| sksmap
Starting Member
1 Posts
Gratitude: 2
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 Posted - 05/04/2006 : 11:42:20
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Hey Callie,
I am 39 years old and have been dealing with bulemia for about 22 years.
I am married with two stepchildren. I don't have any of my own.
I have a wonderful husband and two great kids. I was always heavy all through school, (125-135). I am 5'1". I remember the first time I ever made myself throw up. I have been doing it ever since.
I weigh right now, 110. I feel healthy, but I can only imagine what I have been doing to myself inside.
I hate what I am doing to myself, and tell myself that this will be the last time. I have gone a few weeks, and then I start again.
I told my parents about 3 years ago. I found out at that time, that my mom was bulemic for about 7 years in her 40's. She is fine now.
Other than her, I don't have anyone to talk to, and I don't think that she wants to. Not that she doesn't love me or care, but I think it is a hard topic for her.
If you ever want to talk, you have my email.
I am sure we could probably help each other in someway or another.
Take Care. |
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| confused1 (inactive)
Starting Member
3 Posts
Gratitude: 2
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Posted - 07/21/2006 : 15:31:43
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hey callie,
your question is very difficult to answer, mainly because i have much of the same problem.
for me, i began to love myself more by looking at my interests, such as art. I realized, hey... i'm good at it.
i think that once u find a hobbie, fall in love with it, and become good at it, you will learn that you can be a success, and that you are worthy.
as for leaving your relationship, i don't think that that is a very good idea, because a relationship can tend to be the saving grace in someone that is depressed's life.
everyone deserves love, that is just what you have to realize |
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| Fleur (inactive)
New Member
60 Posts
Gratitude: 16
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Posted - 10/15/2009 : 00:07:57
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Dear Callie and others who may be interested in recovering from an eating disorder,
Last night I spent about an hour writing an email in response to your mail, but I had to use my husband's laptop since for some reason this computer would not link up. Then I did something wrong and the whole message vanished, so I quit. Now I am here again to try again.
I am new here, as you would have figured. I suffer major depression and an anxiety disorder. I used to suffer a serious eating disorder and alcoholism and an addiction to cannabis.
So maybe I can tell you what worked for me, and give you some hope that recovery is possible, even on your own, without going into treatment or paying a fortune to a psychotherapist I know this because this is how I recovered and I have helped others also, in particular a couple of years ago I helped the daughter of a close friend who had very severe anorexia and she is now totally fine. We corresponded by email for a year (she lived in neighbouring Namibia with her family) during which time she went from a phobic Belsen horror who could not stand up straight and weighed about 40kgs to a beautiful, sunny, upright, healthy woman who is now studying art at the university here in Cape Town, where I live.
So that is just to tell you that recovery is possible and brings with it untold freedom and best of all, a happy relationship with food and eating. Because as you will know when you are in the clutches of an eating disorder you really hate food but are totally obsessed by it, only the problem actually has absolutely nothing to do with food, food is just a symptom of underlying issues which can be unpacked and which can liberate one.
A bit of background first: I was always a slender child and had no food issues until I was sent to boarding school at age 12. Then followed 17 or so years of totally disordered eating. It went like this: overeating first at school and getting fat, then starving myself for weeks on end, and yo-yoing between these two conditions until, in utter desperation I reached out and over the course of about ten months, I recovered. Admitting you have a problem is a huge step, because the illness comes with terrible feelings of shame and also telling of lies which makes an already damaged sense of self worth even worse, and this makes it very hard to be honest with anyone about what is actually going on, particularly for bulimics who can often hide their issues from others.
The only reason I was able to seek any help was because we went to live in the UK and it felt safe there to reach out, safe because I was anonymous. I contacted the eating disorders association in the UK and they let me know that a self-help group had set up in the area in which we were living, so I joined the group which met once a week. It was just a bunch of women with eating disorders who spoke to each other no formal therapy. I would have liked to go to the Women's Therapy Center in London which was started by Susie Orbach, but I didn't have the money for private therapy. But is was really through Susie Orbach's writings that I managed to recover.
I did what I usually do when I have a problem: read everything that I can lay my hands on (and relate to) which can help make sense of things. So I read Orbach's 'Hunger Strike' and 'Fat is a Feminist Issue". I can assure you that these books change people's lives around, because they realise that eating disorders have nothing to do with food and that diets and dieticians do not work, actually they just make the whole thing worse by feeding the obsession with food. The girl i recently helped, K, was being taken weekly to a dietician by her parents and was seeing a therapist who was clueless about eating disorders. It took me months to persuade the parents to stop taking her to a dietician because every time she went and the dietician put her on the scale and she had put on a bit of weight, she would go home and starve to get it off again. Getting on the scale when you are trying to recover from an eating disorder is plain stupid. She soon stopped seeing the therapist also because she was helping her not at all.
I am not trying to suggest that therapy cannot help, only that this is a specialised area and, like with addiction, a therapist needs to have that specialist knowledge or therapy will not help.
The addictions are related to the eating disorders and food and drugs are both used to try and deal with other issues. Of course it doesn't work, because no amount of shoving food down your gullet is ever going to fill the black hole, and no amount of alcohol or drugging is ever going to cure the underlying problem. But I that we use these things in an attempt to self-medicate and that giving them up is very threatening, like telling a paraplegic to chuck away their wheelchair.
Susie Orbach, who by the way was Princess Diana's therapist, has written many other books since those 2 classics I mentioned and they will all be worth reading. There are others also. Like Kim Chernin's 'Womansize', Naomi Wolf's 'The beauty Myth', Louise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach's books they have written together, Geneen Roth (she is American has also edited women's stories which are moving and inspirational
So here's what I would do if I were you: get onto Amazon and order all these books. Contact the eating disorders association and ask them for any information about starting a group. These days there may be online groups also, but I think a closed group is essential for issues of trust. One woman in the group I belonged to did not say a word for about 7 months. She was being regularly raped by her father and uncle. The "treatment" she was getting was being sent to hospital and force fed to fatten her up. The the uncle and father would tell her she was looking beautiful. Then she would starve herself again, surprise surprise. The "treatment" for these disorders is disgraceful. I have a friend who is south African and a psychiatrist and head of a major eating disorders unit at a big London hospital. She herself has a serious eating disorder she has never addressed and "cures" her anorexic patients by force feeding them "to save their lives". Mostly they end up dying anyway or coming back in a few months time for another "cure".
I could go on and on, but one thing i can assure you is that you will be a million zillion billion times happier if you can get a handle on this thing, AND YOU CAN. You do not wasn't to pass this kind of stuff on onto children, so it is imperative to get better, not just for yourself, but for them also.
I still marvel that I am free now, that I can enjoy food, that there are no more verboten foods (an essential part of my cure was to stop thinking of any food as "bad"), and I am well and healthy. I will always be slender, but nothing abnormal. I still avoid the scale and still do not wasn't to be fat, but that I live with in a normal way.
I hope that I can help some. Recovering from eating disorders and from addiction is totally liberating, really awesome, and totally worth it.
I wish you well.
Fleur |
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looking for help
hopefully talk to you soon!
