Bulimia

You might be wondering why, after writing so many posts about my mental health between the ages of 12 and 19, I gave brushed over the next 10 years of my life. From 2004 to 2014 I lived the same life over and over again. I would have a period of being well, then the depression and mood swings would return. I would self harm until eventually I ended up in A&E; be referred back to a psychiatrist; take more medication...round and round and round. Some of the characteristics attributed to my personality disorder were always, and will always be, active. There were however, three significant events during that time that I want to talk about. The next few posts will focus on one of them - the beginning of my eating disorder.

Whenever I have been asked when I started engaging in eating disorder behaviours, my answer is always: when I was 22. At the time I was in a stable relationship, working full time and through a combination of therapy and new medication I had been stable for a few months. I was also very overweight, and that is not an exaggeration or my eating disorder talking. The medication I was taking increased my appetite, and I doubled my portion sizes for every meal. Then my moods started fluctuating again, and instead of facing it I tried to pretend it wasn't happening. Then I started eating whenever my mood would dip to cheer myself up. I have always loved food, so in the short term this strategy was effective. I was filling that hole inside my heart with cake...and chocolate, and sausage rolls and...well you get the picture. As a result, I started gaining weight. But again, instead of facing it, I ignored it, and my weight skyrocketed.

I only have one picture of myself at my heaviest; in it I am wearing an outfit I'd had for a number of years but, as I had almost doubled in size, the flowing baby-doll top was now skintight and bursting at the seams. I don't know how I managed to ignore what was quite literally right in front of my face, but until the day I saw that picture, that's what I did. When I saw that photo, I was horrified and repulsed. My mood plummeted. I became depressed, my mood swings worsened and my fingers were itching to pick up something cold and sharp. I made half-hearted attempts to exercise, but after a few days I would always give up. I just didn't see the point in trying.

I was in the toiler in work one day, hiding in a stall trying to get control over a sudden onset of tears. I had just finished lunch, all I could think about was cutting, and out of nowhere I decided to stick my fingers down my throat. After several minutes my throat was burning, my knuckles raw from my front teeth and my stomach ached from the violent retching. It felt wonderful, that addictive combination of a silent mind and pain. So I started throwing up every lunchtime to help me get through the afternoon. All too quickly, once a day wasn't enough to quiet the tirade of abuse I lashed myself with every waking moment. As I ate breakfast at work it was easy to add it to the purge schedule. I quickly learned the tricks of the trade - ways to ensure I emptied more of my stomach. I didn't see the harm in what I was doing; I had plenty of extra fat to keep me going and really, it was just like taking a Xanax. More importantly, I wasn't self harming right?

I couldn't, or wouldn't, see any connection between making myself sick and self harming. They were completely different, the vomiting wasn't doing any harm. In fact, the vomiting was helping me. My clothes slowly started to become looser, I was actually loosing weight. It was just a diet, and like any diet you had to stick with it. So I started throwing up dinner, as much as I could without alerting my boyfriend. I never questioned why my 'diet' had to be so secretive, but it did. I knew I had to keep it to myself, or it might be taken away. By this point I couldn't go one day without throwing up, I was completely addicted to it. Even when my boyfriend discovered what I was doing, I wouldn't stop. I finally had a way to manage my emotions, to block out my thoughts, and nobody was taking it away from me.

Over the next few years, until about 2012, I would go a week or two without throwing up, but I always went back to it. I had lost a lot of the weight I had gained, and as often happens with bulimia, I hit a certain number on the scales and stayed there. It didn't matter though, the weight loss had always been a bonus. The purging gave me control; it was the only thing in my life I felt like I had any control over. But more on control later.

So that's how it started. Or at least that's what I thought. The thing about eating disorders is, they don't normally spring up out of nowhere in your twenties. The behaviour, the purging, started in my twenties. But I have come to realise that my relationship with food had been distorted long before that.