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Some “R”s to try in Eating Disorder recovery
Tag: Bulimia
Not ill enough?
One eating disorder symptom, which isn’t talked about enough, is the belief that you’re not really ill, and definitely not ill enough to get treatment. And for many, including myself, the belief that you don’t deserve treatment, that you don’t deserve more than this existence, the half-life that comes with an eating disorder.
Even now, far along my recovery journey, I find myself thinking I wasn’t that ill. Things weren’t that bad. I’m just an imposter pretending I was ill to get attention. A narcissist, as one troll called me. After all, there were times when I didn’t binge much. There were times when I felt in control of my eating.
And then I think about those times, and realise they were the times when I was restricting heavily and cutting out foods groups. When I was barely eating during the day, then going out and drinking heavily at night. When I was making myself sick and overexercising. And I’m forced to admit that I wasn’t in control at all. I was just using different eating disorder behaviours to cope.
The only times when I used food less were my worst bouts of depression, when I mostly felt numb and so there were less emotions to control. SSRIs dull everything. Not just sadness and depression, but joy as well. And during my first episode, I didn’t have the physical or emotional energy for anything, including food and attending university, for a few months. Replacing the symptoms of one mental illness with those of another isn’t exactly an option I’d recommend.
Photo by Andres Ayrton on Pexels.com
I think back to the perfectionism. The constant shame and guilt. The self-loathing. The body checking I’m still trying to kick. The failure of all my relationships. The lies. The obsession with food that left so little room for anything else. The fear someone would find out how disgusting I was behind my carefully created facade. The secrecy. The physical pain of bingeing and purging. The compulsion to binge that screamed so loudly in my head that I just wanted it all to end.
I think back to the fact that I was diagnosed and referred to an eating disorder service, and they accepted me for treatment, and continued that treatment over more than two years.
Yes, I was ill enough. And if you’re asking yourself if you are? Or reading this believing you’re not, while doing and feeling the things I’ve described? Trust me, you’re ill enough. If you’re not getting help, it’s time to find some. Please speak to your GP, and see my resources page thebedpost.blog/resources for alternatives.
Stolen Years
Allowing myself to feel,
To cry,
To realise just how much you stole from me.
Peace, inner calm,
The strength to be myself.
The courage to admit just how terrified I was.
Sapping my self-esteem
Till I felt worthless, unworthy of any joy.
The feeling of dread
That they would all realise I was a fraud,
Not knowing what I was doing.
Seeming calm but completely out of control,
Wanting it to end,
But not knowing how.
Eating down the sadness,
Throwing up the fear,
Not knowing why
But knowing it was wrong.
Knowing they’d be horrified
If they ever knew.
Trapped in the cycle
Year after year.
So many years stolen.
So few remain.
Time to make them count.
The Day the Music Died
TW: eating disorder feelings and behaviours.
I met him one drunken night in my favourite bar.
He was there to play a short acoustic set and afterwards, we got chatting. About music, life, the usual drunken things. I gave him my number and a few days later, he called and asked me out.
Not long after (maybe not long enough after), we moved in together. It was all going so well. Until it started to go wrong.
My grandfather passed away. He had been my safe person, the man I looked up to the most. And then I fell out with my father. In a matter of months, I had lost both of the male influences in my life.
Of course I didn’t process the loss. I tried to bury it instead. With alcohol, cigarettes, and of course, food. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it. Looking back, I’m not even sure if I’d got over my first bout of depression, or if I was in my second, whether it was grief, or the binge eating disorder taking over. I know I didn’t talk to him about it.
I gained weight, and became more reclusive. I made excuses not to go with him to his gigs, for nights out with friends, to visit his family, because that was my only chance to binge in secret. I was closed off, secretive, and sometimes resented his presence because it meant I couldn’t binge.
Of course this is a simplification of a complex relationship. But it was never going to work. I was living a lie, terrified he would find out who I really was and stop loving me.
Then one day he told me me had feelings for someone else. That she reminded him of me when we first met. And for the first time since I was a small child, the emotions came flooding out. I cried, I punched him, and I threw him out, unable to deal with what was happening.
And when he left, music left, too. In a way, literally, because he took my favourite albums, but also because I couldn’t bear to listen. I didn’t want to hear any of his songs, nor any songs that reminded me of him, of our failed relationship, of how angry and sad I was. The feelings were too raw. I buried them the only way I knew how: my eating disorder morphed into bulimia, I was chain smoking, and I started going out drinking again.
Later, I met someone else. Someone who wasn’t into music. And I forgot the part of me that loved it, this backdrop to my earlier life. I forgot the small child who loved to dance and sang in school plays in that time before she hated herself too much to intentionally attract attention. I forgot the teenager who chose her university based on its music scene. And so, even in my single years since, I’ve never returned to music.
Then a couple of days ago, I heard one of my favourite songs from the time I was married. From an album he had taken with him, that I haven’t heard in the decades since. And in that strange way music does, it triggered the gut-wrenching grief I couldn’t face at the time.
These feelings are some of the hardest I’ve had to face through recovery. They are physically painful. They are suffocating, all-consuming. I’m finally starting to understand why it’s called heartbreak. The pain in my chest, the heaviness in my stomach that won’t stop…
For the first time in a very long time, I am battling the urge to make myself sick.
And I am beginning to realise that maybe I was remembering it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the dieting that led to the bulimia back then. It was the grief, the sadness, and the pain. The restricting and the purging were my physical responses to the emotional pain I was in. I was trying to lift the deadweight in my chest, literally force it out so I didn’t have to feel like that anymore.
I buried the pain so deep I didn’t remember what it felt like. I buried it so deep it took two whole decades and years of work towards recovery to resurface.
And now there is no way out but through. But I have to believe that this pain means I am finally close to full recovery. I am trying to accept it, lean into it, and learn the lessons it is teaching me, even though it is so very hard to do.
It’s time to let go.
That time when I was fit and healthy
There’s a secret I’ve been keeping since my twenties. A particular time when my ED voice was at its loudest. It’s this time I go back to whenever I question whether having an ED was really so bad, or whether I was ever really ill at all. In this blog, I am sharing it for the first time.
It was a bad time for me. My marriage had ended, I’d gone down the “revenge body” route. Started a very restrictive diet. Hired a personal trainer. My body rebelled, of course, and I started bingeing again. Then the purging kicked in, too, and became a regular thing.
I was getting so many compliments. Interest from men. My career was going from strength to strength. I was sticking two fingers up at my ex. Look how well I was doing without him! In public. Behind closed doors was a different story. Looking back, I was very far from well.
After a couple of years, I had a virus of some kind. I remember I developed jaundice. I thought: I’ll see the doctor tomorrow if I’m no better. But the next day I felt OK, so I thought nothing more of it.
Then I started getting really bad stomach ache late at night, particularly if I’d eaten anything rich or binged. The pain was so bad it would wake me up. I would lie awake in agony. The only thing that helped was making myself sick, then I was able to get a few more hours of sleep.
I looked up my symptoms online. They pointed to a stomach ulcer, caused by the virus I had had. It didn’t seem too bad. It was helping me manage my weight. The pain seemed like a reasonable price to pay for being at my thinnest. It was just the universe punishing me for being so greedy.
And there we have it: I believed this internal dialogue. I chose what I thought was a stomach ulcer and the risk of all the potential medical complications over weight gain. I put my fear of getting fat again ahead of seeing a doctor and making sure there was nothing sinister going on. And I truly didn’t realise that there was anything wrong with that decision. Of course the pain was worth it, everyone would make the same choice…
Some time later I was prescribed antibiotics for another issue. They cleared up my stomach pain, too. I was devastated.
Looking back, what I feel is relief and gratitude. I had a lucky escape. It marked the beginning of the end of my regular purging. I would continue to binge, and occasionally purge, for many more years, but I never knowingly risked my life in this way again.
And yet, a few months back, my father mentioned that time when I was so fit and healthy. He had no way of knowing what was really going on.
The world needs to stop worshipping thinness, prizing it above all else, equating it to health. Because it’s not always healthy. Sometimes it’s very unhealthy indeed.
The BED Post 