Waking Up

This used to be a fairly tragic experience. In fact over the years, my ED has usually given me the worst start to the day.

In the beginning my eating disorder was intrinsically linked to my weight. I WAS A WOMAN OBSESSED.  I would wake up in the morning and rush to the scales with excitement, as I hadn’t eaten much the day before. I would then repeatedly weigh myself throughout the day. Looking back, I had been on a diet and viewed certain/entire food groups negatively. Like pasta and bread. I never thought I was putting myself on a diet for life, but looking back, that’s what was occurring. If you’re also doing that then STOP. I know it sounds hard. But really, are you trying to eat nothing for the rest of your life?

I was constantly trying to eat nothing to make up for a ‘bad day’ the day before. I used to con myself into believing that if I did a few days of eating nothing, then my body weight would be ‘right’ and at that point I would begin eating normally. This is the WORST thing you can do. No wonder I got to the point in a day (like any normal person that hasn’t eaten) where I felt so low physically that I was rushing to eat. And of course as soon as I had one bite of a forbidden food (which to be honest was nearly everything) I would forfeit all self discipline and think it was fine to go absolutely crazy and eat till my body literally couldn’t keep the food down and I could hardly walk to the toilet.

 It’s crazy, it’s shameful and quite frankly pretty disgusting but I learned to live with it. In fact more than that, I learned to feel like it was a normal part of my behavior and scheduled it into my daily routine. At the start I remember feeling happy if I woke up at 10/11 as it meant I’d already skipped breakfast for the day. However as time went on I became quite accepting of the fact that I would binge eat and purge that day. I remember once walking my boyfriend to work at 7:30 in the morning, knowing full well that I would return via the supermarket. That’s when my Bulimia Nervosa started to take a more dangerous spiral. I started having days where I would binge/purge binge/purge all day.

It sounds awful, and it was, it truly was. But the overeating and purging gave me such a high that I couldn’t seem to give it up. I felt all the problems of the world simply disappear as soon as I began shoveling food into my mouth.