With a little substitution, this is so "dead on"....

I found this while searching for something else.  And it freaked me out.  Because it was so totally accurate to the feelings I have about food and eating.  Clearly, in a metaphorical way.  And in a way that is so insanely tricky to actually decribe to someone who doesn't have a brain that's wired like mine and like all those other people out there struggling with their relationship with food.  TO get a glimpse into my world, go ahead and generalize the incidences of the author's use of "anorexia" with "eating disorders"....


To me, the difference between extreme dieting and anorexia to me is the part nobody can see -- the part that goes on in your head.

For anyone who wandered over here due to that keyword, here's the difference.


Imagine I'm your mother. Every ten minutes I interrupt you from whatever you are doing and tell you to clean your room. You clean it. It's clean. It's spotless. You could serve the Queen Mother off your floor.

Ten minutes later, I walk back in and tell you to clean it again.

"It's clean!" you say. "I just cleaned it!"

"Clean it again," I say. "You missed a spot."

So you get down on your hands and knees and scrub the floor with your toothbrush, gagging in disgust all the while.

Ten minutes later, I walk back in and tell you to clean it again.

This repeats, over and over, until the room is so clean it's starting to come apart at the seams with the scrubbing, but still I continue to walk in and tell you to clean it. You show me the floorboards coming up. I don't care. You show me your hands, raw and bleeding from the soap. I don't care.

I tell you to clean it again.

After a while, the floorboards do come up, and underneath them, you imagine you see dirt. You know I'm coming back to tell you to clean it again, so with your hands bleeding and the water bucket red and vile, you begin to scrub. You scrub and scrub.

And I tell you to do it again.

You fall asleep in the middle of the floor. First thing in the morning, you wake up and examine every inch of the room. It is spotless.

I walk into your room before you've even gotten out of bed.

And I tell you to clean it again.

If people really understood anorexia, they would never wish it on anyone.

For those of you reading who have never experienced that, the metaphor is that the mom is your eating disorder and the cleaning is your relationship with food.  For those of you who have experienced it, my guess is you already knew that.