Is there anyone else on here who struggles with an eating disorder? I've been struggling with bulimia since I was 15, went through treatment and all that, and even though I'm technically in remission, I still have minor relapses every few months. Mostly when I'm just trying hard to get into shape. I tend to get overzealous, and within a few weeks the urges and behaviors come back full force, however, while in the past it was well known to family when I was still sick, now when the lapses occur I suffer in silence because I want nothing to do with the drama of my darker days. The lapses are truly nothing serious, and last only briefly (a few days tops), but I'm finally in a mentally healthy enough stage in my life where I have the motivation to go about changing my body image in a healthy and productive way, thanks to education; but every time I try to take action and control of my diet and exercise, that risk of relapse is always looming overhead, and not having shared that with anyone these past few years is somewhat isolating (friends and family think I've been in remission since my doctors declared so about 4 years ago). Am i alone in this?
I've not had an eating disorder, but one of my close friends is/was anorexic, and I had another one who was bulimic. I've heard that they are really difficult to overcome, and to get better, you have to feel better about your body image. I'm a bit heavy set, and I've kind of contemplated anorexia in the past, but then I saw what my friend was going through with his headaches, and heart problems and such, it scared me out of it. I love my self image now, though I'm looking to improve a bit. You're definitely not alone here, and there should be many people (including myself) that would be willing to help, if you need it. I'm not sure how much help I'd be, but I'd be more than willing to.
Paradox: Don't consider for a second losing weight in any way you know unhealthy. Avoiding it will save you a life of serious depression, bad habits, and not to mention innumerable medical bills. It leads to a pretty miserable existence. At one point in recovery, my blood tests showed I had started exhibiting the early signs of kidney failure. But when your mindset is so screwed up like that, you have no care in the world, you're in a constant state if denial; the things people do under that influence are truly psychotic, Lol. And its such a selfish disorder. Looking back on my experience, I've since taken a stance of not having any respect for people with eating disorders whatsoever, mostly out of guilt for what I put my family through. But at the same time I know that isn't fair because I know first-hand how unmanageable it becomes. At some point it stops being about weight and body image, and instead becomes about control. You lose all sense of reality, your priorities become so misguided and destructive; its basically like a sort of self-sustaining, neurotic power-trip. You develop deeply ingrained habits, and psychologically you unwittingly train your brain to recognize emotional triggers that spark the irresistible urge to act on those habits. It stops being about obsessing over goals of perfection and becomes about acting on those compulsions. To this day, I will literally binge and not even know I've binged until my stomach is so full I can't sit properly. Then there's no reasoning except to get it out, get it out right now! ---------- Post added 11th Sep 2013 at 12:53 AM ---------- And thank you Nick and Paradox, for your reassurance
I used to starve myself when I was in primary school, though I never got skinny or anything. I love the starved feeling and find it very difficult to continue eating most days. I count calories and I can't ever seem to eat the amount I'm supposed to. I've never made myself throw up, I have tried but I don't seem to have a gag reflex. You're defiantly not alone (*hug*)
I've spent a while thinking of what to even say in response to this thread, and then I saw this paragraph and it pretty much chucked up all the usual talking points I'd typically highlight. Now it's great you've gone through treatment and you keep those thoughts at the forefront of your mind to maintain that perspective, but I'm reading through other aspects of your situation and it doesn't seem like you're applying that knowledge in the way that you need to be doing. It's certainly not my place to be advising on ED recovery as it's a minefield, but it seems like there is a disconnect between your knowledge of the illness and the way that you're engaging in everyday life. There are numerous things in your situation that I can relate to, but the way I approached them was very much driven by the knowledge that I had and that you've identified above. For example, you say that relapses happen. What do you do to understand those relapses? Obviously that risk is there dangling over people's heads when they're maintaining their recovery, but there are steps that can be taken that allow people to understand how they can manage risk and avoid significant triggers. For example, I identified that a common cause of me being sick during early mornings before school was because of my eating patterns the night before. In my mind, if I binged on sugary junk before bed then it was sat inside my stomach and could make me ill during school the following day, which then tapped into my irrational fear of being ill in the presence of other people. As a result, I developed a schedule in which I wouldn't eat 2/3 hours before bed, and also had a list of foods that typically didn't have any feeling of 'sitting' on my stomach. By developing that structure and tweaking it as I continued to better understand my own mindset, I eventually had a rather comprehensive system in place that helped me avoid that urge to be ill. I suspect you already have a rather strong idea of how your illness manifests and what you can do to manage the risk, but you also have to avoid complacency and remain on top of that risk management as your life progresses and the subsequent risks of that change. If I were you at this point in time, I'd be using the knowledge I have to see how it poses any problems for the forseeable future, and I would be actively monitoring what present behaviour is acting as a catalyst for those relapses. Whether you're being ill once a day or once a month, that behaviour is still fundamentally disordered, and it can't always be brushed under the carpet as a simple relapse if its potentially indicative of a wider issue. If you're hiding it from people then that self-manipulative mindset of EDs still has to be present in some capacity, and the best way to minimise the effects of that is to make sure that your eating boundaries are healthily maintained as your life continues to change and 'move on'. If you find yourself accidentally binging on food without intending to then you should take from that that you aren't ready to eat portions of a certain size, and get around that by perhaps avoiding 3 large meals a day and instead having 4 or 5 small portions of food, at a size that would be relatively impossible to get physically bloated from. You've got the knowledge to keep on top of your behaviour, so you just have to ensure that it is continuously applied to your changing lifestyle. A lot of people have this wonderful vision that treatment will cure them and they'll be able to walk away from their illness and never feel any effects of it ever again. However, anybody who is maintaining good health following an ED will know that there's a whole range of triggers out there, and the risks that people face for relapses do evolve as time changes. For example, once upon a time it was the thought of going to school that made me feel ill. Just because I'm no longer in school doesn't mean that the risk has gone, nor should I be complacent and not do any sort of monitoring of my eating behaviour. The risk for me now comes from the stress of the career I'm training for, so I just have to take the knowledge I've had and apply it to these new settings. By doing that I constantly remain on top of things.
Honestly I wouldn't even know where to begin to respond to that. But I'll try using your words and applying them to myself. I identify that a common trigger for me post treatment is when I put myself on a ED-free fitness regime. I become so deadset on maintaining that regime perfectly, that when I slip up and give in to a craving---say, 2 or 3 cookies---i feel a sense of defeat and my immediate response to myself is "well, what the hell, the damage is already done, I might as well just finish the entire bag." However, every time I forfeit my self-control like that, the cravings snowball to mostly anything sweet in sight. The anxiety that I just ruined my chance at any progress causes me to purge, so to avoid this I should allow myself one serving a day, or every couple days, or something junk food related so I'm not wanting that forbidden fruit which I can't gave, then add maybe 5 extra minutes of cardio for myself the days I eat said forbidden fruit. That's reasonable, right? My problem is, however, that I've tried using that precaution before, but my biggest problem lies in my self-control. I have none. Its my lack of self-control that throws me every time. The only time I've been able to manage it was when I used this weird trick of the mind thing my old therapist taught me years ago, which sounded stupid when she told me, bit when I actually tried it a few months ago, it proved to be really useful. What threw me off though was getting my tongue pierced, which made it difficult to eat, and after a noticeable weight loss while it healed, I knew I needed calories ASAP when it felt better, so "healthy" wasn't so much a priority anymore as it was "quickly put the weight back on to appease the gods" and I threw my successful eating plan out the window for the time being. Problem is that mind trick simply hasn't been helpful since. I've thought about seeking counseling for it again when times get difficult, but to be perfectly honest it isn't that bad. It sounds bad me explaining it on this thread I think because I simply have so much I wanted to voice on the matter, having been extremely secretive and telling no one bout it for the last few years, just trying to maintain my status as being in remission. I guess what I could do is seek counsel when I'm trying to do a fitness regime merely as a precaution because that's when the behaviors tend to come back to the surface. Its so difficult organizing all these thoughts, but doing it anyway and actually writing them out is proving to really helpful. ---------- Post added 11th Sep 2013 at 10:53 AM ---------- There a few typos in there that now it seems I can't go back and fix...damnit..bear with me!
