Tag: eating disorder recovery
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Sunshine through the rain
I’ve been crying a lot lately. So much that I even caught myself crying on camera. But the shocking thing to me is not that I cried. It’s that I allowed the camera to keep rolling, then posted it online. I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone that I showed my vulnerability,…
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Short letter, long words
I had an MRI a few weeks back to help figure out what is causing my pain. This week, I received a very short letter with the results. It was full of long words I didn’t understand. Words I wasn’t expecting. Scary words: disc protrusion, stenosis, foraminal narrowing. The second paragraph talked about pain, and…
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Have decades of eating my feelings down made me emotionally illiterate?
I grew up believing feelings were bad. I was told I was too emotional, oversensitive, that I needed not to take things so personally. So I stopped talking about feelings, and did my best not to have them. Bingeing became my go-to when I needed to put a lid on those pesky, unwanted emotions. The…
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A fortnight of fatphobia
These last couple of weeks the anti-ob***y rhetoric seems to have hit an all time high. First the UK Government announced it’s going to start weighing children in school. Then a group of dentists in New Zealand published a highly suspect study about their miraculous new device designed to keep fat peoples jaws’ closed. Both…
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ED recovery through chronic illness
It was all going so well. I had gone through therapy, weaned off antidepressants, and quit smoking. I was learning to deal with emotions, hate my body less and treat it better. But gradually, I started to feel more tired, have pain in my hips, ankles and feet, until walking up the hill to my…
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Learning to live with anger
Of all the emotions I buried with food, anger was the one that scared me the most. It seemed so destructive, so terrifying. I had this image of myself exploding with fury and releasing vitriol on such a scale that I would destroy everyone and everything around me. This, of course, was to be avoided…
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An apology to my body
Body, I’m sorrySorry for starving youFor not nourishing youFor not giving you what you needed Body, I’m sorrySorry for overfeeding youFor sometimes purging youMy mind said it was what I needed Body, I’m sorrySorry for ignoring youFor not listening to youWhen you told me what you needed Body, I’m sorrySorry for hating youFor physically hurting…
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Who Am I Without My Eating Disorder?
I was around 8 years old when I developed binge eating disorder symptoms. Those behaviours continued for 40 years, sometimes with purging, and with varying levels of restriction. Sometimes I went for a while without bingeing. But basically, BED (and all the other stuff that goes along with it) has been a constant throughout my…
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It’s been 2 days since I bought a tub of ice-cream and I haven’t eaten it
I should explain. Ice-cream is my ultimate binge food. Not in the way that movies portray it, that cliche where the skinny actress turns to it after a breakup. No, for me it was much more than that. It was capable of consuming my every waking thought. On a bad day, I would plan my…