ED (No, not THAT ED)

[thestrangequark]

Have you ever struggled, or known some one who has struggled with an eating disorder? Anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating, binge eating, exercise bulimia, diabulimia?

I am curious about people's (sufferers and non sufferers) thoughts on the subject. This can be a very sensitive and difficult subject for some people, so please be conscious of how you post.

 

[Spot's Meow]

In "real life," not that I'm aware of. But I knew someone online in the past that had a very serious eating disorder.

When I was a teenager I was a part of an online diary community and I had found this girl's diary on random one day. I rarely left her notes but I read her diary whenever she had a new entry. It was really scary stuff. She was an Australian in her early twenties who was living with her mom and stepdad. She would describe in detail her cutting, binges, suicide attempts, throwing up, the intense fights she had with her parents, and the way she felt about food and eating. It was a very disturbing glimpse into the mind of someone with deep self worth issues. Sometimes she wouldn't write an entry for weeks and then would come back saying that she had been in the hospital because her heart or another important organ had failed to function properly. She spoke of not eating for weeks and having to sit in a wheelchair with an IV. In the beginning she talked about school and a job but soon those weren't even considerations, the only thing she could focus on in her life was becoming thin. She would list her weights and they were scary low...after a few years of reading this she left for a few weeks again and I found that her diary had been deleted. I don't know if she changed to a new diary, she was in the hospital for a long time, or if her eating disorder had finally got the best of her...I have searched and searched for this person online since then but with no luck. I guess I will never know what happened to her, but I think about her sometimes.

Now that I am older and more wise about the internets I wonder if it was just a hoax and it was role someone was playing. I really don't think that was the case, but ultimately even if it was it doesn't matter, as this situation is very real and is happening to people out there.

 

[freak]

This is a very interesting and yet also very serious issue that has been facing many women in society today. It can also be a very sensitive issue as well..it's all about control-controlling one's environment in an unstable atmosphere.
To answer the question, I did know a friend in high school who was obsessed about her weight. The only thing she ate at lunch was carrots and celery and hardly had any food at home. She was from Finland and was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen in my entire life. She went to High school with me and never had any lunch to speak of. Her host family supported her fasting and so they never bought any food for her and there wasn't anything in the house to eat. She was always 100-105 lbs and she thought that was fat. The good news about her was that recently she has had a baby and she looked the healthiest I had ever seen her when she was pregnant. I have heard that after a woman has a baby(if she had previously suffered from an ED) then her ED disappears automatically. One of my other friends was borderline aneorexic because when she came to visit us in 2004, all she could think about was running and exercising. Thankfully she got married last year and has put on about five to seven pounds(which she thinks is too much). Her mother is obsessed with her weight as well as has always been a size two or below.
Sometimes even I feel as though I want to be aneorexic but think twice about doing it. I don't have the courage to fast for several days or stick my finger down my throat to throw up. I do, however, have body issues I need to overcome.

 

[thestrangequark]

Thanks to both of you for your replies. I'd never heard anything about eating disorders stopping after a pregnancy before -- during a pregnancy, sure, but I think many, of not most, women relapse after giving birth. I actually read a heart-wrenching post on another forum written by a young woman struggling with the fact that she was bulimic and pregnant.

I find it very interesting that pretty much any person who is made to hyperfocus on food in some way at some time in their life develops disordered eating. It is strong evidence of the fact that eating disorders really have only a little to do with the desire to be thin, and much more to do with control issues -- one of the reasons why so many women who suffered sexual abuse or trauma go on to develop ED.

 

[cultcross]

A friend of mine from childhood has struggled with anorexia for a number of years. It wasn't your stereotypical 'models are so thin and I'm so fat!' routine, it was that a lot of stuff was happening in her life (illness, death, etc) that she couldn't control, and she had a very pushy mother who insisted on her doing 'productive' activities any time she wasn't actually asleep and the one thing left she felt she could 'control' was her eating. So she basically... stopped. She got very, very thin (she was thin to begin with) and ended up in hospital for several months. She was 'better' for a year or two but this summer, having again taken on too much, had a bad relapse and ended up in hospital again.

If I may be permitted to rant briefly, there are two things about the perception of eating disorders that bug the crap out of me. One is that it's 'not a real disease'. Does every disease where you're not bleeding all over the floor have to go through this phase? Depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, anorexia, diseases like those have to get through people's prejudice about sufferers 'just snapping out of it'. The second is that anorexia, bulimia, etc, are solely the product of vainly 'wanting to be thin' or 'wanting to look like magazine girls'. The causes are way, way more complex than that and are often a reaction to other traumatic events. They affect teenagers most heavily not because teenagers are that much more obsessed with weight (are they really any worse than 30 year olds?) but because teenagers tend to react very emotionally to events and perhaps lack the experience to process them effectively.

 

[Bears Discover Fire]

A friend in high school struggled with anorexia, but appeared to overcome it in our Junior year. With therapy, she was eating healthy and no longer looked emaciated or called out sick from school constantly. She became slender and very attactive.

I found her on facebook a few months ago; she's a model in Los Angeles. From her pictures, she appears to have relapsed back into her eating disorder, presumably from the demands of her career.

 

[Winged Victory]

Yes, someone very close to me, my sister, was diagnosed with Anorexia when she was a sophomore in high school. She had always been thin growing up so being slender was normal for her. She does have the Type A personality--and even then was a perfectionist and had to have things done her way--keeping in control of herself, of what she ate and put in her body, was extremely important to her. It was so much work for my sister to not eat, always exercise, etc.

My parents were quite critical when we were growing up--perfect straight A's were expected--and had high standards for us to keep. I think as a family, we were not very communicative, emotionally distant, and were 'head in the sand' when it came to her warning signs.

She had the typical symptoms: exercising at all hours of the day or night, wearing huge sweatshirts to hide how thin she was getting, eating tiny portions, always feeling cold, and weighing herself all the time...at her lowest, she weighed less than 90 pounds and couldn't stop shivering one night. That's when my dad took her to the hospital and the doctor told us that it was anorexia.

Thankfully, we lived near the Melrose Institute, http://www.parknicollet.com/eatingdisorders/
where she was an inpatient for a month. We as a family had therapy with her too. She's not relapsed and has been at a healthy weight for many years now. And become a vegetarian, but not because of anorexia, she saw a documentary about a slaughterhouse once...anyway!

It's definitely affected my life since then. I don't like to get on the scale at all, reminds me too much of how she would methodically do that twice a day. I hate to see how the women in the modeling industry are so thin because of these ridiculous standards of beauty. I see girls who are rail thin, have no muscle in their legs and arms, just a skeleton almost, and I think of my sister and how horrible that time in our lives were, and I don't want any girl and her family to go through that.

 

[Kestra]

I think I've verged on having an eating disorder, and at the very least I have a very erratic and unhealthy relationship with food. Fixating on a resolution just seems to make it worse, in some respects. I haven't gone off the deep-end, but I think it will be one of those lifelong struggles for me. I'm probably a binge-eater, and maybe even have that night eating syndrome that is proposed, if it's a real thing.

 

[KimMH]

I was large as a teenager and lost a lot of weight as a young twenty-something - I lived on coffee and cigarettes. People would tell me how great I looked when I felt terrible about myself and liking the attention and physically exhausted and so dependent on my wieght to feel good about myself.

I think that any eating pattern that people attach meaning to is problematic and potentially harmful if not confronted. It doesn't just affect girls - my own son who is 21 yrs old surprised me a little while ago by asking me if I thought he was fat. This kid has never had a BMI over 20! We are looking at a counselor to help him sort some things out.

The sins of the parents visit the children . . .

 

[Emher]

I'm an emotional eater. I haven't always been but I developed into one around when I was 11-12 years old or so, during the period when I was being bullied heavily. I've struggled with it ever since, as I have with the overweight I've had ever since.

I'm finally started to get to grips with it now that I've ended completely with crisps and get on the training bike for 25 minutes every day unless it's been a really physical day at work. It take a lot of effort though to maintain because of the emotional eating aspect. Right now things are hard to say the least for our family and it takes a lot of effort to not comfort myself with a cheap taste bag of crisps. But I do not want to be fat all my life.

I've thought about how it will be when I finally get thin again. If I get attention from women, will it be because of my physical state? Will that anger me, make me question what was wrong with me before? Sure I'm not very comfortable in myself right now, but a lot of it comes from the fact that society has imposed upon me that I big and ugly. In any case it's a moot point since I need to loose weight to survive. There are several disorders in the family, and none are helped by being overweight.

 

[WillsBabe]

I have a terrible "relationship" with food. I've always been plump or just slightly overweight, but when I started to diet, in my early 20s, my attitude to food changed. Ever since then I have battled with my weight, with my relationship with food, with my body image and self-esteem. I am totally screwed up with the whole thing. It's beginning to define me. I'm in my 40s and have been struggling 20 odd years with this "issue". I now measure events not by the years they happened but by the weight I was at the time, the size of my clothes, whereabouts I was in the cycle of weight loss/gain. I wish it were a switch I could turn off and go back to being "normal".

 

[KimMH]

I'm an emotional eater. I haven't always been but I developed into one around when I was 11-12 years old or so, during the period when I was being bullied heavily. I've struggled with it ever since, as I have with the overweight I've had ever since.

I'm finally started to get to grips with it now that I've ended completely with crisps and get on the training bike for 25 minutes every day unless it's been a really physical day at work. It take a lot of effort though to maintain because of the emotional eating aspect. Right now things are hard to say the least for our family and it takes a lot of effort to not comfort myself with a cheap taste bag of crisps. But I do not want to be fat all my life.

I've thought about how it will be when I finally get thin again. If I get attention from women, will it be because of my physical state? Will that anger me, make me question what was wrong with me before? Sure I'm not very comfortable in myself right now, but a lot of it comes from the fact that society has imposed upon me that I big and ugly. In any case it's a moot point since I need to loose weight to survive. There are several disorders in the family, and none are helped by being overweight.

That made me angry too - wondering why I didn't merit a second glance when I was large. Being overweight seems to be the last group it is still okay to make fun of.

Another thing I discovered as a girl (well, an old one now!) is that I felt safer when I was larger - like I could shield myself from the world a little and like I was less approachable - if that makes any sense. Not that I could ever fight my way out of a paper sack, but I only discovered I had been carrying that illusiopn around in my head once it was gone. I still wear glasses instead of contacts for the "face shield" Shields up!

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I have never had an eating disorder myself, however I've known quite a few people who have.

My wife used to be bulimic, although she had other issues, so the bulimia subsided as she had the underlying problems addressed. It's not a problem for her now.

I had a girlfriend once who was terribly bulimic. She was way too thin and just couldn't seem to help herself--every time she ate, she'd go throw it back up, like clockwork. I tried to be patient and tried to support her getting help, but in reality she didn't want help. She staunchly believed she was fat, and would hear nothing else. We didn't work out because it just completely ran her life. I couldn't compete with that, and I can't help someone who doesn't think they have a problem.

I also had a friend whose daughter was bulimic. Like my wife, she suffered from many other issues. She was on medication for bipolar disorder, which caused her to gain weight, which gave her image problems, and it spiraled into bulimia. She eventually quit throwing up but she kept binging, to the point of weighing over 300 pounds by age 14. Last I heard, she was getting a gastric bypass done.

I think people underestimate the power of the behavior involved, and think it's purely a matter of self-control. You have to think of it more like addiction and other coping mechanisms. The behavior becomes very integral to how you deal with life, and it can be exceedingly difficult to break the pattern. It is often impossible without dedicated, outside assistance.

 

[Emher]

I'm an emotional eater. I haven't always been but I developed into one around when I was 11-12 years old or so, during the period when I was being bullied heavily. I've struggled with it ever since, as I have with the overweight I've had ever since.

I'm finally started to get to grips with it now that I've ended completely with crisps and get on the training bike for 25 minutes every day unless it's been a really physical day at work. It take a lot of effort though to maintain because of the emotional eating aspect. Right now things are hard to say the least for our family and it takes a lot of effort to not comfort myself with a cheap taste bag of crisps. But I do not want to be fat all my life.

I've thought about how it will be when I finally get thin again. If I get attention from women, will it be because of my physical state? Will that anger me, make me question what was wrong with me before? Sure I'm not very comfortable in myself right now, but a lot of it comes from the fact that society has imposed upon me that I big and ugly. In any case it's a moot point since I need to loose weight to survive. There are several disorders in the family, and none are helped by being overweight.

That made me angry too - wondering why I didn't merit a second glance when I was large. Being overweight seems to be the last group it is still okay to make fun of.

Another thing I discovered as a girl (well, an old one now!) is that I felt safer when I was larger - like I could shield myself from the world a little and like I was less approachable - if that makes any sense. Not that I could ever fight my way out of a paper sack, but I only discovered I had been carrying that illusiopn around in my head once it was gone. I still wear glasses instead of contacts for the "face shield" Shields up!

Yeah that makes me mad to no end, and will likely for the rest of my life, the fact that it's okay to joke about overweight people. Nowadays when I'm more secure in myself I tell people to fuck off if they do that in front of me.

Some irony for you: I have a friend who's a martial arts practitioner, he knows several different ones. When he was for the interview for the mandatory military service (which isn't that mandatory anymore, but anyway) he was told that he was not allowed in since he was considered to knowledgeable about how to kill people Anyway this guy has said that he does not want to fight me ever, since I could use my weight against him. However I trust I could handle myself if I lost weight. Maybe not against him, but against random folk who may pick a fight.

Otherwise I feel very vulnerable in my big body. Sure I'm a tall guy who's pretty imposing, but I still feel exposed in my body. Ironically not when I go swimming for some reason. As for glasses, I'll still wear those if I'm thin. These days I look okay without them, but I'm kinda used to them. And I don't really like contacts. I did grow my beard at first to look thinner. But now that I've had it for quite some time and maintain it properly I think I'd keep it when thin as well.

 

[trampledamage]

Thankfully it never developed into an eating disorder for me, but I did have image issues when I was younger. Thanks to parents always making comments about my weight I was very unhappy about how I looked, and thought I was fat even when in hindsight I can see that I lost a lot of weight and was actually thin!

Nowadays I'm much heavier than I was then, but also much happier and I feel much better about myself. So for me, I equate being thin with being unhappy, and being fat with being happy... go figure

 

[thestrangequark]

Some of you have shared such personal information, thank you for sharing.
It is interesting to me, as someone who has suffered from eating disorders for more than half her life, hoe much misinformation (which often informs very judgemental attitudes and behavior) there is about eating disorders. For example, how little they really have to do with being thin.

I have a terrible "relationship" with food. I've always been plump or just slightly overweight, but when I started to diet, in my early 20s, my attitude to food changed. Ever since then I have battled with my weight, with my relationship with food, with my body image and self-esteem. I am totally screwed up with the whole thing. It's beginning to define me. I'm in my 40s and have been struggling 20 odd years with this "issue". I now measure events not by the years they happened but by the weight I was at the time, the size of my clothes, whereabouts I was in the cycle of weight loss/gain. I wish it were a switch I could turn off and go back to being "normal".

This post really hit a nerve, because for most of my life I had no idea what it meant to be "normal." Although I was a healthy weight, very active, and pretty adorable ( ) as a child, I've had body image issues (for lack of a better term) since I can remember. I first suffered abuse at the age of 2, and I suspect that much of it stems from that, but it was all exacerbated at 12 when I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Suddenly my whole life had to revolve around food -- it's no wonder nearly 80% of type 1 diabetic girls develop eating disorders.

Then, a couple of years ago -- I don't know what happened -- all the obsessive thoughts about food, exercise, control, just disappeared. Literally overnight, it was like that "switch" was flipped and suddenly I was "normal." It lasted for about 4 months and I was in the best health of my life; my blood sugars were under pristine control. I've tried to figure out what happened, but none of the doctors or psychiatrists I've seen seem to have any interest in discovering what was going one -- that is, when they even believe me.

I am a very smart person. I wonder what brilliant, creative thoughts I'm missing out on when I can't stop thinking about calories, food, control. Some days it seems that's all my thoughts are about. I want to get better, and have been more open about this over the past few months.

 

[Sephiroth]

sorry, I had to