Living A Lie

This is part two of three. You can find part one of my story here. 

Bulimia is embarrassing if you think about the details of it: intentionally binging and then bending over a toilet to get rid of everything you just ate. But it doesn’t always appear this grotesque, especially to the one doing it. In a way, my bulimic behavior crept up on me. In some ways the extreme exercise I was engaged prior to my anorexia diagnosis, could be considered a form of purging. The throwing up didn’t start until the tail end of my recovery from anorexia. As I said in my Part 1, my recovery looked “perfect” as I followed the doctors orders exactly.

When someone engages in extreme restriction of food intake and fasting, there is a shrinking that occurs with the stomach: a natural adaptation of a body in starvation-mode. So when I finally allowed myself to eat it had to be in small amounts. But as those amounts grew to more “normal” portions, my mind (the part of my mind still controlled by the obsessive, disordered thinking) revolted. I feared gaining weight. I feared being “fat.” I feared that if I kept the food inside me that it was a sign that I was losing all control. So I began to purge, small amounts at first. Secretively so no one would notice. Everyone could see if I was restricting or not, they could see if I was exercising excessively, but no one would know what I did behind a closed door.

The lie was still there. The lie that I wasn’t good enough as I was, the lie that I had to be someone else in order to be accepted. Even though I wanted to change (as evidenced by my recovery from anorexia) I had not yet addressed the root issue. It is much easier looking back to see what exactly the problem was, but when you’re in the thick of it, it can be complicated and confusing. The therapists I’d seen had dug into my family history looking for abuse (there never was any), dysfunctional relationships (there are none), and traumatic experiences (I supposed being called a “hippopotamus” could be traumatic to a 10 year old). I came from a loving and supportive family. My parents were committed to raising kids with a sense of compassion, generosity and responsibility and they lived as an example of what they believed. Kids can be cruel, bullying isn’t a new phenomenon, but I can’t say that I ever felt bullied. I remember only one occasion where a kid verbalized their opinion on my weight, that “hippopotamus” comment stuck with me, but was not the sole cause of my eating disorder. Instead it was the things unsaid: the things I thought other people were thinking of me. In some ways, I wasn’t obsessed with my weight or appearance, I was obsessed with what other people thought of my weight or appearance. And when that becomes the obsession, what you think people think of you is really what you believe of yourself. So from a young age, I believed that my weight was not good enough. As I grew older that lie became more pervasive: I was not good enough. So I did everything I could to be good enough. I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of disappointing.

Fear is the great enslaver. It paralyzes and traps. And so driven by a fear of being fat I continued to purge meals. For a bulimic the purge is liberating, because the binge--the too-much food that’s sitting there in your stomach--is going to make you fat. And being fat is the ultimate fear, so the purge releases that fear and returns you to a sense of control. There is no thought to the physical harm you are doing to yourself and even if there is it takes a back-seat to the fear, because somehow (as twisted as it seems) the fear of becoming fat is greater than the fear of health complications. There is a reason that bulimia is called a disorder. The way the mind twists on itself changing the order of the truth and the lie: that is the ultimate dis-order.

This twisting of the truth and the lie, seems to me to be the root of addiction. I was addicted to the purge, to the control it allowed me. I could eat normally, I could eat excessively and not “worry” about weight gain. [Just a side note here: A purge does not eliminate the affect of insulin to the blood sugar, so even though you are purging the majority of the food that has been consumed your insulin still spikes. This inhibits weight-loss. And you can never completely empty your stomach. So many bulimics are average weight or slightly overweight. This was true for me and since being completely free for the past three years my weight has regulated to a place that I was trying so hard to get it to through purging.] For the next eight years my struggle was with an ADDICTION. I took me eight years to recognize it as such. During those eight years I was focused on the behavior: the bingeing, the purging and was trying so hard to eliminate (or at least control it) that I did not see that I was in fact addicted to the behavior.

It would take an incredibly long time to chronicle the pain and frustration, and even the small victories of those eight years. It was a roller coaster. There would be progress: two days, three days a week even where I wouldn’t binge or purge. Or times where I’d binge but have the wherewithal to call a friend to keep me accountable to not purging. But more often than not it was a vicious cycle of deception, guilt, isolation, depression, denial, helplessness, anger and resolve. Sometimes I’d live this cycle two or three times in one day. Those are the days I’d like to forget. And the thing about bulimia is it doesn’t take a vacation, it goes with you. So many of the trips my husband and I have taken are punctuated by memory of where and what I purged.

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All this time, since my doctors first gave me the OK after gaining the weight they wanted me to, I was running. I was racing: 5K's, 10K's, half-marathons and marathons. All this through the binge and purge cycles. Many times I'd feel obligated to run, like it was the way to eliminate the 'extra' calories that were still left after the purge, after I took the laxatives. Other times I'd run to free my mind from the obsessive chaos that seemed to rule it. [When I think about the way in which I abused my body through binging, purging and using laxatives I am amazed that I am still here today.] If I had a race approaching I would have better resolve not to purge, because I knew if I did it would pose a danger to my health. But that thought didn't stop me any other time. I had a few good races in those eight years, but most of them were bad: disappointing results that fell far short of my goals. Somehow I convinced myself that it had nothing to do with Bulimia, that I just needed to train harder (more evidence of the distortion in my mind). Looking back now, I know that I had so much potential as a runner (I still do) that was unrealized because I was caught up in the trap of bulimia. I also missed out on the joy I find in running now.

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Every time I would come out of the haze of a cycle of binging and purging I would resolve to “do better” next time. I’d call up a friend and relate the difficulty of the past few days and ask them to keep me accountable. I’d confess to my husband and ask him to keep an “eye out.” And when I got to my counseling session I’d relay all the details, I would analyze it for her so she knew that I knew what was wrong and I could fix it. I believed that if I just had more self-control, if I just tried harder I could fix it. I was wrong.

To go to Part Three click HERE.

--Sarah