.

It was radical. And also I didn't just lose weight. I changed completely. Like I went from being approachable and, you know, sweet maybe to being very hard and very unapproachable and very shut down. and just impenetrable. Nobody could reach me. I was just got and very guarded and secluded and spending tons of time in my room, not wanting to engage with anyone, just very reclusive and angry, very angry, very hungry, and very angry.

So, if you think back to that, when somebody's saying to you, just eat, and like you said, it stokes the fire, it makes you probably more frustrated, more angry, more set in your ways. But what is that? What is that feeling that if somebody tries to come to you and approach you really in any way to say, you need to eat, this is not good for you.

What is that thing, if you could try to describe it, that comes up inside you that makes you feel so frustrated and angry? Power of my book, yeah. 

Fuck off, leave me alone, don't tell me what to do, don't interfere, you don't know what I'm going through. It's very guarded and very aggressive and very defensive and very angry and of course the opposite side. Anger is the opposite side of the coin to hurt, so, I was obviously hurt,  but it was coming out in anger.

I remember days when, She would just pour some oil into the pan to fry something and I would freak out and start screaming at her for like just pouring oil into the pan. So it was extreme. And now there's a lot more information like you pointed out back then where you were living or just in general, there was not this kind of information.

People didn't have access to information about this eating disorder. Parents didn't necessarily have any clue how to deal with it. It's different now, but at the same time, I think there can be misunderstandings about it. And even just the amount that you've described here or talking about it in your book, it is such a different thing than just I want to look a certain way or I want to be pretty or whatever.

How would you describe that? Just the psychological aspect of this disorder that takes over a person. Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. This could be talked about for hours on end because that's, I think, the crux of it is people do a lot of people still think it's a disease of vanity and honestly, had I not gone through it, I would have completely thought it's a disease of vanity when so many other radical things are going on in the world, hunger and murder and rape.

It seems so trivial and so tried and so self inflicted and in a way it is self inflicted, but something takes over you. So it's, it really, I do believe it's a, it's an attempt to cope with emotions. That's what it is. It's a really twisted, strange way to cope with your emotions. But like any addiction, that's what it does.

It helps you to numb yourself and shuts you down to whatever you're feeling so that you're feeling whatever the addiction is giving you instead. With alcoholism, you're using alcohol to numb your emotions. An eating disorder like anorexia, you're using the absence of food. There's all kinds of studies done what it does to the mind and what it does to the body and how it completely changes you.

You can't function when you're in a starved state. You can't make rational decisions at all. You can't focus, you can't communicate very well, you can't engage with others, your nervous system is completely on alert, you're in survival mode for that whole time. When I was recovered, I once had this man come up to me, I was in a community college and he said, isn't it just for like chicks who want to be skinny?

And you really would think that's all it is, that it ends at that, that it's as superficial as that, but it is so complex. It's the hardest psychological, psychiatric disorder to treat, of all of them. Harder than schizophrenia, they say. There's a 5 20 percent mortality rate. That's a lot. 5 to 20 percent of people with anorexia will die, not from taking their lives, I think, from their bodies shutting down and starving to death.

And treatment often doesn't work because it's so different to alcoholism, for instance, or any kind of drug addiction where you have to abstain from the drug of choice. You have to engage with food or you are going to die eventually. So it's such a weird twist. It's like the food as an anorexic is your enemy.

And yet you have to engage with it constantly in order to recover. So that's where so many anorexics fail is in those first few months of recovery, then the refeeding  and the meal plan. And when all those emotions come up, you have to keep eating. And on a psychological level, I mean, I've written a lot about this in the book about it's like being locked in like the 24 seven psychic hell.

There's a part in my book, it's about a page long, where I just write what I ate in the last week, like I ate a carrot, I ate a bite of this, I ate this, I don't want this, I'm not hungry, it's just chaotic, it's like a spiraling of anxiety in your head. If you see an anorexic, and you just look at them, it's like, You would have no idea what's going on in their head.

It's torment. It's like constant torment of the mind going in loops and loops about what not to eat, what you have eaten, the guilt that you're feeling of what you've eaten, what you, so your whole construct is just focused on what you have eaten and what you won't eat. And then on top of that, it's laden with so much guilt and so much shame.

And that's the feeling that you're constantly trying to escape. Which is the irony because that perpetuates the starvation. So you starve in order to not feel guilty. And then the minute you eat something tiny, the guilt rises and the shame rises and then it perpetuates the cycle. So it's like this never ending dog chasing its tail, trying to escape that guilt and trying to escape that shame with the very things that are causing it.

It's constant. It just doesn't let up at all. It's like being held prisoner in your own body and you can't let anything in. You definitely can't let any love in and your body kind of hardens. It hardens in this attempt to protect itself and be the opposite of receptive, like just pushing the world out, pushing everything out, just the survival mode of.

Chaos and torment and  ritualistic behavior that borders on OCD and insanity. Honestly, I remember every day I had this ritual with my tea where it was so important because it was like, I wasn't consuming much. So my tea was everything and I would get up. And fill the kettle and then put the same amount of tea or coffee or whatever and stir it in a little bit of milk or whatever.

And it had to be exactly right. And if the temperature just dropped this much, I went back and filled it a little bit more. And it had to coincide with the cigarette that I was smoking. It's completely OCD. You have all these rituals. And then once you have that kind of under control, then a lot of people cross addict.

And then they start with drugs or they start with, um, over exercising, something to supplement. The starvation, so then that spirals into a whole nother chaotic world, which is what happened for me. You do a really good job here in this interview and also in your book of describing that, helping me and I think audience members to understand that there is like that whole guilt, the torment, the cycle, the OCD aspects going back and over and over and over and.

Reading your book, I just thought, wow, it's just sounds really tough. It sounds really miserable and painful. And I think that is so good to talk about that people really are going through that level of torment. So you're going through this many years of this. So where did the crack happen? Where did you start to see some light come through and you start to think, I want to do something different?

When did that start? Thank you. I just want to say one more thing about the vanity. I wanted to just say one more thing about that. Like for me, a lot of people think that anorexics choose it because they want to lose weight. And I was never an overweight child. It's not in my makeup. So I was already fit.

Which is interesting. It's weird because yes, the goal is to be thin as an anorexic, but it's almost like an obliteration of your soul. It's become spiritual. It's like it takes over your psyche and it goes way deeper than vanity because if it really was about vanity, you wouldn't want to get that, that nobody wants to look skeletal, like truly, if you are really honest with yourself.

And I honestly, this is really important for me to say, and I really do feel like people need to know that it starts with the struggle inside. And I wrote this in my book that if it could be summed up with one line on a page, it would read, I don't want to be me and being me. And I think this relates to all the anorexics means experiencing those emotions, feeling the shame, feeling the sadness, feeling the anger, feeling the guilt.

So that's what being me meant, and it's an inability to separate those emotions from yourself. So you don't have a strong sense of self, you are those emotions. And of course, if you are those emotions every day, you want to find some way to escape them. And that was my way. It went way deeper than just trying to lose a few pounds here or there.

It went to the level of, I don't want to be who I am on a deep level inside with this weird, obscured, twisted way of controlling my body. But people who have a strong sense of self, children who have a strong sense of self and are not influenced by peer pressure and really loves who they are. We'll never go down this road.

I think you have to be very vulnerable and very scared and very sensitive to go down that road. And that reminded me when you were talking now and before is that it's not a conscious decision. It wasn't a conscious decision for you to say, okay, I'm going to go down this road to get as skinny as I possibly can.

Or like you said, you weren't trying to harm yourself. It was not a conscious decision.  It wasn't a conscious decision to spiral out of control, but it was a conscious decision to get as skinny as I could, but not for the sake of looking beautiful. It's weird. It's really weird. It wasn't for the sake of looking beautiful.

It was for other reasons that some I think are unknown to me. It was for the sake of being the best that I can at this one thing and going all the way. And it's very OCD, very black or white thinking. And then it just takes over and it has a life of its own. That's the thing. You can't just say to a person suffering from it, snap out of it or just eat because it's just not possible.

It takes over and you spiral and spiral, which is what happened to me, which is answers your next question is when did I see, want to see the light? And when did I start feeling like I wanted to find a different way? But I mean, it went on for me for 10 years. which is a long time from the age of 14 to 24.

I was anorexic and it had variations. There were times that I did eat, but I binged because I was so hungry and so out of my mind and then starved and then binged and then starved. I never vomited. I was never bulimic, but I did cross addict to drugs, alcohol, promiscuity. Over exercising and all of that.

And there was a point when I was six years into it. So I think I was 19 when my mom was really at it, like at her wit's end. She was threatening to take her own life. She said she couldn't take it anymore. She just couldn't watch me suffer like that. And I had been to Israel and back. I had been recruited to the Israeli army, which was a whole nother story.

And then I came back to South Africa to live with my mom. And she had found this man in the community who's. Two daughters were recovered anorexics, and she had turned to him. His name was Ron, and he, he agreed to just talk to me on the phone one day, and just have a conversation about where I was at. I remember being in the kitchen and she came down and she said, there's a guy on the phone who just wants to talk to you about where you were at.

So there was something about that being vague. And anonymous that spoke to me, he wasn't invested in me. He wasn't a clinician. He wasn't trying to help me or remedy me as far as I knew. It was so vague. It was just neutral. He was just going to talk to me about where I was at. She wouldn't dare use the word anorexic.

She wouldn't dare. I had never uttered it aloud. So it was nothing like that. And I remember talking to him for two hours on the phone and he listened and he also was very harsh and authoritarian, which is a. My mom was never like that. So it was, I think, a figure that I needed in my life and he just laid it straight and said, in a sort of parental way, he called me girly.

I remember now it was endearing. It was like a dad figure. And he said, girly, if you don't start eating, you are going to die. And other people had said that, but the way that he said it was so matter of fact, and he had nothing invested in me. There was something about it that just resonated with me. And I knew that he had told me about his girls who had suffered from it.

So he wasn't just talking blindly out of his. He knew what he was talking about. It was matter of fact and straight forward because anorexia doesn't respond to kindness. It just doesn't because it's not a kind disease and you are not yourself. So who you are cannot respond. So it was that sort of harsh tone that got to me.

And it was the very first time in six years that I actually admitted out loud that I had a problem.  I don't even know if I said I'm anorexic, but I told him I said I have a problem and I need help or something like that. I don't even know if I said I need help, but it was a huge moment because it broke my denial.

It was the very first time I acted it aloud. And I remember going downstairs to my mom and saying, he's the only person in the world who understands me. And she just was, I think she burst into tears and she was hopeful and relieved, but unfortunately it just continued after that time for the next four years or however long it was three or four years and got worse and the addictions got worse and the drinking got worse and the drugs got worse and the exercise got worse.

So I think I was scared when that came up, I think I got scared. To face my emotions and I wasn't ready. So luckily I didn't die in those years. And then eventually with all the drugs and the drinking and the partying and stuff that I was doing in my early twenties, I was at a rave in Cape town and I took a micro dot of LSD and had a very profound out of body experience where I was like a micro dot blasting through space and I had almost lost my sense of self.

And I remember the following morning coming back into my body, like Timothy Leary describes that you leave your body and it was almost like a death experience and coming back and looking at myself in the mirror and just being grateful for the very, very first time in my whole life for being me.  I think that's what treatment centers are trying to do is help you be grateful for being who you are and trying to find some forgiveness.

But it's very hard to cognitively talk yourself out of a mind state like that. So I've spoken a lot about NSD in my book and in different places, and I'm not saying that's a cure all. Although it is becoming much more accepted in our society as a powerful remedy for addiction, but it helped me. It helped me connect with myself in a way that I never had.

It helped me find gratitude, a seed of gratitude for being me. And it helped me connect with spirit and with the divine in a way that I never had before. And a lot of people say that their first spiritual experiences with God or the divine are from drugs like LSD. And I don't think I believed in God before then.

And then something slowly shifted after that experience. I started reading the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which is about the Buddha's journey and realizing I'm not the only one in the world to have this suffering. And that book really spoke to me. And I started to do yoga at the age of 21, which slowly got me into my body and out of my head and opened me up to be more receptive to the world around me and more receptive to my emotions.

And then still years went by and I still continued with more drugs and more drinking. while that was happening. So it was like a little bit of the good coming in, but bad was still there. And eventually the drugs stopped working and they just weren't giving me pleasure or joy or fake happiness anymore.

And I think the more I did yoga and the more I fed the spiritual side of myself, the negative stuff started to come down. So it was like a fine balance. They say, if you give up something, you have to supplement it with something else. I think I was doing that without even knowing that I was doing that.

And then when I was 20,  I met this guy who I was really madly in love with, and I really wanted to be with him and that same guy. I'd had the conversation with the man Ron who helped me break my denial. I visited him. I wanted to show him that I was in a good space, even though I wasn't. And he said to me, you will never be able to love someone until you love yourself.

And it really hit me. It's obvious people say that all the time, but it really hit me. And I realized I really wanted to be in this relationship with this young guy. And I realized that I would lose that if I didn't learn to love myself. So that sort of got me thinking I need to get out of this hole that I'm in.

And also I had done everything. I had taken it to the extreme. I had starved myself for 10 years and I had cross addicted. I had tried every single drug and they had stopped working for me. I had abused alcohol. I had done all those things and I was still feeling unhappy. The goal with an anorexic is when you reach your goal weight, then you'll be happy.

That's stupid. It's just ridiculous, but it's a very twisted mindset. So I did reach my goal in those days and I realized I got off the scale and I was like, I'm still not happy, obviously, but it was a shock.  There was a small seed that had been growing in me since that acid trip of connecting with spirit and finding my true self and living a life that was actually happy.

Not this one that I thought would make me happy because I didn't believe in happiness all those years. I thought it was fake. I didn't think people were really ever happy because I just never felt it. And I think I just let down my guard enough when I was 24  to say to myself, I need help.  And that same man who I went to visit, who told me that if you can't love yourself, you can't love someone else.

I saw him in person and he said to me, also again, in a sort of very nonchalant, uninvested way, he knew I was moving cities from Johannesburg back to Cape town, and he just gave me this number of a therapist in Cape town. And he said, just do me a favor. He didn't say do this for you, which was so helpful because I wasn't at that stage of wanting to do it for me.

He said, just do this for me, which was amazing. And he was so nonchalant about it. So I said, okay, I'll make the call. And I knew it was to a therapist. And when I got to Cape Town, I made the call, which was the call that changed my life. And it was my therapist Graham on the other side of the phone. And he invited me that night.

There was like a support group for anorexics and bulimics. And he invited me that night to come and be in group. And I had never been in a support group of any kind. He was also just very casual. He was just come and check it out. And my mom dropped me off at this clinic for girls and women who were anorexic and bulimics.

And I sat in a circle and they went around and asked your name and I just remember bringing my hands to my face and just sobbing and sobbing. Because it was the very first time that I felt I could let down my guard. I was in a safe place. These were people who were like me. I was not alone. I may have been crazy from this disorder, but I was not truly crazy.

And just my whole being and not that I relaxed, relaxed, but I felt more safe than I could ever feel outside of that group. And that's what support groups are for. So that support group and him really saved my life because I didn't know that was the start of recovery. I was going about it in the dark, just one thing at a time, making the phone call, going to the group, and then in the group, he said to me, to supplement this group, we've got to do one on one therapy.

So then the next day I made an appointment with him and he said, Then he hooked me up with a nutritionist. So it just was happening to me. Once I made that decision to make that phone call, because I did say to myself, I want to be well, I don't know if I said it aloud, but I think I said to myself, I want to be well.

And I had no idea what that meant. And I had no idea that it would be a really hard journey. But I knew that I didn't want to die. I never wanted to die. And I knew that I didn't want to continue the way I was because it was hard. It was really hard and I was exhausted. I was burnt out. So that's the long story.

Yeah. It is interesting to me too, though, that I think sometimes for so many people with so many different things going on, different addictions or habits that are affecting them or whatever, it can just start with little seeds and it can take years. But there's one man just talking to you in a certain way, and it's not, you didn't make any great big changes after that, but there's still something there.

There's something that shifts and it doesn't mean that you're going to stop the next day or even the next year, but you're on a journey and then your LSD experience and you're starting to embrace your spirituality and. Slowly, but surely you're moving on that path. And I love that concept. It's not easy.

Like you said, you didn't necessarily anticipate how tough it was going to be, but it's like a transformational journey and it can be really painful. And so that reminds me too, I wanted to ask you about when you did mention in your book, which I thought was a very profound thing to say is that you didn't realize when you gave up your anorexia that it would be basically like your former identity dying and having to rebirth.

Yeah. Or reset, or whatever you want to call it, this new sense of self. So talk a little bit about that experience. When I gave up anorexia, I didn't realize that I would die because for those 10 years all I knew was this identity of anorexia and for people who don't know what Anna means, it's the title of my book being Anna, Anna is a nickname in the eating disorder world for anorexia and Mia is a nickname for bulimia.

So I chose that really carefully because for those 10 years I was Anna. It's a very stereotypical persona. All anorexics share the same traits and the same mind state and the same psychological and physiological effects of starvation, what it does to the brain and the mind and the body. So I became this other person, not a person because an anorexia is not a person, but it's almost like you become possessed by this other person.

Spirit, not a spirit, but like a persona that takes over you and you are no longer yourself the same as with alcoholism, but people say they can't relate to the person that they love because they're possessed by alcohol. So it almost takes over like a spirit and I was stuck in that and that was me for 10 years.

And then when I started recovery, it wasn't like very fast, but like over the months. that I was really in this active recovery while I was following my meal plan and eating more food in a day than I sometimes ate in a month and trying to deal with just superficial emotions during therapy and then going to the support group.

So a lot of support during those years. Once my emotions, Rise up and the disease of anorexia, its power was lessening. Then that persona started to crumble. And eventually a few, I don't know, months later, I really felt a death, not sudden, but slow, almost like I had lost myself. And I did, I lost the identity that I knew.

Suddenly I was putting on weight and I was wearing baggy clothes and I was. Uncomfortable in myself and uncomfortable in my, in these new emotions that I hadn't felt all those years. Depression was coming up, fear was coming up, sadness, anger. They weren't new emotions, but they were related to something different.

They were related to my past. Like, they say that When you're anorexic and with the length of time that you're sick, your emotional maturity gets stunted at the age at which you started. So I was almost like back at being 14 again, even though I was 24, I'd lost that emotional growth that people get during those years.

And I honestly, I just didn't know who I was again. And I remember being in my backyard and my whole day felt like it was consumed with food and meal plans.  And going to the store, which was like an anxiety attack every time because it was so overwhelming all the choices and then having to go home and make the food for myself and prepare it.

And then I would sit with my list of my meal plan and make sure that I totaled the counts and so that I could present it to my dietitian and she could make sure that I was getting enough calories. And then all of that, that brought up the emotion. So I remember being in my backyard and just taking a bite of a sandwich and just buckling over in pain and just sobbing and sobbing and feeling like just the storm, this wash of emotions, like flooding me.

And I think that was also the letting go of this hard persona, this hardness. I don't know that I even shed a tear in those 10 years.  I was so hardened. It's hard to describe it. I was imprisoned and hardened and untouchable and just prickly, just inaccessible. And then once I started recovery and I started eating and all the emotions came up, I started to soften and I wasn't familiar with that at all.

I was  suddenly a new person. And I didn't know who I was anymore and they say I've written about this in the book, but in so many diseases or not even diseases, like somebody has a broken leg, you go to their house and you bring them food and you can console them and talk to them. And it's visible, but with something like anorexia, it doesn't look like there's anything wrong with you.

You're not just lying around in bed recovering. You've got to be active and continue with your life. That's recovery is engaging with life and having healthy relationships and. Being productive and finding meaning in your life. That's recovery.  It's very different to like lying in bed with broken legs.

So I just didn't know what to do with myself and all these new feelings and it was hard.  Well, when you think about how difficult that was to go through that experience and then have to re engage with food on a totally different level that before was your enemy and now you're on meal plans and you have to eat a certain amount per day.

When you look back now, if there were other people who were looking at that, wow, that sounds really hard to reinvent yourself in a way, the way you are now, and then looking back at that pain you had to go through to re engage with your emotions, re engage with food and life. What would you say about that?

It was essential. There is no other way. They say the only way to recover is through. And I am on the other side now. I am recovered. I really say that the spirit of anorexia has left me. It has. And I've had hard stuff in my life. I had my dad dying five years ago. I went through divorce. I went through immigration.

And I've never relapsed because it's not in me anymore. And I've found enough coping mechanisms. And I don't have the desire to go down that road anymore.  Looking back, it was a stepping stone. I think there's so many different phases in life, especially with the disorder that you're in and then recovering from and then recovered from.

There's stages to it. I didn't know because I didn't have the hindsight in those days, but had I known that it would be light at the end of the tunnel and that I could go on to lead a normal, healthy life, I wished for that, but I didn't think it was possible. I thought I would always be stuck in that state.

I remember during early recovery when I was 24, I was sitting in the dietician's office and I used to wear children's clothing. It's just, I don't know, it was part of that  infantilizing, like just wanting to be a child almost. So I used to wear these like little tiny tops for the five year old. They were all tight and squeezing.

And I remember just being in her office and just. Looking at the meal plan that she was giving me and saying, I can't do this. This is more food than I've eaten in a month. And I don't want the rest of my life to be like this. And so she used to reassure me. And so did my therapist by saying, this is just now, this is temporary.

This is what you have to do to get better. These baby steps, you have to eat this. And then eventually like I bought regular clothes and my food was regular. And it's just a stepping stone because you can't just go from one extreme to another and then suddenly, well, I'm happy. Like it's a journey. So I gave myself at the start of recovery, five years, because I think they say for every year that you've struggled, you need to give yourself a year of recovery, something like that.

So I gave myself five years, which is half of the time to dedicate myself to recovery. And I was as dedicated to recovery as I was to the anorexia, which was an asset. I've heard people in the eating disorder world who work as doctors and stuff say that. If you do survive anorexia, you can go on to be very successful in life because you have a very strong will and a focus.

So I put as much focus into my recovery as I did into my eating disorder and I was determined, absolutely determined not to relapse. I relapsed once very early on. And it took me back to square one and I was like, I don't want to be there again. And then I remember I went to the support group, that same support group for two years, every single week, it was my base.

It was like my stability. And I remember two years later when I was like really starting to engage with life and my food was much, much better. And my emotions were stabilizing a little. I remember people were in awe. Like they would say, like, how did you do it? How have you recovered? If there's no secret recipe, you just have to stick with the plan.

The same as with AA,  you have to not drink. If you want to recover from alcoholism, you have to not drink. You have to keep showing up at the meetings and abstaining from alcohol. And with an eating disorder, you have to keep showing up to the meetings, doing the internal work. And eating the food and dealing with the emotions.

There's no secret. It's just that is the way through. And it's really messy and really uncomfortable and really awful. There were women in those groups who were survivors of incest and being raped by their fathers. So who am I to sit back and say, well, you've just got to deal with your emotions. That is,  Really big stuff.

And in my past, I didn't have incidents that were exactly like that, but we all know what shame and pain feels like. And there's varying degrees of it. That's the fear is confronting that pain and that shame and the guilt. And that's where people would fall short every single time I'd be in those groups.

And the woman that had been there for years and they would just relapse and they'd be at square one again, and they just couldn't deal with the emotions or couldn't deal with this new life. Couldn't deal with the loss of their identity. So many variations. But that's what makes it so hard to recover from it.

Those are all those things. And there's another aspect after you go through this process that you went through, you really dedicated yourself to it. You're like, I'm going to do this and you really went for it. And then there's a point at which you mentioned a couple of times in your book, especially towards the end that you really had to learn to love yourself.

And like you said earlier, it's such a thing that we hear even like that man told you, you can't love anyone else unless you love yourself first. And so we hear it. But it's such a thing that I think is difficult for people to really grasp or to really understand. How do I get there? What does that really mean?

And so at this point, it sounds like from your book that you have felt that you've reached that. What does that mean for you? The idea of loving yourself or a feeling that you do love yourself now? I love this question, Beth.  It's such a hard one to answer, but I'm going to try. I'd say that loving myself means making decisions that serve me, being in touch with my intuition, because you can't be in touch with your intuition or make decisions that serve you when you're starving yourself and out of your mind.

You just can't. It's impossible. So those are the two things that come to mind the most. I think having padded my life, like I was talking about the negative things fell away, like I stopped doing drugs and stopped doing all those things that were harmful to me, although they gave me something, otherwise I wouldn't have done them, but ultimately they were harmful and started bolstering my life and myself with these positive things like yoga and being connected to people like opening up to my mom and having friendships where I could confide in people.

So like bolstering myself. And I actually had this therapist when I was in my late twenties, who said a very profound thing. She said that recovery means that you're fattening up your sense of self. So I think all those years.  During recovery, those five years that I gave myself, that's what I was doing instead of thinning my body, I was fattening a sense of self by learning to be an adult in this world by taking responsibility for my feelings by moving through my emotions.

By falling and standing up again and falling and standing up again by getting out in the world and starting to give my gifts. Soon after I started recovery, I started to reach out to newspapers and started freelance writing, which is what I really wanted to do. Giving myself more confidence and knowing that I can be capable in the world, even though I had felt so incapable for so many years, I felt like a child stuck at the age of 14.

So all of those things, like going out into the world feeling like a normal person. I remember. Dreaming about just being a normal person. Can't I just be a normal person who just sits down and has a sandwich? When there was a time when having a sandwich was completely anxiety provoking, was out of the, I didn't have a sandwich in 10 years.

Two pieces of bread on top of each other was out of the question. So I think just. Knowing that I can move into life, be a normal person, wearing normal clothes, not children's shirts and eating normal size meal, not like a little tiny Japanese bowl and the yoga supporting me and helping me get into my body and helping me ground.

And just the years that went by of feeding myself food so that my nervous system could relax and getting on the right medicine so that I could treat my depression and anxiety. That's one other very important thing to mention is I've heard that 99 percent of anorexics It's not only start with a diet, but start to escape anxiety or depression.

I think I didn't know that, but I'm sure that I was depressed as a child. And that also came up once I started recovery, I went through some major clinical depressions, one that landed me up in the psych ward. So I had to deal with all of that. So learning to love myself throughout that process was just a lot like a child learns to walk, a lot of falling, a lot of making the wrong decisions, a lot of sleeping with the wrong men and getting really hurt and making the wrong decisions with jobs and just one by one making the wrong decision and then knowing that was the wrong decision and knowing that in the future I can make the right decision.

And I remember this job that I had was so arbitrary. I was working in the film industry. And I was on my hands and knees painting the sidewalk, exhausting work. I was up at four in the morning and doing this all day long on my hands and knees. And the person who was my boss at the time was just so abusive and something rose in me, that same sort of seed, like some tiny little seed said to me, this is wrong, I don't have to take this.

I can literally get up off my knees and I can say something because that's a lot of what anorexia is, your voice is swallowed. If you read Caroline Mace's book, uh, Anatomy of this Burden, she's She talks about the different chakras. She talks about how the third chakra is related to diseases like eating disorders.

Your third chakra is your sense of self and your throat chakra is your self expression. Those are the two things that are blocked with anorexia as you deprive yourself of your food so you don't feed your sense of self and your throat chakra is blocked. Like I literally couldn't swallow properly and there was so much anxiety around eating that my self expression was blocked.

Those little movements forward in my daily life of being able to go back the next day and say to this man who was abuse, abusive, I'm not coming back. That was huge. Or saying to some guy who was sexually abusing me to actually say no, to get that out. Those are huge steps. And I think that's what helped me start to find self love.

And I remember little things like my sister came over during my recovery and she was so proud of me and she wanted to give me a gift and I was still so shut down to love and to kindness. I didn't feel I deserve. That's another huge thing about anorexia is you feel like you don't deserve anything. You feel like you don't deserve any pleasure.

You don't deserve any joy. You don't deserve happiness. So those little moments where she came to the door and she was holding this little gift for me beautifully wrapped with this little card and she gave it to me and I opened it. I still have it. It's like a prism that you hang in your window. And just opening that gift brought up so much pain because it was like opening up to love and to receiving and to knowing that I am good and I am okay and I can be loved.

But those were huge steps. And she left the house and I just bawled. I lay on the couch and I just cried and gutted, feeling like bereft. And I think that all of those were moments of learning to love myself along the way and make good decisions that served me. Because nowadays I rarely make a decision that doesn't serve me.

It's no longer a conundrum. I remember in those days it used to be like, how am I going to make this decision? I wasn't in touch with my intuition. I wasn't in touch with my heart. So I had no gauge of what's right for me and what's wrong for me. Cause I had no sense of self and no center. And nowadays it's so easy because I know who I am.

I know what's good for me. I know what my limits are. I know when something doesn't serve me. And I know intuitively when I meet someone that the energy doesn't feel right, I know to say no. I know when a job I take on doesn't feel right. I know to say no. But so it's a lot about learning boundaries, which I never grew up with at all.

And a lot about just re educating or educating myself for the first time about what I deserve and What any human being deserves really to be a healthy, normal person in this world. So learning to value myself and through these little stumbling blocks, falling along the way and then picking myself up and knowing next time I can do it differently.

It is so hard, I think, to articulate how one grows to love themself. You listed so many things that are just good things to get there that are really helpful for people. So I know you have created this journal writing circle concept and writing is a huge thing for you and you like to spread it out there to help in the healing of others as well.

So can you tell me just a little bit about that? Yes, before I do, I just want to say one more thing about the journey of self love is we're all different. We all heal at different paces. It's so individualistic. But one thing I really feel, and I'm only conscious of this now that we're talking about it, is just to keep going.

You got to just keep moving forward and you don't know how long the journey is going to take for self love. I know I didn't reach a point in the middle of the labyrinth and say like, Oh, I love myself now. It's just so slow and unclear and just so ethereal. It's like a labyrinth at some part on that labyrinth.

You finally realize, Oh, I actually feel good. And myself, and I actually do like myself. So I think it's very slow, but if you keep going and it happens, it can't not happen, it's our natural state. So it's just connecting with the natural who we really are without all the bullshit and without all the fear.

And then about the journey riding, I call it journey riding circles, and I've been offering them for women and teen girls. I just started offering it for teen girls. I've been doing it for five years in my community online and in person. And then I've also started. Offering it at treatment centers. So I'm offering it near my house at addiction treatment center for women, which I absolutely love.

And of course it's coming full circle because it reminds me of the days that I sat in support group and the holding and the support that I felt there. So it's me coming back and offering that to these women, which is such a gift to me and such a gift to them. And it's a beautiful process where we use poetry, like very powerful woman centric poems.

And I read a couple of poems during the circle. And then I pull out about five prompts from the poem. And then we write in a very stream of consciousness, but focused way for 15 minutes to the prompts and a lot comes out. It's a very deep, deep process. Processing of one's past, of your history, of your memories that can lead to a memoir, but doesn't all, you know, it's just the memories of our life, which is our memoir.

And, uh, I really love this work because writing my book took me eight years and I healed along with the writing of the book. And I want to offer that to people so that they can also heal through their writing, their journeys. And another part of the process of this journey writing is witnessing. So you write, put your pens down, and then you read verbatim what you've written.

Everybody gets a chance to share. And the rest of us just sit back and listen with open hearts. And we just witness. And it's that kind of like the Native American talking circle where you just are witnessed in your pain, in your shame. And you realize you're not alone. You realize that your stories resonate with other people.

You realize that we're all the same, even though we have different Ways of going about it and is very healing and very grounding. It's a beautiful process where people really connect with themselves. They say in a deeper way than they do in other ways, in other processes, and find a lot of joy and a lot of meaning in the connection with each other and with themselves.

It's a beautiful process. I really loved it. I love it. I love everything about it. I think it's awesome. It's awesome. Do you have any other things that come to mind that you wanted to make sure to talk about or that came up during the interview? Just one thing is people hear that once an anorexic, always an anorexic.

It's like this curse that never leaves you. And I really don't believe that's true. I definitely have some, maybe a little weird eating habits, not completely normal. I don't know if anybody's completely normal. A lot of us have weird relationships to food. But like I said, that spirit of anorexia has left me.

I could even do a cleanse a few months ago and be okay, because I have coping mechanisms in my life. So I don't have to fear falling into this other world because I, I have the skills now and I do believe that there is a way out. I know there's a way out and I do believe that you can fully recover. And go on to live normal life where those thoughts are not attacking you and where the desire to starve is no longer there.

So I really do believe in full recovery and I think that's important because a lot of people don't think that's true. I think the way you say it, that the spirit. Of it has left you that that really to me is a good way to visualize that where you just simply don't have that in you anymore that pull that desire that whatever you used to feel towards it is gone.

Yeah, and that's nice to think that people could think this is not a life sentence. This is something that I could recover from and feel like I can be free of it. Yeah, yeah, it's a real driving force. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you talking about all this. I really appreciate everything you've said and thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Beth. I really enjoyed it and I really appreciate your questions. They were really great and just the opportunity to talk about it is really good. I hope it serves others.