[Trigger Alert: I mention numbers/weights in this particular blog, so please read at your discretion]
My name is Billie Julianna Cantrell, and I was born in Nashville, TN in 1970. My parents are attorneys, and I have an older sister.
I was fairly content in my early childhood, going through the usual joys, aches, and pains of growing up. Except for the fact that I was an anxious little one, and when I overheard any adult frustrations/plans/necessities, I worried that I needed to help take care of these things, right then and there.
In 1979, at age 9, I went on a diet. Magnetized to its front door, our refrigerator at home had a “diet meal plan” based on 1000-1200-1500-calorie intakes. That plan seemed significant to my younger self; I had heard rumors that a prosperous life depended on following the guidelines I saw posted there. The meal plan even included an explanation of food exchanges.
Trying to be a dutiful young person in the world, I started following the middle diet outline, the 1200-calorie plan. That plan worked pretty well, but a competition developed within me, and I wanted to do even better at the challenge. So, I cut back my intake to match, approximately, the dictates of the 1000-calorie strategy.
Within a few weeks, all foods that had calorie value scared me. If you come from a restrictive background or anorexic background, you probably understand how fast someone with this type of disorder can adapt to restriction. Of course, as I write this memoir 40 years down the road, I can understand what was going on: I had a genetic predisposition for anorexia. Once my body went into an energy deficit, the irrational but compelling belief that I was in a famine, sent up from my body and triggered in my disordered thoughts, started organizing and preparing my life for impending disaster. Restriction and constant movement would help me survive.
The fears and perceived threats that accompanied food became so great that, 4 months after starting the first diet, my parents took me to a psychiatrist. I was behaving very oddly – so scared of food that I avoided it except for the “safest” things, which, back in 1979 to a 9-year-old, were dill pickles and mustard. Most foods with higher calories made me scream with fear at the prospect of eating them. I also became extra-anxious, afraid of every 1970s world issue, from economics to environment to politics. Somewhere inside my brain, I knew that all these fears and the severe reaction to food were strange, but these vague notions did not help shift me out of the new mode of living in which I found myself.
I first went into treatment in a children’s psychiatric hospital in December, 1979. Throughout the 4 months that I spent there, I was never told that I had a diagnosed disorder. I simply thought I had lost the plot. Why the doctors thought it best to keep the diagnosis/disorder’s name from me for that first hospitalization remains mysterious to me. However, after I was discharged and in after-care, I learned that I had a disease called anorexia nervosa. Knowing that I had a disease provided some relief, even though I still felt crazy.
Over the next couple of years, 1979-1981, I went back into the same children’s psychiatric hospital 2 more, lengthy times. My date of discharge depended solely on reaching a goal weight.
After those first 3 treatment tours, I was quite adamant about not returning. So, for the next several years, from age 11 to age 16, I stayed at a fairly average weight, and I attended school, made friends, and participated in extracurricular activities.
However, food fears never quite went away. While I enjoyed plenty of “junk” food during that time period, the enjoyment was parceled out between periods of restriction.
Towards the end of high school, the stress and worry over college testing, applications, and admissions spurred my restriction. At that point, I was half-aware that the eating disorder had marched back in to help manage everything, but I did not want anyone else to know (as if they did not), and I hardly wanted to admit it to myself. I had worked very hard in high school and wanted to go to a good college, get my degree in 4 years, and go on to graduate school. I was not sure what my major would be at that time, but I had goals nevertheless. To stop and assess the eating issues would delay my progress.
I graduated as valedictorian of my high school class in 1988. At the time I graduated, I had lost so much weight that my graduation pictures appear less triumphant than sad. Whatever the case may be, over the summer before college I lost even more weight, but I proceeded on to college anyway, at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Brown had a “no core curriculum” policy, so I could take whatever classes I wanted. Among the usual academic courses that any college freshman would take, I chose to do a course in dance – for the entire year. I had never formally trained in dance before. Now, I think I understand why I wanted to take a course in dance.
In high school, I was so focused on academics that I did not exercise much. I did not eat much, either. I managed to grow a bit, but I am shorter (5’3”) than I would have been had I eaten normally throughout my adolescent/teenage years. I also never fully went through puberty. My body simply ceased developing at some critical stage in that process. And, as I mentioned, I did not exercise a lot, but I moved around quite a bit – participating in acting classes/plays and studying while standing.
Once in college, however, I not only took the dance class, but I also imitated my friends around me who all exercised to some degree. My best friend had run cross-country in high school, so she would go to the college track just to “keep in shape.” I went with her. I could not run like she could, but I tried. On top of the dance class and dance-practice.
By the end of my freshman year of college, I had lost 10 more pounds from the weight where I had first started back in the fall of 1988. And I had gone to college already severely underweight. The last few weeks of my freshman year, I remember, felt like pure drudgery. Brown’s campus stretches among many hills, and getting to-and-from class wore me out; yet I still danced in the dance class and went regularly to the gym.
When I got home from college in 1989, my weight was extremely low. I went straight back into the psychiatric hospital I had first visited ten years earlier. Protocols for treating eating disorders there had changed a bit, and I was in a unit for teenagers, but – well, the treatment, which lasted nearly 4 months, did not really help. In the early days, when I met with the unit’s overseeing physician, I asked him what weight he thought I should be. I was 5’3” and 63 pounds when I asked. He told me that 90 pounds would be a “safe, low weight.” I took his words to heart.
I also worked one-on-one with a psychiatrist and sometimes with a dietician. Every morning, a nurse brought a scale down to my room and took my weight. I had a food plan to follow, plus supplements to drink between meals. I was reluctant to eat as much as the food plan called for, because I greatly feared weight gain, so I did not eat the food-plan’s requirements until the medical doctor threatened me with tube-feeding. Since deep down I really wanted to eat all the food required and drink all the supplements, plus more, I opted for following the meal plan over tube-feeding. However, I exercised in my room when I could, and after I had gained a few pounds, my psychiatrist actually prescribed exercise. I played tennis and badminton in the little gym the hospital offered, plus took walks with staff. When I thanked my psychiatrist for allowing me to exercise, she replied, “It’s the only way you’ll get stronger.” I took that to heart, as well.
I was discharged from this treatment in September, 1989 after entering in June, 1989. By December of the same year, even after 4 months of treatment over the summer and into the fall, I reached the lowest weight I ever reached in my adult life, 55 pounds. I went into the regular hospital for re-feeding and stayed until Christmas.
A couple of years went by; I did not return to Brown – I had liked it, despite my anorexic downslide there, but all my friends had gone on to senior year, and I would be returning as a sophomore. So, I decided to transfer to another college, a warmer one (ha), out on the west coast.
While assembling the application materials for Stanford University, I spent a year working for a record store in Nashville, but when anorexia got its hooks in me and my weight plummeted, I simply could not do the tasks required of me on the job. I worked a late shift, and I started falling asleep standing up towards the end of the night. This weakened state drove me back into treatment, and at the time, in 1991, the latest recovery “vogue” for eating disorders was 12-step treatment. I decided upon attending a 12-step treatment center in Atlanta. I spent over a year in Atlanta, in-and-out of the 12-step treatment center/recovery residence. When I finally went home to Nashville, I spent about a month there, then went immediately out to Stanford, where I had been accepted as a transfer a year earlier. I had deferred my enrolment to undergo the treatment in Atlanta, and I was grateful I had a chance to get back to school.
I wholeheartedly immersed myself in the 12-step lifestyle for the next 5 years, even while in California. I worked the steps, went to meetings, got sponsors, and received meal plans from dieticians everywhere I went. The only problem was: I did not follow the meal plans. This noncompliance meant, in 12-step lingo, that I was “using,” despite all the efforts to follow the 12-step protocols.
When I returned home from California in 1993, I went back into treatment in 1994, rather unwillingly, at another 12-step treatment center in my hometown. When I say “rather unwillingly,” I mean I did not want to go back into treatment, but my medical doctor and family insisted that I should return to some sort of inpatient facility. Because I was 24 years old, a legal adult, my doctor had to commit me to inpatient treatment through the judicial system. In other words, a court case arose out of my refusal to go to treatment and my doctor’s insistence that I was a threat to myself. (At the time I weighed 65 pounds.) The court appointed an attorney for me, and my family had their own attorney. We were officially at odds against one another. In the end, each side settled on my checking into a local, 12-step hospital that ostensibly treated eating disorders, and I would stay there until I reached a goal weight of 105 pounds. Since another medical doctor had told me 5 years earlier, when I was 19, that 90 pounds was a “safe, low weight,” the 105-pound, new weight goal bothered me a great deal. However, my case had now solidified in the Tennessee judicial system, and I had to reach that goal in order to leave the hospital. The terms of settlement also dictated that I had to live in a recovery residence after reaching 105 pounds for 6 months.
I was in-and-out of that hospital for 2 years, until the doctor overseeing my case gave up on me and sent me back home. This part of my story provides enough fodder for another few blogs on its own, so I will just move along from here.
Upon my release from this 2-year stint with the court-mandated doctor and treatment center in Nashville, I was ready to finish college. I still wanted my Bachelor’s Degree. When I was at Stanford, I had decided I would major in French and focus on French cinema, but by the time I returned to college in 1998, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I had forgotten a lot of my French vocabulary and syntax, so I quickly switched over to major in English.
My weight, from 1996-2001, went up to the highest it had ever been, which was still a bit below the lowest rung on the “normal BMI” chart, but it was a functional weight. Ever since age 19, when that doctor at the treatment center told me 90 pounds was a “safe, low weight,” I had thought I should live my life somewhere around 90-95 pounds. I thought I looked best in that range, anyway.
When I graduated from Vanderbilt, the third college I had attended in my B.A. quest, I felt a lot of pressure about what to do next. I decided I needed a graduate degree, but since I was already 30 years old, I thought graduate school in English would take far too long before I found a career. So, I decided I would go to law school. My parents were lawyers, and even though I did not really care for what I heard about being a lawyer, I went anyway, hoping I could shape my law degree into something that would fit with my personality.
Law school lasted just about a year. I started in 2001 and quit early in 2002, because I lost weight during that time very quickly and hit a point where my doctor (a new one, another one who “specialized” in eating disorders, ahem) decided to put me in a regular hospital for a week. After that hospital stay, I slowly gained some weight back, but my life just froze for the next several years. I had no idea what to do with myself. Of course, now I realize that I really wanted to eat loads every day, and the fight not to do that had become my life’s work.
I did manage to find a job as a paralegal for 4 years from 2007-2011, but the struggles with anorexia got the better of me, and I quit working yet again. I had lived for a while in my own condominium, but I had to sell that in order to save a little money, and I moved back in with my parents in 2011.
Around that time, I also started intensive outpatient treatment at another new, vogue-ish center that provided sessions in cognitive behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, yoga, acupuncture, and group therapy. When a year of this approach failed to inspire me, my therapist, with whom I had been working since law school in 2001, suggested I try electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). I underwent a round of ECT in 2012. You might be able to guess whether ECT had a beneficial effect on me. (No.)
In 2015, my weight plummeted again – it had hovered just below the lowest number of the BMI chart for about 8 years, but by 2015 a series of health issues and general stress sent me back into regimentation mode. For me, whenever I feel acute stress, disappointment, fear, etc., the anorexia always comes to the rescue. The neural pathways in my brain are patterned to fight impending doom through restriction and OCD-type behaviors. In 2016, I started working with a dietician out of my primary care physician’s office, but the dietician departed in 2017. I felt abandoned by her departure, even though I never followed the meal plans she set up for me.
After my dietician left in 2017, I went to the internet, at age 47. Interestingly, I had never looked up recent recovery methods on the internet, I guess because I thought I already knew the methods: follow a meal plan, let the dietician/doctor monitor my weight, then pull back on the amount I eat when my weight gets to a certain, ideal range. Plus, work with a therapist or psychiatrist on the important, bigger issues, like why I act the way I do.
What I found on the internet, after a series of different Google search queries, resonated with me from head to toe. When I found the websites of Tabitha Farrar, Kayla Rose Kotecki, and Elisa Oras, I could not believe what I read/heard via their sites. Especially Tabitha Farrar, who comes from a background of anorexia and who got herself free from the anorexic, systemic entanglement on her own.
Throughout my entire life with anorexia, I ALWAYS wanted, deep down, to eat, and eat a lot. I also wanted to sit down and watch T.V./do crosswords for the next millennium. Despite these inner desires, I was deathly afraid of gaining weight. And throughout years of treatment, I had been warned, over and over, that I had an eating disorder, and therefore I was susceptible to “swinging the other way” and becoming a compulsive overeater. Hearing this threat scared me further, because I really wanted to eat like I imagined a “compulsive overeater” would eat.
Tabitha Farrar, however, had, in her recovery, eaten entire cakes, entire loaves of bread with butter, and much more. She also rested her body entirely for over a year. In the end, she reached her own, natural body weight. Her brain shifted from a severely OCD-oriented thought pattern to a steady, balanced thought pattern. She had completely challenged all her fears by acting in opposition to them, even though the fears were sitting right there. This kind of courage seemed almost beyond my capability, but my desire to eat like she did overpowered my immediate fears, and after a few months of communicating with her personally, I dove in and ate loads. Almost a whole cake, yes; a whole, medium-sized Domino’s pizza, yes; lots of doughnuts, yes.
Am I still fearful? Yes. Have I gotten further with recovery from anorexia nervosa than I ever have in 40 years at this? Yes.
Am I recovered? No. Why?
I believe that the longevity of my disease has cemented my brain’s neural pathways to near-fossilization. Every time I start to do anything in life, it comes with an anorexic tag – some kind of fear, some kind of threat, etc. And then I tell myself I am not brave enough. All this self-talk is hard-wired, anorexic chatter. Nothing I think with regard to food, exercise, and weight can really be trusted.
So, in early 2019, after having reached a weight within the “normal’ BMI range and freaking out, because I still wanted to eat loads of doughnuts and whole cakes, I slumped into quasi-recovery. I clamped down on my intake and started compulsively standing every day. However, by August of 2019, my body started sending very loud messages, in the form of colds and coughs and fatigue, that it was very weary of my restrictive games. My body simply wants to gain more weight, and I have to let it do so. Only just recently has the concept of No Body-Weight Suppression really dawned on me.
Therefore, I am going “all in” as they now call it, eating without ANY restriction for as long as it takes, and going to any weight my body directs me. This part is the most crucial and the toughest. I fear that since I am older and have tortured my body for so long, my body will “get revenge” somehow by making me obese (as dictated by a BMI chart). I have to pretend, however, that I do not care about any of this. The fear sits right within me, but I ignore it to the best of my ability. When I hear it coming at me (in a thousand different ways), I act in opposition to it.
This story – as long as it is – provides just a snapshot of all the hills and dales I have crossed to get to where I am with this disease. My story is unique in its own way, but very common among those of us with long-term anorexia/restrictive eating disorders. As I continue to write blogs, I will offer more stories about my past and my experiences with anorexia and anorexia treatment. For now, though, I welcome any comments or messages you might want to send me. Otherwise, I will catch you next time, in another blog!
