Six Side Effects of Anorexia NOBODY Talks About

Half a dozen reasons why having an eating disorder really sucks

By: Toxicka Shock

ToxickaShock@gmail.com

On Twitter: @ToxickaShock

On Instagram: @ToxickaShock

On DeviantArt: @ToxickaShock

I’ll be honest with you, fam. For most of my life, I’ve had an eating disorder. I don’t want to come out and say it’s explicitly anorexia, because it has sometimes been coupled with bouts of bulimia and downright insane binging, but by and large, my issues manifest themselves in extreme bouts of fasting.

It’s a very predictable cycle. Something will trigger me — I’ll think I look like shit in the mirror, or especially if the bathroom scale gives me a reading I don’t want — and for seven, eight or sometimes nine days at a time I won’t eat anything solid. I’ll still drink coffee and chew gum and have a mineral water at bedtime, but beyond that? I ain’t chewing or digesting shit. The math is fuzzy, of course, but I suppose I end up capping my daily intake at 500 calories, and that’s a very high-end estimate. 

The weird thing is, even as a wright loss “cheat” it doesn’t always net me the best results. After a massive binge the cycle can see me drop 11-14 pounds, easy, but if I try do repeat the pattern the next week, I’m lucky if I can drop just five or six pounds. Your body is a lot smarter than you might give it credit for. You try to convince your physiology to burn calories and fat like a motherfucker, and once it figures out you’re doing it on purpose and you’re not really starving, the brakes got slammed on that shit fast.

But still, that compulsion is there, and as simplistic as it may be, seeing the numbers on a scale roll back instead of moving forward is one of those small things that fills me with so much confidence and excitement. After all, your body is yours and yours alone (unless you vote Republican), and feeling like you are the master and commander of your own corporeal form is very reassuring and comforting.

That’s the secret appeal of all eating disorders: people like to feel like they are in control of at least one thing in their life, and managing your weight is something that can easily be charted on a nearly second by second basis. 

Yes, by now, we all know that anorexia isn’t cool and it does a lot of short-term and long-term damage to your body. 

But there’s a couple of things that happen when you’re anorexic that most people aren’t aware of. These are the hassles, headaches and complications that tend to make any bout of prolonged fasting or calorie restricting a major pain in the ass. Indeed, I can check off at least half a dozen side effects of anorexia that prove, once and for all, that being hungry is just one of MANY unwanted and deleterious consequences of not eating …

#001

It makes your breath taste terrible

When you don’t eat for a couple of days, peculiar things start happening to your throat. It’s not quite as severe as a strep infection, but after awhile you start to get mild pangs every time you swallow. If the eating moratorium drags on long enough, you end up getting this horrific case of cotton mouth and then it’s almost like you have to REMIND yourself to voluntarily swallow.  The saliva secretions keep coming, of course, but it just feels like your mouth is drier than it should be. It may not be a commonality among all anorexics, but when I went on these mega-fasts I would start to taste something very coppery in my spit, almost like it was blood mixed with my saliva. It isn’t bleeding gums, though — it’s an after effect of my body producing ketones, which is what your body produces when you’re basically deprived of any and all carbohydrates.

I’ll let you trudge through the scientific research on your own time, but that deficiency of other minerals and vitamins makes the phantom flavors even more pronounced. Eventually, this crosses stream with another side effect of “restricting” — heartburn. Odds are, you’ve experienced this a whole buncha’ times in your life. But when you haven’t had solid food in a week, the heartburn symptoms are far more severe. There’s this sharp chain that just radiates over and through your chest all fuckin’ day. And worst of all, the metabolic clusterfuck results in your breath getting funky with a capital F. I’m sure different people will describe the sensation differently, but for me, the odors creeping up and down my esophagus smell AND taste just like Worcestershire sauce — acrid, smoky and very bitter. 

The next time you’re in a supermarket, get a whiff of a Worcestershire sauce bottle. Now imagine a taste and scent THAT pungent and caustic riding on the ass end of every breathe you take throughout the course of a day. Needless to say … it gets old. Fast.

Just when you thought A.I. Art Couldn't get Any creepier ...

#002

It slows down time

This is one of those side effects that I suppose you could chalk up as one of those “blessed curse” things. Over the years, I’ve noted something pretty bizarre about how I seem to gauge time when I’m fasting. Namely, those days seem to drag on WAY longer than days when I’m eating like a normal person. It’s a psychological conditioning thing, for sure, but there’s got to be some kind of physiological angle to it, too.

I’d like to say something more academic than “being hangry makes time pass slower,” but damn it, that’s about the meat and potatoes of it. Now, in some regards, this can be a blessing. When I’m restricting, I do seem to plow through my work obligations faster. It’s not that fasting allows me to focus better, I think it’s simply the perspective that time’s dragging along that gives me the illusion of more overall time to meet my professional responsibilities. Neurologically, I can’t explain it, but think about it like this. Most people break their entire daily schedules around their eating habits. You take time off first thing in the morning to eat, around noon for lunch and then later in the evening as a prelude to winding down and going to bed. Now, when you take away those ritualistic patterns, what happens? That’s right, you kind of fall into a pattern where there’s no designated start/stop times for eating, which means your daily schedule can flow unbroken from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep. So instead of your daily routine falling into these little pockets, it just unfurls — sans any breaks — from start to finish. Which, naturally, would give you the illusion of more time on your internal clock.

Well, the downside to this should be just as apparent. When the day drags and you get bored as shit, just having to wait an hour feels like an eternity. And the lack of nutrients and antioxidants and shit pulsing through your veins definitely doesn’t help with all of the impatience and anxiety I already feel on a day to day basis. When you’re anorexic, the clock quickly turns into your worst enemy. And there’s no fuckin’ way you can beat him, or even fight his 60-second and 60-minute ass to a draw.

#003

It really fucks with your sleep cycle

Normally, I don’t have much trouble getting to sleep and/or waking up. Unless I find myself doing a LOT of stimulants the night before, my sleep cycle is pretty damn predictable. Well, whenever I go through a restriction phase, that system that usually runs like clockwork derails. And in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily suspect, either.

First there’s the cramps. After three or four days of a steady diet of nothing, while I’m in bed I start to get these weird palpitations. It’s not just my heart pounding like a jackhammer, it feels like every organ in my chest cavities are about to explode. This is almost always followed by an odd jitteriness in my wrists and knees. Maybe it has something to do with the lack of potassium. Inevitably, it gets to a point where the pains in my abdomen are so sharp I simply can’t lie down like a normal human being anymore. Which means I either have to wake up or make do with sleep in a recliner or sofa. Which just leads to MORE cramps the next morning.

The fasting makes you tired. Not just sleepy, but physically exhausted. By day six or seven, making it up the stairs feels like a daunting challenge and just standing upright for more than few minutes becomes surprisingly taxing. One time I made the mistake of going on a long walk in the middle of summer after a week of practically zero consumption. By the time I made it to the car, my ankles felt like wet spaghetti noodles, I was having difficulty breathing and my heart rate, if my FitBit is to be believed, was pushing somewhere around the 150 beats per minute range. When even mild physical activity like that makes you feel like you just ran a marathon, it means you’re going to have to spend a lot more time on your ass and on your back, and that leads itself to even more erratic sleeping patterns.For example, you might take a nap at 4 p.m., wake up at 8 p.m., try to go back to sleep at midnight, wake up at 4 a.m. and never be able to go back to sleep. Which, of course, fucks up your sleep cycle for the next day, which fucks up your sleep cycle for the day after that, etcetera. If you’re going to be anorexic, it’s almost a sure bet that you’re going to have to double, triple or quadruple up on the melatonin and NoDoz. Perhaps even on the same fuckin’ day.

Body Horror isn't relegated to fiction, you know.

#004

It makes you OBSESS over food

This one is so fuckin’ obvious but kind of unexpected at the same time. If you go six or seven days at a time eating less than 500 calories a day, it’s only rational that you would get hungry. But whenever I go on these wild-ass fasts, around day four or five I’m not just craving some calories, literally ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT is food.

No, for real. As soon as I wake up, tacos and pizza slices are dancing in my head. It’s like one of those old cartoons, where the famished anthropomorphic character would look at someone and their head would turn into roasted turkeys and shit. Mid-fast, it seems like the ONLY thing your brain can focus on is burritos and pasta. And no matter how hard you try to think about literally anything else, the cravings for random-ass foods only intensifies.

One time, I think I spent an hour or so at work just looking at Wikipedia entries for various casseroles. Sometimes, I’ll get a little artistic and start *drawing* pictures of huge, humongous pizzas and hamburgers, to the point they were basically engineer-quality schematics. As in, I diagramed each LAYER of a seven layer burrito in graphic detail, drawing the cheese-drenched black beans in as much detail as humanly possible. Clearly, this is the kind of behavior that ain’t normal for me, but it goes to show you just how much the lack of food makes you dwell on that lack of food — consciously, subccosnciously and every fuckin’ Freudian recess in between.

#005

It gives you HORRIFIC digestive issues

Oh, this one is going to be fun to write about. Even though you don’t eat for a couple of days, your body still has to process all of the junk in your system prior to the start of your fast. And although it might take a couple of days, eventually, your body is going to tell you to take a shit. And when you do — get ready for the worst.

If you’re on day seven of a fast and it’s time to hit the commode, that means that whatever’s about to drip out of your asshole has been rotting and fermenting inside your guts for at least a week. And I assure you, when it finally DOES empty itself from your bowels, it’s going to smell beyond foul. You know that old saying that you’re not supposed to be able to smell your own stink? Well, when you take a delayed anorexia shit, you WILL sniff some ungodly odors, and you’ll know it as soon as the stench snakes its way into your olfactory glands.

But it’s not just that the feces smells like radioactive sewage. Considering how much time the ex-food has had to marinate in your duodenal tract, instead of exiting your anus in the traditional turd shape, it’s more than likely going to come spraying out of your sphincter in this hideous half-liquid/half-solid syrup that not only makes wiping a chore, it also has a nasty tendency of staining your cheeks with back spray. And if you have a hairy ass, just plain forget it. It’s going to take you an absurd amount of time to get all of the residue plucked from your anal cavities. I don’t care how pro-thinspiration you might be. When something like THAT is an unavoidable side effect, you really have to rethink just how worthwhile being skinnier and lighter actually is. 

#006

It kills your sex drive

Look, I make no bones about. I am a huge goddamn slut. I think about and crave sexual release every day. If I’m healthy and in normal operating condition, I want to fuck, suck, French and frot. My sex drive is very, VERY high, and as soon as I’m orgasmically satisfied, it doesn’t take long for the horn (or is that horny?) o’plenty to refill itself within my loins. 

But when I’m in the thick of a fast, for whatever reason, my libido takes a severe nose dive. I generally have to masturbate at least once or twice a day just as a stress coping mechanism. But while in a restrictive mindset, I don’t even have the urge to finger my own asshole, let alone feel the need to have somebody else dick me real good. It’s not that I’m tired or depressed, it’s just that I seem to lack that hedonistic procreative itch. It makes sense. No nutrients, no energy, no mammalian desire to engage in genital, oral or anal pleasure. Which is a shame, really, because we all know some hot and heavy fuckin’ definitely burns a lot of excess calories.

And if you DO try to engage in sexual functions around the fifth or sixth day of a fast, good fuckin’ luck. One time I was absolutely dead set on ejaculating to something, so I laid in bed for almost three hours (I had to take a break whenever my heart rate got too fast, which was often) and attempted to polish my meat log into sperm-spewing submission. The end result? I experienced an orgasm so anemic, my balls didn’t even bother pulsating. And as far as “release,” I get maybe a few micro-millimeters of watery sputum milked out of my urethra, which didn’t travel beyond my knuckles. And the less said about interpersonal sexual encounters whilst in a self-imposed calorie restriction regimens, the better. Not only will your jaw muscles ache too much to perform oral, you can’t produce enough saliva to really make the pussy eating and/or cock-sucking efficient. For fuck’s sake, I can’t even enjoy receiving when I’m in a fast — basically any position other than flat on my back not doing anything is a physical impossibility.

Which, in a way, sort of sums up the inherent contradictory calculus of my eating disorder as a whole.

I force myself to lose weight so I’ll look sexier, but in the process, I lose any and all interest in sex. 

It’s ironic, I know. Perhaps the better word is “stupid as fuck,” but as anyone with an eating disorder will tell you … we just can’t help ourselves.

XOXO, Toxicka