My Eating Hell (Eating disorders - how are they caused?)

Member Name: TigerTiger

Product:	Eating disorders - how are they caused?
Date:	13/02/02 (614 review reads)
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Around about a year ago I wrote an opinion about my experience of bullying, it was a hard thing to write about, but it proved to be a positive experience for me as years on I still struggle to cope with what happened to me. Bullying can have many consequences and in my case I developed an eating disorder. For five years I suffered from a combination of anorexia and bulimia and eating completely dominated my life, I was obsessed by food and by being thin. Here’s my story……..

~~~How it all began~~~

I had always been popular with the guys at school, I was attractive, a size ten and got a lot of attention. Looking back I had everything going for me, I had an enviable figure. Indeed to everyone looking on there was seemingly nothing wrong. I had a long term boyfriend and a good family and it wasn’t even as if I felt unloved. I had my university place and little to worry about. The problem however came from the jealousy of all the other girls at school who for no apparent reason decided to spend their days making my life a misery. Girls being girls and bitchy they targeted the usual things like appearance and weight. They would make comments like “yeah, the face is ok, would be better if she lost some weight though” and I took them all in (in reality I was actually thinner than most of them!). In public I was quite good at hiding it and I held my head up high, studied hard and then went home to my family and real friends. However, away from the prying eye in private, I had started a dangerous process of punishing myself through food and had entered a cycle of starving myself, binging and making myself sick which went on for the next 4 years or so, and as I will go onto will continue to be with me for the rest of my life.

Initially I just started eating less and less. I was depressed and just couldn’t bring myself to eat. I kept myself so busy that I never noticed that I wasn’t eating half the ti
me and everyone else was so busy in their own lives that they didn’t notice either. The weight started to come off and no-body really noticed either, I wasn’t dangerously thin, just skinny. However, in time my Mum started to get suspicious and she sat me down and gave me a good talking too. She said that I was getting very thin and that it was starting to get unattractive more than making me more attractive if that was my aim. I insisted that there was nothing to worry about, but she gave me the talking to anyway. After this conversation I made a conscious effort to eat properly again and I managed to gain a bit of weight and everything seemed ok.

A few months later my A Level exams started and coupled with the stress, the bullying was at an all time high as I think they wanted to get as much bitching in as they could before we left and I never saw them again. One Saturday night I went out for a meal with my family and I remember feeling so full that I couldn’t take it. I felt fat and horrible and I got home, put the shower on and made myself sick. I am not going to pull any punches here, I want to tell it how it is and that first night was one of the strangest experiences of my life. Firstly, I had tried to make myself sick a couple of times before, however, had given up as it just hurt too much and try as I may I just couldn’t make myself sick. I would gag, but nothing more and with it being very uncomfortable I would just walk away and vow to eat less the next day. However, this night for whatever reason I succeeded. Being sick hurt, my throat hurt, my chest hurt as I was ill and I hurt emotionally. I was so confused. I felt disgusted with myself, as I knew what I was doing was wrong and that it was potentially harming myself, however, at the same time I felt some weird kind of euphoria and good for what I had just done. I felt powerful and in control, and that is a very powerful emotion and one which you tend to want more and mor
e.

That day was a turning point in my life and there was no going back. Every time I felt unhappy and sad I just ate what I wanted and made myself sick. It also got over the problem of people watching what I ate, or more to the point, what I ate as I just ate all my meals (and some) and then got rid of it later. Within three months of that first day I was pretty much being sick after everything I ate and I had conditioned myself so well that I didn’t have to stick my fingers down my throat any more, instead all I had to do was look at the toilet bowl and I was sick. At this time I was on study leave, and then the summer holidays and so there was no-one at home to notice. My weight was slowly going down, but not so much that everyone was rushing me to the nearest eating disorders clinic. No-one had a clue what I was up to and in a strange way that was part of the buzz I got. It was my secret and I was in control. I had to be careful though as my mum was not stupid and so I cleaned up after myself and made sure nobody ever discovered the wrappers of all the cakes, crisps and biscuits.

All through this time I truly thought that I was fat. I looked at my size 10/8 thighs and all I saw was fat and ugliness. I looked in the mirror, on the occasions that I could bring myself to look in a mirror, and hated everything that I saw. I can only describe myself as living permanently with one of those fair ground mirrors in my head, as what I was seeing was not reality. Even years on I do not claim to be able to accurately tell you what I look like (some things never totally go away), however looking back it was a lot worse then.

Then it all started to get really bad. I went to university and for the first time in my life I was on my own, at liberty to do what I wanted to do. The first thing I did was stop eating. I lived on nothing more than a few crisp bread a day and maybe an apple. The weight started dropping off and I was now a size 8, but
that was getting too big by the day. I lived with 7 other people in halls though and it wasn’t too long before one of them approached me about it. I denied it of course and said that I eat in university or round at friend’s houses. They remained suspicious and I realised that I had to become more careful. It was then I started making myself sick again. I had an en-suite bathroom, so it wasn’t hard to get away with it. However, it started spiralling out of control and I was being sick many many times a day. I knew what I was doing to myself, so I will never confess to being out of control as such. AS I was making myself sick I would wonder how it was affecting my teeth, what it was doing to my skin and at times when my chest really hurt from being so sick I feared I would make myself have a heart attack or something and that really frightened me. However, regardless of all this I could not stop.

Something ironic happened at this time as I was asked as part of my psychology degree to do an essay and presentation on eating disorders. As ever I worked hard and read many books on the subject. I hoped I may understand myself more, and maybe I did, but when the time came I stood up there in front of the other 200 people on my course and professed to be some kind of expert on how to get rid of such disorders. An hour later I was back home throwing up.

It went on for most of the year and coupled with all the eating problems I also became obsessive about going to the gym and getting fit. One day I came home to find a letter underneath my door which was rather strange as our post came in to the kitchen. It was from one of my female flat mates and it she basically told me that she knew what I was doing, that she had heard me being sick and that she had been to see one of the student advisors about it as she didn’t know what to do. Enclosed was a pile of leaflets all detailing eating disorders and what to do if you have one, or someon
e you know has one. They tell you to confront the person, which was what my flat mate was doing. She was letting me know that she was there and that she wanted to help me. She also said that she would have no alternative but to contact my family if I didn’t seek help. I felt sick, I had been discovered.

I didn’t go for help. I thought that I could deal with what was happening to myself. Then a turning point came when I passed out one day at the gym and struggled to find the energy to walk home. Each of my legs felt like they had weights on them and all the way home I thought “I did this to me, it’s all my fault”. At home I stood and looked at myself in the mirror ( a rare thing) and my skin was really bad (I’d never had bad skin) and I looked pale and tired. I also often had sore at the sides of my mouth from being sick so much. Generally my whole body was shouting at me that it couldn’t cope, but it was only then I started to realise it. I went to my flat mate and cried and cried. It felt good to finally let someone into my secret.

~~~The healing process~~~

At the time admitting I had a problem to my friend felt like the hardest thing, however, there was a lot worse to come. I realised that if I was really to get over this illness that I needed the full support of my family and friends. I wrote a letter to my mum and told her everything in painful detail. I even went back to the first time I made myself sick and recounted every last detail. It was an awful letter to write and one of the most awful to receive I imagine. My mum called me that very night and told me how it had broken her heart to receive it. However, now we could together start to fix the problem. I was adamant that I wanted to stay at university and so one day I walked into the university counselling centre and a started the pain process of getting help.

Weeks later I was sitting in a counsellor’s office having my
first assessment. It was dreadful recounting it all, as well as the rest of my life basically. I felt dreadful, like a real failure, because for whatever reason I could not cope with life at all well. Here began my 18 months in counselling.

I started to keep a diary which held all my feelings and also held a record of when I felt the need to be sick and if I was sick. I found this in itself very therapeutic as it made me reach deep inside of myself. Along side this I saw my counsellor once a week. I saw my first counsellor for a month and just didn’t “click” with her and so I asked if I could see someone else. It is actually very important that you do have some sort of relationship with your counsellor as if not it is a waste of both your times. My new counsellor and I got on extremely well. I think I warmed to her because she too had had an eating disorder and when I spoke to her I was consciously aware of the fact that she knew what I was going through. I found the whole counselling experience very hard. I thought I knew the true cause of my problems and that it stemmed from the bullying, but she made me think about other things, like my strained relationship with my father and slowly it dawned on me that I had started a destructive cycle of eating because of various reasons. It was painful though and on many of our sessions I would cry endlessly and go home wondering what I was doing to myself. However, I had started to eat three meals a day and with the help of my flat mate was binging and being sick less and less.

A few months in to my counselling it was suggested that I join a group session for people with the same problem as me. Very reluctantly I went along. The biggest shock for me was finding two other girls off my degree course there. It made me think that if out of my whole course there were three of us undergoing therapy for eating disorders, how many other people on my course also had problems? It was a scary thoug
ht. Obviously we couldn’t tell anyone outside of the group of other people and their names for confidentiality, but I became really good friends with the two girls on my course and started to see more of them away from the group. Having someone else who understood exactly what I was going through was brilliant. Being in a group scenario like this was great I felt because it made me feel like I was not alone and that other people had the same irrational thoughts as me. For a long time I had felt like a real failure for not being able to cope with life and having to turn to such a destructive way of life. After a while I stopped thinking that way.

Throughout the 18 months that I was in counselling life was far from easy. People who knew my problem were constantly watching me and what I ate. My mum would call me every day at University. I was battling with the desire to be sick and get rid of anything I ate, whilst feeling angry at myself for stopping myself get better. I also felt dreadful at the guilt that my mother experienced, she felt, as any parent would, that if only she had done something different and she also worried why she hadn’t noticed what was going on for herself. Everyone was blaming everyone and we all struggled to retain any normality.

~~~Nearly 5 years on~~~~

I am now 24 and am a lot better, but I still consider myself to be bulimic, because I think eating disorders don’t ever really go away. Once a bulimic always a bulimic. It is like alcoholics, they will always be alcoholics, even if they aren’t drinking. I still have an easting disorder even if I am not starving myself, binging or making myself sick. I don’t want to kid myself otherwise. I may not make myself sick any more, but I still have times when I think, I could be sick or that I will get fat if I keep food inside of me. However, what counselling has done for me is provide me with coping mechanisms for this. It has also helped me w
ith a lot of my other issues so the desire to make myself ill doesn’t arise as much in the first place. I still worry about my weight and watch what I eat and I doubt this heightened sensitivity to food and my weight will ever go away. There have been the odd occasions where I have made myself sick during the past few years, and I am not going to deny that and say that everything went away over night. It hasn’t. but it most certainly is a lot easier to live with.


~~~So, what do I think causes Eating problems??~~~~

The only one thing I know for sure is that there is no one cause of eating disorders, instead there are many factors. I get annoyed when I hear people saying that it is all down to the media. Certainly images of stick thin glamorous women plastered over every magazine and newspaper does not help anyone’s self confidence, however, I think there has to be a certain pre-disposition to an eating disorder to start with.

One of my friends who I met at counselling became bulimic after her grandmother died. Another after the breakdown of a long term relationship with her boyfriend. I also know of people who had eating disorders triggered through external stressors such as exams. It appears that there are many different causes of eating problems and that they can manifest themselves at any stage of our lives and in both men and women.

I get very upset and irritated by people who say that eating disorders are nothing more than a way of getting attention, because I can hand on heart say that I never wanted attention whilst I starving myself or being sick, in fact I would have happily disappeared into the shadows. Eating disorders are an illness and people don’t understand the pain that suffers undergo. I spent years in my own private hell, knowing that what I was doing to myself was bad and could seriously damage my health, yet at the same time being unable to stop it because of the temporary relief
it provided me. Eating disorders are a version of self harm, and no different from taking a razor blade to your arms. People with eating disorders need understanding and not criticising. This is one reason why I chose to write this account of my experience of eating disorders, as I feel it is important for people to hear a real life account of the problem and not a media account.

Years on I can’t say I understand eating disorders, or why some people are pre-disposed to them more than others. What I do know is that help is out there and it may not be easy, but it will be worth it in the end, as it’s no life being an anorexic/ bulimic, it’s a hell that I am glad to be out of.

If anyone has any similar problems and needs someone to talk to, maybe I can say something that makes sense! Email me :O)

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