How did I get here? Here’s a snapshot of my rocky history with abusing food. What I now fully appreciate beyond a shadow of a doubt — eating disorders do not just away. There are no life events or external motivations, like going to college, landing a job, getting married, having a baby, that can “fix” chronic, maladaptive behaviors. I fell into the trap of thinking, “When x happens, I’ll stop doing this…” Wrong.
Timeline of Chronic Eating Disorder
- 4th grade: become body conscious, teased for being chubby. Hyper aware of stomach being fat by this time, as old journal entries mention diets and sit up regimes, etc but never resulted in action or restriction.
- 7th grade: growth spurt, thinned out naturally, experienced the “high” of praise for losing weight, started accepting the messages internally that “smaller is better.” Attempted first purge out of curiosity, as I’d heard about it from peers and general culture.
- Rest of adolescence: specific binge/purge cycles as result of sporadic restricting, growing in intensity and frequency. Begin to seriously “play” with the manipulation of food and feelings later in high school. The secrecy, the ownership, the control….
- College: Full fledged anorexia freshman year, lose 40 pounds in a matter of months. Weight becomes questionable, but I maintain “good enough” through enough drinking and bingeing… Rest of college is extremely disordered eating.
- 2004-2014: up and down with food, weight always stable enough but still restricting, bingeing, purging. Sometimes vomiting multiple times a day…Peak activity was around 2007/ 2008 when living alone. By this point I’m an “adult” and feeling overwhelmingly embarrassed that I’m still making myself throw up. I don’t want to do this anymore but don’t understand why I’m too afraid to let it go. Failed therapy a couple times… lots of “talking” but not enough work to change behaviors.
- 2014-2015: Through CBT with a great social worker, achieve abstinence from purging and starving (not sobriety, though, as I remained fearful of forbidden foods and kept to a strict clean diet)
- 2015-2020: relatively stable with some controlled phases of higher/lower restriction and accompanying bingeing/purging. Never achieved normalcy with food but not controlled by it either.
- 2021 complete eating disorder relapse — restricting during the day, bingeing on a large dinner and purging at night. Once every couple weeks melting down and bingeing/purging on forbidden foods. It was only a matter of time before my white knuckled food “sobriety” was lost.
Tasting Freedom 