Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders

When I received Gaining:  The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders, by Aimee Liu, I was thrilled and scared to read it.  At 17, I developed anorexia, which plunged me into two years of eating 600 calories a day and exercising an hour and a half seven days a week.  Even after I adjusted my daily caloric intake up to 1,200 calories a day (which is dieting to most people but caused me to gain ten pounds immediately), I kept up the exercise routine for another four years.  It wasn't until pregnancy that my metabolism self-corrected and I became able to maintain my normal weight taking in a normal amount of calories and reducing my exercise routine to forty minutes four times a week.  It was a 13-year battle for me.

I was worried I would see myself in the book, and I was worried I wouldn't.  I think I've learned to live normally, but I now understand that part of the depression I experienced during pregnancy with the little angel centered around the weight gain.  The weight gain almost killed me - knowing I had to let my body balloon as it did without knowing for sure if it would ever come off again was nerve-wracking to me.

Liu, who suffered an eating disorder herself, has put a tremendous amount of research into this book.  That's the reason the book is good.  The reason it's important is the author's look at life AFTER the rest of the world thinks you're "cured" because you look normal.  Some people are able to work on those personality and genetic dispositions and loosen up.  Others are not, and it affects their relationships, work and parenting styles. 

Liu dispels the notion that eating disorders are caused by parents or strictly environmental circumstances.  She quotes research isolating susceptibility genes for restricting anorexia nervosa on chromosome 1 and for bulimia on chromosome 10.  I sighed with relief.  For years I thought my struggle with my weight was something I "did" to myself.  Since my recovery, I've believed I'm hard-wired differently than other people, but I couldn't prove it.  Knowing what causes something makes it easier to figure out a solution.

The science in this book is intriguing.  In one study, "60 percent of eating disordered respondents had been perfectionistic, rigid and rule bound as children."   In another, former anorexics and bulimics did not have a normal appetite response during brain mapping.  "Even decades after their last fast or purge, former anorexics and bulimics will respond to the sight of a layer cake with a complex mix of attraction, resistance, guilt, calculation, permission and release."  The important part of recovery is to learn to override or "patch" the brain's initial response to food.  I feel myself doing this even now. 

After laying out the science, Liu goes on to discuss how these thinking patterns can affect other parts of a former anorexic or bulimic's life.  They can affect parenting styles, they can affect romantic relationships, and they can affect sexual relationships.  The restricting behaviors of an anorexic and the all-over-the-board behaviors of a bulimic seem to play out incessantly in some people and not others.  It all seems to go back to whether or not the formerly disordered person has learned to deal with that hard-wiring.

I could go on and on.  For me, this book was like getting an instruction manual to my own brain after I had already figured out how to do it on my own.  I highly recommend this book for anyone who has experienced an eating disorder, but more importantly, for their friends and family members.  I am rushing to write this review so I can give this book to my parents.  I know it's been hard for them to understand my past behaviors, and it was hard for them to understand my anxiety during and immediately after pregnancy.  My beloved has a lot of trouble understanding, since he wasn't around when I was a pile of bones.  I think it's hard for him to give it credence because I seem so normal now.  Hopefully this book help anyone who doesn't understand, including those caught in the throes of this tortured thinking.  Great job, Liu.

Comments

[Trisha Gura]

I am well aware of this story--and more like it. I am a 15-year medical journalist, who was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa as a teen. I just completed a book, "Lying in Weight: the Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders" to be published by Harper Collins in May 2007. http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Weight-Hidden-Epidemic-Disorders/dp/0060761482

"Gaining" is a fabulous book that tells one aspect of the story of eating disorders in adults. But there is more. Society holds a myth that eating disorders happen mainly in adolescence and end there. But life doesn't. An eating disorder, or some remmant of it, follows a person through marriage, pregnancy, parenting, mid and late life. Therefore, we have to wonder what is happening at each stage of life and how the eating disorder plays out in each and every phase of the lifespan.

What do the partners of individuals with eating disorders have to say? What kind of man marries a women who weighs 85 pounds or vomits after dinner each night? Does pregnancy change a woman's behaviors for better or worse? How does she parent in the recent panic of childhood obesity? Why might a new-found fitness regime in midlife evolve into an eating disorder?

For those those who never had an eating disorder, I'd say that those with eating disorders, at any age, have a lot to teach. You probably know someone with a problem: your sister, wife, friend, mother, or the woman at your gym who looks like you could break her in half. Eating disorders, at any stage, are attempts to cope, as are alcohol, drugs, or any other unhealthy behaviors. And recovery is never a line, "sick" on one side and "healthy" on the other, that a person jumps over when she reaches adulthood. If we understand some of the "whys" we can address better tools for recovery.

Trisha Gura,
tgura@nasw.ord
trishagura.com

[Cara Fletcher]

I've suffered from eating disorders through my whole life too.It was during my pregnancy that I started eating normally.Now hopefully the eating disorders are a past and I keep my weight in norm with exercises.