Food for Thought

I'm still waiting on the results of my beta, but I'm 99.9% sure that it's going to come back negative.

In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of research and a whole lot of soul-searching. I've mentioned in my previous posts that I think I have an eating disorder. It's always been in the back of my mind, but I never addressed it because I didn't fit the "typical" profile of being bulimic or anorexic.

For the past 8+ years, I have restricted my daily calorie intake to be between 1,000-1,200 calories. If I knew I was going to be having dinner with friends, I'd skip lunch so that I could eat "normally" at dinner or do an extra few miles on the treadmill. I would go to bed hungry, sometimes 4-5 nights/week. Up until about 8 months ago, my daily meals would be: one small bowl of fiber cereal (150 calories); salad with only veggies and no dressing (300 calories); small dinner usually chicken, veggies, brown rice (500-600 calories). In addition, I would exercise for a minimum of 1-2 hours 5 days/week.

After doing research on the internet, I realized that you don't have to be 5'5" and 100lbs to have an eating disorder AND that I had many of the symptoms associated with it. I have incredibly scant periods, low estrogen, bloating, brittle nails (for awhile my toe nails were falling off), thinning hair/hair loss, dark undereye circles, joint pain and chronic fatigue.

What's amazing is that no one has ever noticed...After eight years and two years of being married to a doctor, you would think that someone might take notice, but I guess I was pretty good at hiding it. Most of my meals are eaten at work and no one ever questioned my eating habits.

After the results of my last IVF retrieval and information from the internet, I finally decided to talk to Doc about it. It completely caught him by surprise and it was incredibly difficult for us. I'm such a terrible communicator and all I wanted to do was curl-up and disappear, but I made it through. Doc asked a lot of questions and we had a long, in-depth talk. He told me that there are many fully-functioning women with eating disorders. He also recommended that I talk to a nutritionist and a counselor.

The counselor is actually a good friend of Docs and when he spoke to her about me, she said that 25% of unexplained infertility cases are related to eating disorders and most of these women never disclose this to their REs! There are several studies that show the exact same thing.

The reason I'm writing all of this is because if there are other women out there with similar issues, please get help. Your RE will probably never ask if you have an eating disorder, so it's up to you to be your own advocate and make things happen for you.