Month: September 2016

My secret life with Bulimia, was just that, secret.  I could now carry on with life on the outside looking quite normal.  I maintained a healthy weight, was socially active, and did well in school.  My parents were elated.  Elated and Oblivious!

Keeping it secret was pretty much a full time job because as my disorder progressed, I could have episodes of it once, twice, or sometimes three times a day.  I had to binge in secret and I had to purge in secret.

The next part of the story is the hardest to tell (at least one of the hardest).

I started stealing money from my parents to buy some of the food I ate. They always had cash handy because they owned their own business and took money from the till home.  Also, I had to find places to purge. Sometimes I went out into the woods next to our house, sometimes I drove to woods, but if I could not get out of the house, I had to find ways to do it in my home without anyone knowing.  Many times I did it in the shower while the water was running.  Many times I purged in my room in a container.  This is how my parents finally found out what I was doing.  They found that container before I could flush the contents.

Once again, bulimia is not a known term in 1977.  My parents can not figure me out.  First they think that maybe I’m having trouble with alcohol and got sick.  But self-induced vomiting? They had never heard of such a thing.  Their response? Anger.

This was how my teenage bulimia looked like. Unfortunatly, it did not end there.

 

There is so much inner turmoil inside me about telling the rest of my story. Even now, after making the commitment to start and pay for this blog, I can almost talk myself out of it.

The only way to tell this story is to tell it with brutal honesty. I hope I have the guts.

My little reprieve from the symptoms of eating disorders did not last long. The pendulum swung the other way. Even now I can’t pinpoint the exact reason. I would love to have all the answers, but I don’t. I just know that this second wave totally took me down. That second wave was Bulimia.

Bulimia: Also called bulimia nervosa. An eating disorder characterized by episodes of secretive excessive eating (binge-eating) followed by inappropriate methods of weight control, such as self-induced vomiting (purging), abuse of laxatives and diuretics, or excessive exercise.

Yep, that’s the definition. Yep, that’s my secret. And this dirty little secret, unlike anorexia, will plague me for decades.

When I tell this part of my story, it’s probably the easiest for me to tell.  The first year and a half of my eating disorders, I was anorexic.  But as my sixteenth birthday approached, I started doing things socially outside of my family.  I had good friends at the time and I began to want to get better.  Up to that point I had been a straight A student who spent all her time studying for the perfect grades (probably another reason for my disorders).  Now I wanted to be normal.  I slowly started eating.

Through my junior year in high school, I WAS very normal.  I started looking healthy again.   Socially, boys were starting to notice me.  My parents were elated.  They thought that whatever that was, it was over.  No….It wasn’t over.  None of the things that caused this disorder had ever really been addressed.  I didn’t receive the help I so needed.  It was just dormant for a brief time.  The real storm was about to happen.