Lies

When I moved in with my boyfriend and his family I knew I would have to stop throwing up, the privacy I needed to purge was gone so I had no choice. For a few weeks I managed to resist the urges, but as often happens when you're in the honeymoon period of a relationship, I put on some weight. Not much, I know that now, but at the time I felt like Violet Beauregarde after she eats the gum in the Wonka Factory. My self loathing was at an all time high; I alternated between mournful resignation and complete denial of my size. In the end, the ceaseless self degradation became too much to bear, and I gave in.

Knowing I couldn't escape dinner, I focused my attention on my daytime eating habits. Not eating at all wasn't an option for me, I lacked the willpower to restrict and I couldn't do my job properly if I was tired and dizzy all day. So I began to 'diet' during the day, eating foods that were low in calories and fat. After a week, I started running for the bathroom once I had finished my lunch. After a month I was throwing up lunch and the apple I ate in the afternoon. This still wasn't enough, I wasn't trying hard enough. I was pathetic; I was weak; If I really wanted to loose weight I should work harder. One day, I stood in front of the mirror and surveyed the disgusting blob I called home. Lumps and bumps in all the wrong places, flesh soft and doughy from my chin to my ankles. I was neither waif-like or curvaceous. I wasn't lean and athletic, or carrying the right amount of 'junk in my trunk'.

Unless you have experienced it, I don't think there is anyway for me to convey exactly what it's like to look at yourself and be truly horrified and repulsed by what you see. To constantly criticise and despise every inch of your body. That's not to say that being insecure about one's appearance only happens to people with eating disorders. I think most people have or have had some part(s)of their body they don't like, or wished they could change. I doubt you could walk more than 2 feet down a busy street without passing someone who is insecure about how they look. People of all shapes and sizes disike their bodies, it's not just those of us who have eating disorders; in fact we are probably the minority group in the body hating category. But in my experience, if you have an eating disorder, you fucking hate your body. You hate it to such a degree that you would rather destroy it than live in it anymore. Whether you are bulimic, anorexic, a binge eater, orthorexic or EDNOS(Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified *eyeroll*), your behaviours can and will kill you. But death is not as terrifying as letting go of your ED.

A couple of months after I moved in with my boyfriend I cracked, and two or three times a week I would make a beeline for the toilet after dinner. I didn't even notice when it became an everyday ritual. I did everything I could to hide what I was doing, which is to say, I lied my ass off. For me that's the worst part of the ED, the lying. But as much as the guilt tore at me, I couldn't tell the truth. If I did, people might try and take it away from me, they wanted to steal my best friend. That's what my ED was then, it was the one thing I knew wouldn't let me down. Purging for me was just like self harming; it dulled whatever overwhelming emotions I felt, it gave me control when I felt powerless; and if I did it right, it would help me loose some weight. It was, and still is, my safety blanket. People will come and go(there's that abandonment issue again), but the ED will never leave you.

Not every moment of my life at that time was marred with sadness, I have plenty of good memories, more good than bad. I considered myself to be 'well'; I refused to see the ED as anything other than a diet, and a companion. When things became difficult in work I just upped my game, soon I was throwing up anywhere from 3-15 times a day. Not even rice-cakes escaped, everything was on the clearance aisle in my stomach.

Other than suffering with IBS, at this point my overall health was unaffected. This was proof that I was fine, and if that changed I would immediately stop. Then my right back molar had to be extracted - the stomach acid had started to erode my teeth. The dentist assumed I drank a lot of fizzy drinks and suitably chastised me. I knew better, and as I walked out of the dentist office, crying, I told myself I was done. I had gone too far, and I believed that for about an hour. It was only a back molar, and it had probably been eroding for some time. Just like that, my promises to quit were gone. The crumbled in the face of the ED