e mail me at :hope2bsurvivor@yahoo.co.uk
"And people in pain will do painful things
People in pain do painful things"
-Razz
This page is about my eating distress which I believe was just another form of self harm. It is my personal experience and is not a professional description of either anorexia or bulimia.
If you are seeking help or information on eating disorders then you may find the following website address useful:
Controlling my eating was another method I used to abuse my body. To deprive it of it's demands, or to indulge it and then deny it was yet another attack on my physical presence in an attempt to heal the emotional pain. I do know when my eating distress began. I was twelve and I can remember feeling that my stomach was not flat. Up until that point I had never given a second thought to what I ate. I just ate whatever was placed in front of me and I was of perfectly normal weight. I began a quest to make my stomach flatter, a quest that soon became an addiction. I started to control my intake of food by using my Mum's calorie counter book. I had soon learnt that off by heart and food lost all it's pleasure becoming just a number. I became vegetarian to reduce the amount of fat I ate. (I remain a vegetarian to this day, from the age of fourteen it was because I didn't want to eat animals and ceased to be a dieting measure.)After a lot of protesting about the meals I was being served I was left to cook my own meals which gave me complete control over what I ate. I developed a technique of making my plate look fuller than it was, and then after the meal, emptier than it was. I began to get hungry, very hungry.
"...and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never considering how in the world she was to get out again."
extract from 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll
Out of all the pain I inflicted on my body I find eating distress the hardest to explain. It started as a diet to lose a bit of weight and then I discovered that I could make my body hurt physically on the inside as well as on the outside. I could starve it until it hurt and I didn't have to give into it's demands easily. I let it suffer because I deserved to suffer. As I felt more in control and the starvation spiralled out of control I lost the reason why I had started in the first place. By then, it had very little to do with losing weight, that was a side effect of gaining power over my body. Of forcing it to exist without the fuel it demanded. I was aware I was thin - I always saw myself as ugly but never fat. I was fascinated by the image of my skeletal frame pushing through my skin, the way the bones jutted out. It created a physical image of my suffering, a flesh and blood version of my pain. I had no concept that I was effectively killing myself.
"I work from the inside out. I expose you
Slowly as one of my own.
You grow thinner."
from the poem 'Eating Disorder' by Rosemary Norman
At it's worse I had narrowed down my intake to just five types of food. They became all I would allow myself to eat and I didn't eat much of them. By the time I left secondary school I was very thin. I was taken to the doctor who said that if I continued to lose weight they would admit me into hospital. That scared me. I convinced my Mum that I would put on the weight and that I didn't need help to do it. In actual fact I needed a lot more help than I knew at the time. I was completely screwed up. I had to lie to and deceive people to stop the doctors getting involved but I did begin to put on weight. It took me two years to reach my ideal weight and get everyone back to believing I was okay.
I left home and my eating was much improved to what it had been. Food and I were never going to enter a harmonious relationship but I was eating enough to function properly. And then just as everything was going okay my past decided to make an ugly presence in my life. The enormity of the abuse I suffered as a child suddenly hit me-much harder than my Father's hands ever did. By this point I hadn't seen my Father for two years and although I did not miss him I did miss having a Father figure. I still do. It was like having a huge black hole of emptiness open up inside me, an emptiness that has never quite gone away. I turned to food once again - or rather the lack of it, to reclaim some control over my body. It was easy for me to slip back into the old pattern of starving myself. Feeling weak and tired again some how seemed to calm me down. I managed to get through that crisis using my eating distress and self harm to survive. I never sorted the problems out, I just kept the pain at a level I could tolerate enabling me to get on with my life. The realisation that the abuse had happened and there was nothing I could do about it came much later. Although this realisation has never meant that I've forgotten. I will never forget and I will never accept it. It should not have happened - my abuser stole my childhood. For that I will never forgive, no matter how many people say it would be easier on me if I did. The anger may stay with me forever but why shouldn't I be bloody well angry.
"It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don't have to give in to it's whining."
extract from 'Wasted' by Marya Hornbacher
As I became absorbed in my work my eating improved. Then came cutting and food ceased to be the huge issue it had been. Cutting was far more successful in dulling the pain and I didn't need the ache of hunger to make me feel alive. As my cutting became worse I realised that my self harm was way out of control and that I really needed to do something about it. Self harm had been my life and I suddenly began to question it. I began to feel so sad about everything I had done to myself and was still doing. All my life I'd just been scrapeing through each day depending on self harm to survive. I began to feel out of control and I started to starve again until bulimia came along to get me.
"And you begin to purge, purge, purge that fragile frame, until you send the message home, you send the message rushing, gushing out, of you in hellish moments, you send the sparks of hopes and dreams shooting in the air and your flesh, your flesh begins to burn, until you are burning the electrolyte lines in your brain"
from the poem 'After the binge' by Dawn Burgess
Out of necessity to keep my self harm secret I had to force myself to stop cutting - at least on my arms. It was only for a short time but to me it was forever. So one day when the need to cut was overwhelming I found myself with my fingers down my throat forcing myself to be sick. I do not know why I did it, it was just a case of finding myself doing it. Throwing up didn't come easily to me at first and it would take me ages to get the result I wanted. However, the more I did it the easier it became. I went from being sick every few days to a full scale attack on my body of being sick a few times each day. Very soon I was addicted to bingeing and vomiting. Throwing up down the toilet or if I thought anybody would get suspicious in carrier bags in my room. I found the whole process repulsive and I was disgusted at myself for doing it, but when you hate yourself with the intensity I did it doesn't matter much what you have to do to feel a tiny bit better. Soon I was cutting again, much deeper than before. The bulimia did not stop as I planned it would, instead I was left with both this and cutting to destroy my body. I hurt physically and emotionally all over. I sank lower and lower, in fact I very nearly sank so low not to rise again.
"...the bulimia had had a life of it's own. It was purely an emotional response to the world-and actually had little to do , believe it or not, with a desire to lose weight."
extract from 'Wasted' by Marya Hornbacher
I was quite willing to die at that point although I was too low to do anything about it. If someone had offered to end my life I would have willingly taken them up on the offer. I was waiting to die or to be saved and neither was happening because I wasn't doing anything about it. I moved back with my Mum in a last ditch attempt to save myself. Even though my Mum didn't know about the mess I was in, it was where I felt I needed to be. It worked. I stopped cutting and then later the bulimia stopped. I gave my body the kind of respect and care it had never had. The emotional pain actually increased but I had the physical health to fight it.
I believe I needed to do the things I did to myself to survive the distress I experienced. However, looking back I do believe that these attacks made me feel a whole lot worse in the long term. Although eating distress was another form of self harm it was different. Self harm was how I eased the pain that seemed to exist in me for no apparent reason whereas my eating disorder was much more about a reaction to the abuse. A need to punish my body for being abused and cleansing it of the filth. I do not see self harm as being connected with the abuse but I do see the abuse as the cause for my messed up, love and hate relationship with food. If only I'd known that inflicting pain on my body was not the answer and that really looking after my body would help heal my mind far more. If only I could have seen that or been told that, but then I may not have chose to listen. Anyway I'll stop dwelling on ifs and buts as whatever happened in the past I can now say that I'm healthier and happier than ever before. Did I really write that?! Healthy and happy are not words I ever thought I'd use to describe me!!
"It's not about the food, it's about me" -anon
Keep Hoping