Myth: Someone With Anorexia Can’t Get Pregnant

By Christina Taylor

I was diagnosed with anorexia when I was 13.

At an all-girls school, where my peers were hypercritical of every aspect of appearance, periods and development before you were 13 were seen as a sign that you were fat, that you couldn’t control yourself. I felt sick when I got my first period aged 11 because I didn’t know how I would conceal it when it came to our weekly swimming lesson. A P written in the register would identify me as openly as The Scarlet Letter. I faked illness to avoid it. I wore vests when I should have worn bras because I was so afraid of being a target, of hearing someone talk about, and laugh, at me.

The loss of my periods and flatness of my chest through anorexia nervosa felt like a relief. It anonymised me for a bit longer.

Once I was old enough to take contraception, I discovered through trial and error (and some pretty awful mood swings) the existence of the mini pill. It allowed me to remove the inconvenience of periods, of that shameful identifier that I was heavy enough to be ‘normal’. I, of course, ignored the possibility that having an active eating disorder, with which I made myself sick and took laxatives, would reduce its potential effectiveness because I believed all the stories about people with anorexia never being able to have children that my mum had told me to scare me into eating. (Ineffective on a 13 year old, unsurprisingly.)

I always wanted two children. A little girl who looked like me and a little boy who looked like my other half. The face of the little boy changed as my boyfriends changed, but the family in my head remained the same. My mum was 41 when she had me, and I vowed that I would be a younger parent than mine were. My mum’s age was another thing that made me stand out. My peers asked why my parents were so old compared to theirs. I wanted to be a more invisible, ‘normal' type of parent. So I’d decided the ideal age to have two children was 27 and then 29.

When I reached 26, I’d been out of inpatient treatment for five years. I’d relapsed twice since then and was living my life with functional anorexia, with a pretty high dependence on wine to be able to eat anything. Most of my friends drank a lot anyway. It was kind of normal that I ate erratically and slept a lot. I’d been with an amazing boyfriend for over two years. We’d just bought our first house, and I’d got a new job that would lead to a proper career. I liked the idea of marriage and kids (my boyfriend had started saving for an engagement ring a month after my twenty-sixth birthday) but not the idea of changing anything else in my life. I had occasional periods, breakthrough bleeds they called them.

For a few weeks, a couple of my friends had said I looked different in dresses (they thought I’d been doing a new workout at the gym) and joked that maybe I had pregnancy boobs. I laughed at the time and ordered another double vodka because it was so ridiculous. After a family wedding one day, I felt awful and the next day I couldn’t get out of bed. I wasn’t too concerned. I’d never been able to shake a hangover. But I took a pregnancy test, just to be sure. It was negative, and I knew I was being ridiculous. But I continued feeling awful and went to the doctor.

“I think I might be pregnant,” I said. It seemed crazy because I had anorexia, and people with anorexia needed lots of help to have children. My GP said that it was pretty unlikely, but I should take an expensive test to be sure. I duly bought one plus a bottle of wine to celebrate being absolutely sure.

I didn’t drink the wine for over a year.

I will never forget sitting in my bathroom, looking at the little digital window that said 2-3 weeks. You think that growing a baby immediately makes you a responsible parent and that you have it all figured out because you love that bundle of cells. I started crying because I realised I didn’t know how to eat without drinking wine or throwing up afterwards. What would I tell my boss at the job I’d been excelling at for four months (and had wanted for over a year)? Would my boyfriend be okay with it? Would it end our relationship?

When my other half came home, he was really shocked, but we were both happy. We had no idea how we’d deal with it, but we both wanted this. I decided I would eat properly. Starting tomorrow.

It didn’t work like that, of course. Every time I tried to eat, the guilt overwhelmed me. I tried to delay it but always wound up in the bathroom, making myself sick until I cried. I sobbed every time, wondering how I could be the kind of mother who willingly hurts herself and her baby.

It was all formed around a bizarre logic in my head. The baby books warned against ‘eating for two’. They said you only needed to eat a couple of extra slices of toast. So in my head, eating more than that meant that my weight would rapidly spiral out of control. It might be okay while I was pregnant, but what would happen afterwards?

I even wondered if social services would take my child away from me if anyone knew what I was doing. But my protective instincts were greater than my fear, and I nervously explained the situation to my new GP, asking for a dietician referral. I thought if I asked someone else to do a meal plan for me, it would be safer. By this time, I’d already lost weight because I’d stopped drinking wine (which turned out, was about 75 per cent of the calories I’d been taking in).

My GP refused. His reaction will stay with me the rest of my life and was the reason I would one day work as a campaigner. He laughed. Then he told me, “If you don’t eat enough, your baby will eat you. You’ll both be fine.”

By the time I had my daughter, I had lost about a quarter of my body weight. I stood up on the bus at seven months pregnant and my pre-pregnancy skirt fell down around my ankles. I kept telling people around me that I needed help. Please help me. No one listened. At the time, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders stated that amenorrhoea was necessary for a diagnosis of anorexia. I’d been able to get pregnant, so I must be fine.

Eventually, a different midwife examined me, after I’d fallen, and was horrified when she could count my ribs. An immediate referral to eating disorders services was made. The first question they asked me was why it had taken me so long to ask for help? I burst into tears of frustration.

I left work early and went on bed rest, and my daughter was born a perfectly healthy 6lbs 4oz. I was totally emaciated and didn’t have sufficient body weight to feed her.

The second I held my beautiful girl, I vowed that I would stop making myself sick. And I never did it again (even though I wanted to). I stayed under eating disorders services and began to regain weight and settle into life as part of a family of three.

We decided to have a second child when our daughter was just over a year old. My siblings are much old than me, and I wanted my kids to be close. The condition was that I engaged with eating disorders services and they monitored me closely — which would have been great if they’d known how to cope with a pregnant woman who cried every time she was weighed.

When I was around five months pregnant, they discharged me. “Just until the baby comes. Then you can go back to treatment”. This time, I was lucky. I had an amazing midwife who researched anorexia and fought tooth and nail for me to be referred to a specialist eating disorders obstetrician. I remained under her care, seeing her fortnightly until my son was born. She explained that she would help me safely control my weight gain, that baby weight was made up of baby, placenta, fluid and increased blood cells. She gave me her word that we would agree a safe zone for me and my baby, and she would make sure I left the hospital in a body that felt familiar to me. I trusted her implicitly and she kept to her word. There were no diets or constraints. I just felt confident that she was looking out for me.

When my son was born, it was the end for my eating disorder.

It didn’t disappear overnight. My daughter wanted to be a baby again and refused food. That changed me. I didn’t want to be the reason my children lived a life just like mine, picking up all the wrong ideas from me. I read an article about a woman who said she realised her mother wasn’t beautiful when she heard her speak critically about herself, and I had the option to change that for my children. They wouldn’t hear me criticise myself. They wouldn’t believe they weren’t amazing (because they are).

It was a constant struggle, but over time I stopped caring if a yoghurt had two more calories than the one I ate yesterday and started caring about the family in front of me instead. I barely drink now, and I eat food because I like it. It started as tiny, excruciating steps, but almost without me noticing, it became strides. Then suddenly I was running.

My children are ten and eight now. They are extraordinary, brilliant, healthy and beautiful. And they are my biggest fans when I speak about eating disorders. I campaign for eating disorder awareness to make sure that a doctor never again speaks to someone seeking help like I was spoken to, and that the impact of eating disorders in pregnancy is recognised and understood as it should be.

Find Christina on Twitter @chtaylor__