When your loved one is starving themselves…

So this is something that I really need to share just to get it out of my head, it isn’t easy because I live it everyday and have been living it everyday for nearly 3 decades. My wife has a problem with Anorexia, and has had this problem for a long time, at her lowest around 25 years ago her weight was down to roughly 79 lbs. She was so small and fragile looking I thought I would break her by accident just by hugging her as at the time I was likely somewhere in the vicinity of 400 lbs. myself (powerlifter, so I was big).

At around that time we found out she was pregnant, her doctor required her to gain a lot of weight during her pregnancy, and she followed through and did that, and my wife kept some of that weight on for a while. That of course didn’t last. She wanted to work out though as I did to feel better about herself so I got her a gym membership, and she used it and she got to what I would consider a normal weight. In the 120’s or so and to any other person she looks great. But to her, she still thinks she is fat.

Just about a week ago she expressed to me that if she could be 85 or less pounds again she would be and that is what she is striving for. That alarms me, because of course the smaller she gets the more I worry about how I am going to react to it. I am by no means as large as I was, time and the need to decrease my weight and stop powerlifting has allowed me to get down closer to 225, with a goal weight of about 200, being I want to keep my original knees which are pretty much destroyed.

I am a personal trainer and I program my wife’s workouts, as of late she has taken to CrossFit so that is what she does, and she likes the workouts to be tough, so I oblige and make them tough. There is nothing that I have thrown at her that she cannot do or complete.

So what worries me most, my wife has been eating in a calorie restricted manner for some time now, decades, there have been times where she has possibly gotten near her actual needed calorie requirement per day, but those days are few and far between. For the most part she is usually taking in fewer than 700 calories per day on a good day. I have done the math and I know that based on her age and activity level she should be getting somewhere near 1800 plus per day or more just as a break even, but she is definitely more in the negative calorie intake on a daily basis for sure, maybe by as much as 500. My worry is one day she just has a heart attack because she has done a potentially great deal of damage to her system by not consuming what is necessary for her body to function properly.

There have been two occasions where I have tried to get my wife to get help for this, and on both occasions it has amounted to absolutely nothing, she doesn’t think she has an issue at all. That part I don’t get, though I don’t necessarily agree with the need to hit a rock bottom on this, as someone who is a recovering alcoholic/addict I recognized my problem and knew I needed to take care of it, and now nearly a decade later still clean and sober. So in that sense I don’t get that my wife doesn’t see she has a problem, how can you not see letting yourself waste away to nothing as being a problem.

I don’t know, just needed to share this, had to get it out of my head, in hopes it will stop consuming me some. I love my wife and just want her to be healthy and to stop trying to waste herself away to nothingness.