Anorexia and Compulsive Lying

Anorexics are typically found in a web of lies

"Did you eat?" Yes

"How was your weight today?" "Fine"


They lie about the food they ate, and resort to methods such as chewing and spitting food out in nearby napkins or objects, compulsively try to focus on restricting or controlling calories (i.e. memorizing nutrition labels), may secretly sneak out to purge, and take chances to secretly exercise any moment they can.

That was me. I did all that. I was physically doing all those things, harming myself and those around me...but really was that me, or my disease?

I knew what I was doing was wrong. Everyone around me was trying to help me, to speed up my recovery, but I just couldn't help it. I knew exercising would just slow my recovery, yet I took every chance I could to walk faster, jump around, or fidget just to know I was burning more calories.
I knew lying about my weight, saying it was going up while it was going down, would only make me suffer more and break the trust of others around me. It even got to the point where I was water-loading before I weighed, or I would photoshop the pictures I sent to my weight checkers.

It's so miserable and terrifying living where nobody trusts you, not even yourself. Throughout my process, I've lost so many people around me. The people with shining, bright hopeful faces, excited to readily help me through this in any way possible suddenly resort to lies themselves to avoid contact with me. The pain of loneliness is so excruciating, but I just kept at it. My disease was still pushing me to continue my ways; every time I began rebuilding peoples' trust, my disease would snap me into ruining everything. I didn't want to be a bad person, I didn't want to lie, but I did.

So that leads to the big question. Did my disease create a new persona?
Almost like multiple personality/disassociative disorder, whenever the chance to act out came up, I was suddenly no longer in control of my mind or actions.
I would forget all the pain I was in and become complacent toward any consequences.
I hated myself so much for it.

Throughout my disease, I lost myself.
I always cared about morals, and tried my best to uphold them, for myself and others. After I fell further into anorexia, I broke them without consequence, without care.
I would ration extremely small portions, then throw food away shamelessly, though I preached food sustainability and anti human hunger.

I would open food packages in stores to try them, because I know if I bought them I would never eat them anyway.
I would binge on food at holidays or parties just to later throw it all up.

Just think about all of the resources, the food wasted. The money. The time. The energy from friends and family

So, what is it that we're supposed to do when we actually want to change and no one believes us?