This Is How (5 page)

H
OW TO
B
E
T
HIN

C
ORNELL UNIVERSITY DID
a study and 90 percent of the women they surveyed wanted to be thinner.

So everybody wants to be thin. But apparently, nobody can get there.

Which makes me ask,
what is thin?

One of the rarest gemstones—and it may, in fact, be the rarest—is a fancy red diamond. While there are plenty of white, black, grey, brown, fancy yellow, and green diamonds to go around, a true, GIA-certified fancy red diamond would sell for well over a million dollars a carat.

The gem is so rare and in such huge demand among gem collectors that this pent-up, frustrated desire is like steam, which propels prices of the stones even higher into the stratosphere.

That’s what thin is.

The state of being known as “thin” is sort of the fancy red diamond of human desires.

The desire—and sometimes obsession—to be thin is so elusive that it can support an industry worth over 60 billion dollars in America alone.

If reaching “thin” were effortless or even attainable with ordinary hard work, there would be no 60 billion dollar industry.

Thin would be reduced to quartz crystal.

When something is worth 60 billion dollars, that tells you that almost nobody can have it, whatever it is.

So what is it, exactly?

For some, the desire to be thin actually is a desire for a more slender body. And that’s all it is. For these people, getting thin is no more complicated than expending more calories each day than consumed.

For other people,
getting thin
is less a desire than a way of life. A journey that leads a person from one diet right into another. Where the number on the scale each morning is more accurate at predicting whether it will be a good day or a bad one than any horoscope could ever be.

Often, the pursuit of
thin
lasts a lifetime and the goal is never reached.

For these people, thin isn’t really about being slender.

Thin
is being more beautiful than you are.
Thin
is coming from a wealthier family.
Thin
is a bigger chest.
Thin
is a smaller nose.
Thin
is more followers on Twitter.
Thin
is a more popular channel on YouTube.
Thin
is more friends on Facebook.
Thin
is famous.
Thin
is a perfect score on the SAT.
Thin
is your first-choice college.
Thin
is an iPhone, not a rip-off.
Thin
is having a better singing voice.
Thin
is being from somewhere better.
Thin
is being respected.
Thin
is loving yourself.

Thin may be one of these things or all of them or something else entirely. The reason it’s impossible for so many people to
ever get
thin
is because what they truly seek is something that can’t be microwaved or ladled into a bowl.

In fact, the more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.

Not even if the physician’s scale says you have not only reached thin, you have gone well beyond it. Even then, you will not experience
thin
.

Because your actual desire and obsession is only dressed up in the costume of
thin.
And it’s a very good costume; it’s fooled you by making you think you don’t need to question it. Of course you want to be thin; everybody does.

When everybody believes something, so will you. Unless you pause and think. Maybe you’ll still believe what you did before you considered it, but maybe you will feel entirely differently.

I know exactly how it feels to be obsessed with being thin and wanting it more than anything, even though I’ve never once in my life actually wished to be skinny. But that feeling in me never goes away; it just changes constantly. But it’s identical in concept and solution.

If you are insane to be skinny, I can tell you that one day you may very well reach the place you call
thin
and feel so wonderful and satisfied and deeply at peace. I can also tell you that this
thin
you have reached has nothing whatsoever to do with your weight. In fact, you may finally get thin and weigh more than you do now. But the feeling you believe thin will bring you is carried by other needs.

What you have to do is figure those out. You have to figure out what thin actually is to you, what it stands for.

You can do this with a therapist but you can also do it totally on your own. You don’t need advice—you need clarity and you
need to see the truth. A therapist—or a friend—can sometimes say something that is so unexpected, it knocks your brain around and dislodges an insight you had previously overlooked.

Which is how therapy can transform you, but also a friendship where you talk, instead of just doing stuff together.

However you can, try and decipher the meaning for you in that extremely loaded word,
thin
.

I’m an alcoholic who doesn’t (and doesn’t want to) drink anymore so I exist in a state of never-ending micro-addictions that reveal themselves in the form of obsessions. I was the same as a child.

These obsessions are things I want, want to do, or want to be. I become so fixated I neglect every other aspect of my life.

What results is that I get really good at doing a lot of different things but no matter what I do, it’s never the thing that gives me the feeling,
this is what I’ve been searching for, I am home.
In other words, I never feel
thin.

One hundred percent of the time.

It’s only after causing myself a certain degree of damage that I learn what it was, underneath it all, I was looking for. Once I see that, I can get it. It’s usually something within easy reach. It’s something basic, elemental.

After I feel it, I might still be really interested in what was before an obsession. Which is like, realizing that thin isn’t what you actually want; what you actually want is to
not
feel disliked, like a freak because you have six extra pounds nobody else around you has.

So then you can put your brain in reverse and take a right and start focusing on letting go of the concern you have with how you are—or are not—perceived by others. You can practice not giving a shit.

Which lets the actual
you
out loose, free. This is what causes the feeling,
satisfied
. Or
at home.
Or just
really pretty okay with it all.
All of these phrases describe this feeling.

After you reach it, you might like your weight, you might think you’re too skinny, you might think a couple of pounds still need to go but you’re cool with that, not crazy over it even if it never quite happens.

That’s one of the weird things about some obsessions. To get over them, you have to give them up, let them go, release them, truly not need or want them anymore. Then there it is. It’s yours. If you even want it.

In anorexia, something in the brain emphasizes or strengthens the quality of obsession and transforms it into a kind of
punctuated equilibrium
—a biology theory that says, actually most species remain pretty much the same, they don’t turn into something else.

So not only is the obsession with thinness exceedingly powerful, it is entirely immovable. It does not change into an obsession with youth or an obsession with career; it’s all thin all the time, food none of the time.

It’s very difficult to learn about anorexia because it’s not as prevalent as many diseases, so it’s not nearly as well funded or understood. Which means the treatments are not based on as much science, thus understanding. It’s even difficult to name a proper prognosis. The best I could cobble together was this: about half of those diagnosed after age eleven recover. The other half either remains thin—clinically emaciated—or dies.

Fifty-fifty?

A coin toss?

That tells you that this is not breast cancer. I mean, the advances in breast cancer are staggering and brilliantly hopeful.
I knew a woman who lived fifteen years with stage-four breast cancer.

When I was a kid, stage-four breast cancer meant you needed to pick out the outfit you wanted to be buried in.

These are the dark ages of medicine’s understanding of anorexia nervosa. So if you have it, you must also cure it.

Anorexia is an extreme. It’s like the genetically modified and exaggerated evil clone of
want
or
need
.

Needs and wants: these are helpful things that can be focused and propel you high into your future, into satisfaction with your life.

Need is the focused, highly fortified form of want. Need is want that has been transformed into something closer to certainty by decision and commitment. When you need air, you get it. When you need water, there’s no question about what you’re going to do: you’re going to get a drink even if that means grabbing the garden hose by the neck.

Need can be confused with obsession, but they’re very different. Need lacks the dangerous, cycling, all-consuming quality of fixation. When you need something, you get it and move on. But when you’re obsessed with something, it’s all you can think about.

Obsession and fixation—especially the hyper-obsession/ fixation of anorexia—are the emotions of misguidance; they will hijack your brain and destroy your life. You have to break obsession and reclaim your mind.

You have to be like Todd Beamer, the passenger on 9/11’s hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 whose last words were, “Let’s roll.” He and some other passengers attacked the hijackers and brought down the plane, killing everybody—including themselves—onboard and thus preventing the plane from
completing its course, into either the Capitol building or the White House.

To break obsession you have to chisel it into pieces. You have to understand the shade of your obsession. How does it make you feel? What is the opposite of this feeling? Did you ever feel this opposite as a kid? Why?

What was happening?

It’s almost like hiking, but inside your mind and without a map. I hiked mapless as a kid because we lived in the woods. It was definitely frightening a lot of the time and then it was really exciting and after years of doing it, I was never afraid to explore in a new direction.

Learning about yourself is the same.

Unlike hiking through the unfamiliar woods, learning about yourself is safe.

People always freak out when they contemplate their own damage or baggage because they think understanding the source, seeing the reason, is dangerous and will make their minds explode or something. Or they think they’ll end up crazy and in a mental hospital like in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

But truth is noncombustible.

Yes, it can explode your marriage. If it does, well, it needed to be exploded. Truth will never explode your mind. It will never make you mad.

It will do just the opposite. It will restore you from the madness of a bathroom scale and looking at “68.5” and thinking, “Fat, fat, fat.”

If you can freeze that moment on the scale and examine the whole spectrum of how that number makes you feel and what that number makes you want, if you can really try and draw a picture of everything
thin
stands for and means, you
then have a chance to penetrate the disease at the deepest and most targeted level.

I believe that the women and men who have successfully overcome anorexia have done so not by taking a pill, recording their daily calorie intake, or measuring their thighs, but by going hiking inside their minds. They learned who they were.

They freed themselves.

By seeing themselves.

It is always safe to see yourself truthfully.

You never have to be ashamed of yourself
with
yourself. All the self-hatred or criticism you may feel in your life doesn’t penetrate to the deepest level of you. For some reason, it can’t. If it could, most of us would be ruined in childhood.

It is exceptionally rare to be a truly ruined person. Ted Bundy was a defective human. He was ruined.

Nobody with anorexia is ruined.

Everybody with the disease should assume control of their recovery. Take what is useful in treatment, dismiss everything else. Trust your instincts, but not the voice of the disease, posing as your instincts.

Consider yourself.

Let yourself think terrible things about people you love. Let yourself imagine neglecting the needs of those who depend on you.

Do you feel terrible for causing your family so much stress and pain, all because you won’t eat? Or do you, secretly, love that you can hurt them so efficiently? Or do you love denying them what they want?

No matter how “terrible” a feeling may seem, it’s never terrible to recognize and admit it to yourself.

It’s the safest thing there is in the world:
to think your own thoughts.

Nobody can listen to your thoughts.

God can’t listen to your thoughts. Maybe your religion says that God indeed can listen to your thoughts because He, after all, knows everything as the creator of everything. But if there is a God and if this God did create everything and knows everything, He would also know how everything turns out because All There Is already exists whole, within him, so everything happens because it was designed to happen. Which means that I was born to tell you that even God can’t hear your thoughts.

So stop being afraid of them.

It’s going to be very hard work to fix yourself, but it’s much harder work to be employed by an obsession or addiction.

One good thing is that some research into anorexia has actually paid off already. They now believe there is a genetic component to the disease. A predisposition.

Which explains why with all the images we see in advertisements, magazine articles, TV shows, movies—everywhere—do not make all of us anorexic. Only a very small percentage, in fact.