An opportunity

Initially, I thought I would start this blog post with a warning. A warning that this may hit close to home, a warning that it might make you uncomfortable, or that it might stir up something inside you that you didn’t want to face - that it may bring up some triggering for you.

However, my intention for this isn’t to disrupt anything unwanted. I want this to be received in a way that can be seen as an opportunity. An opportunity to feel into what feels true for you, what resonates for you, what highlights parts of your life that have been left unattended to, whether it’s for you or a loved one. See it as an opportunity to recognise the power in yourself, that allows you to identify with certain themes or topics within this. Because the first step towards anything is recognition. Recognition of a dream, a gut feeling, or a pattern. Once recognised, they become more realistic, more tangible. And whether you’re ready to delve deeper into whatever has been recognised is irrelevant, but recognising it brings it into conscious awareness, where it can now sit for as long or short as necessary, until you’re ready to address this. Or maybe this post will just leave you feeling sorry for me, which I don’t want. I am incredibly strong and feel completely in my power here. Which is why I wrote this – I wrote this to give you a raw, unfiltered view into the mind of someone who had an eating disorder for an incredibly long time.

And if, even though it is not my intention, this is triggering for you, if it stirs something up that you know you cannot work through by yourself, I hope reach out. To me, or to someone you trust. Because my main intention for writing this is create awareness. To make sure people know they aren’t alone. Nothing in here will be sugar coated, because I found, even though I didn’t necessarily know it at the time, that the most constructive and developmental aspects of my healing came from myself and the people around me, being unapologetically real and upfront about it. I’m not here to glamorise eating disorders and mental health, I’m not going to beat around the bush with any of this, I’m here to be completely real in describing in my experience. I’m not going to go in to my experience with trauma, because I believe that is very individual to the person, and I cannot speak in to your trauma, nor can you in to mine. I can relate, but our experiences may still have been different. All I’m here to do is provide insight into the mind and happenings of someone who, for the better part of 10 years, struggled with what I thought was something quite normal, and even after I could acknowledge it was somewhat problematic, I still didn’t connect the dots between eating disorders and mental health. I did not believe, for a very long time, that I had mental health issues.

Full disclosure, this is the first time I have ever expressed how this was for me in an unfiltered manner. For the sake of protecting my loved ones from the burdens I went through, some of the detail in this post has never left my mind. I consider this another step in my healing. If you are someone who I hold close to my heart, know that my ability to share so openly about this now is entirely because of the support you have shown me. Because of the strength you have instilled in me. Because of your unwavering and unconditional love. Like truly unconditional love. I am very aware of the distress this experience put on a lot of you. And I am so deeply sorry. I will be forever grateful and in debt to you.
And that’s why writing this feels important. To acknowledge where I was, and where I am. To become someone who people feel like they can relate to, in the hope that I will shed light on this horrible dis-ease. Maybe it will help you to better understand yourself. Maybe it will help you to better understand the darkness one can enter, which may directly or indirectly help you to support someone you know struggling through something similar.

In hindsight, I would say that my distorted relationship with food began in high school, pretty early on, though at the time it just seemed like a phase a lot of the girls were going through, something somewhat ‘normal’ for some people. I know now that it was a terrible societal customisation, a pressure or expectation to look or be a certain way that came with entering high school, and is far from what we should be considering normal, but it was there nonetheless. I would go entire school days without eating any food, and then tell my parents I had eaten so much at school that I felt too full to finish my dinner. I felt like sometimes there was this competition with how little we ate at school - I remember a conversation as clear as if it was yesterday when a girl my age was saying she only ate one apple and half a warp the day before. Was this the new goal? I didn’t know, but I aspired to eat less anyway. However, had you have asked me when my eating disorder began 5 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have had the same answer. Instead, it would have been something like this.

I remember the first time I ever made myself sick. I remember the meal I ate, who I was with, and even what house I was in. I could say I remember the feeling of it, but maybe that’s because over the years, what started as potentially just an ‘experimental’ one off, quickly became an every day occurrence for me. I don’t remember the deeper layer of thoughts behind it, I don’t remember if I ate that meal with the intention of purging it. But I do remember being in the toilet purging like it was a completely normal thing to do.

I didn’t recognise where it was coming from – to be completely honest, I didn’t think what I was doing was problematic. And 3 years later when I was very deep in it, I still didn’t think it was an issue.
Bulimia, for me, started out as something I would do occasionally – like if I over ate, or if I ate then just didn’t feel like feeling full, I would just go and purge. It felt easy and simple. Eat, feel full. Purge, feel empty. Nothing else to it.

Wrong.

Between 2015 and 2017, I would say I had, for lack of a better word, ‘casual bulimia’. I wasn’t purging every day, but upon reflection I guess it was slowly increasing over time. The diagnostic criteria for bulimia is purging once a week consecutively for 3 months. That part was true for me. Had it have been less than once a week, I would have been labelled as someone with ‘bulimic tendencies’. Still, I didn’t think it was an issue. It was just a thing I did. I had no shame or guilt attached to it. It’s not like I was going around telling people, I was just doing it regardless, without thinking about the fact other people were likely aware, and likely very uncomfortable.

I had reached out to a few really beautiful and supportive friends. One of whom was, or had been, going through something similar, and the other had a sister who was going through the same thing. I don’t know whether that felt alarming for me, that within my immediate circle there were other people experiencing this, or whether it felt comforting. Perhaps it was both. I think maybe I was able to recognise that this potentially was an issue I needed to deal with, but I wasn’t convinced that I was at the point of needing to seek professional help. I guess in sharing it with some close friends, I believed that was all I needed to do – acknowledge that it was there, and move on.

In 2017, my beautiful partner, now husband, and I left to move overseas with two of our closest friends. The trip of a lifetime. It truly was, I will be eternally grateful for that experience for more reasons than I can count. One of the biggest being, it really shed light on just how fucked up my eating disorder had become.

Not long after we left the country, things began to escalate and morph. I went from purging once or twice a week to purging every day. And if I wasn’t able to purge every day (which was often, because we were living in a van at the time), then I just wouldn’t eat. Except maybe some pretzels, because that didn’t feel like eating. So I guess you could say there was also some anorexic / restrictive tendencies there.

I very quickly become addicted to feeling ‘empty’ in a physical sense. Though I wasn’t aware of this at the time, if you consider that on more of an emotional level, it makes a hell of a lot more sense, and points towards a much deeper issue than just not feeling like having any food sitting in my stomach. But here I was, completely naïve and thinking I was just absolutely thriving off feeling empty.

And I truly thought I was thriving – I felt light, energetic, care free. And of course living overseas probably added to those feelings of joy, and not just because I was living overseas. But because I was living away from the root cause of it all. Free from burden, guilt, and all the other much more complex emotions that maybe I’ll go in to another time. At this stage, I was pretty sure I was fooling everyone, that no one knew about my secrete weapon to feeling care free and without the ‘weight’ of the world. I thought that the people I had initially confided in probably didn’t know it was still a thing. Maybe they thought I was better, or at least that’s what I told myself.

We lived overseas from April 2017 until November 2019, and during that time frame things got pretty out of control – however, if you had of asked me at that time if my life was looking how I wanted it to look, if I felt in control of of it all, I would have answered with ‘yes, my life is wonderful’. And I would have been sure of that.

I went from purging once a week, to every day, to every meal. And if I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to purge, I didn’t eat, said I wasn’t hungry even when I was.

Bulimia brain took over my every thought. My entire day became planned around when I could and couldn’t purge. Was I going to be able to eat and purge discretely? Were there bathrooms close by? If both of those questions were answered with ‘no’, then I didn’t eat. Or, I just did it anyway. I quite literally had no shame around it. It’s not that I didn’t care if people did or didn’t know, or hear me, it’s just that in the moment between eating and purging that thought didn’t cross my mind. There was only one thing on my mind, and it was getting out whatever I had just put in me. And if, for whatever reason, I couldn’t purge after eating, even if it had been a small meal, even if it was a slice of toast, I became over ridden with what I now can identify as guilt and anxiety – at the time, I was just an autopilot. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t think at all, aside from thinking about what wasn’t coming out of me. The act of purging after a meal became second nature. I assume that sometimes I probably didn’t even feel ‘full’ or like I had over eaten. I probably could have sat quite comfortably with the food in terms of the size of what I ate, heck, I was probably still hungry half the time. But that was irrelevant. The purge happened regardless.

It’s incredible to witness the strength of the mind when it is determined to stay in control after seemingly feeling out of control for so long. Not an hour went by every day where I wasn’t planning or at least thinking about eating and purging. It seemed like every waking thought I had was, if not directly, indirectly linked to food. I wouldn’t go as far, at this point of the journey, to say I was binging and purging. Because I wasn’t binging. I was barely eating one meal a day, but still purging every time I consumed something.

I was completely unaware of my physical form, which was decreasing in size and shape drastically, and who even knows what was going on internally at that point. Yet somehow, I functioned. I would say that initially, it was never about the physical form for me. I didn’t have a goal weight, I barely ever weighed myself during this time period, and definitely didn’t own scales. I wasn’t measuring my thighs, or the flatness of my belly like so many others with eat disorders do, I wasn’t constantly looking in the mirror and definitely wasn’t attached to being a certain size. To this day, I’m not sure how I managed to do all the things we did. We hiked up and down the Grand Canyon, and all through out America’s national parks - sometimes we were hiking for 9 or 10 hours a day, and I was doing so on next to no food. Some people have said maybe I just have a strong constitution. And maybe I do. But more than that, I think it is to do with the power of the mind. What’s that saying … ‘mind over matter’? I feel like that’s relevant here. It’s as if I had tricked me body into being able to run off literally nothing. I didn’t feel abnormally tired, in fact quite the opposite. I felt happy, I felt confident. I felt like I was thriving. And that is a true aspect of having an eating disorder. Because I was always small in size, even before this, and my body very quickly adapted to being able to run off nothing. They’ve done scientific experiments based around starving people, where they restrict them to a certain amount of calories per day, people of all different shapes and sizes. And some people enter psychosis within a week, where as others have been able to live a completely normal life. That was me - doing all the things I would have normally done and not noticing a shift in my energy.

Fast track to being in Mexico with a group of close friends, and that’s when I would say things became the worst they had ever been. There were some days where I couldn’t even keep an apple down. Where I would be cooking food for other people, shaking because my body needed it so badly, but I knew that whether or not I chose to consume it, it wasn’t staying in me. We travelled throughout Central America and I know there were a few times when my friends tried to intercept a purge – they came to the toilet with me, or asked to come in to the bathroom while I was ‘showering’ – but it didn’t stop me. I was determined.

Everyone else was staying on in Mexico, while I was about to embark on a solo mission back to Guatemala to do my yoga teacher training. I had just arrived at Lake Atitlan when I received a message from one of my dearest friends who I had just departed from not 24 hours ago. I don’t remember the exact message, but I do remember how it made me feel. A message that’s roots were deeply imbedded in love and concern, felt to me like a attack. How dare they say this now, when I’m all by myself in a completely unfamiliar place. I felt completely misunderstood, like there was absolutely no way they had the right to say anything to me. I was defensive of my situation, despite having just spent a few months sharing airbnbs and hostels with these people who definitely knew that after each meal, I wasn’t taking myself off to the bathroom to pee. I was still convinced that I didn’t need help, that I was in control of the situation. Not that I wanted to at the time, because addiction isn’t like that, but I had myself believing that I could just stop it if I wanted to. That if I woke up the next day and had decided I didn’t want to have bulimia, that would be the end of it.

It’s interesting when someone reaches out –  to show love for you, to try and make you aware that you are worthy of health, of feeling loved, of feeling important – how the body and mind respond when, without knowing, you have been battling the opposite of those feelings all your life. After this text, I jumped in to a 28 day intensive 200hr yoga teacher training with a group of women I didn’t know, in a place that wasn’t familiar. And for the first time, though at the time I didn’t admit it or necessarily know the depth of it, I was able to witness how this had gotten out of control. At any given time curing my yoga teacher training, I think nearly every other student commented on how much I eat and how tiny I was. They asked where I put it, amazed at the size of my appetite.

I had zero conscious thoughts around eating and purging. It had turned to binging. I was intentionally eating 3 far too large meals a day, and then popping off in to the forest to purge. Every meal I ate, I consumed more than what was comfortable for me, and then bought it straight back up. It was such an automatic response in my body, I think even if I consciously tried to stop the act of purging, I wouldn’t have been able to. It was too deeply ingrained in me now that eating food led to purging. There wasn’t another option for me. One way or another, no matter what situation I was in, it was going to happen. This was the point where my body started to react physically. I was doing 4 hours of vinyasa a day, on top of sequencing training and theoretical lectures, and there was one morning where I just couldn’t get up for class. My body was so tired.

By the time I got to Canada in November, where my partner and two closest friends (one of which was the soul that sent me the message when I arrived in Guatemala) were waiting for me, and where we would be living for the foreseeable future, my kids size 12 thermals, that I had bought in March that year, were now baggy on me.

I don’t remember exactly when this conversation came, but I assume it was a few weeks, maybe a month or two, after I arrived in Canada. Long enough for my partner, along with the two friends we had spent the most time with over the last few years, to notice how much my condition had spiralled. I’m sure they had conversations about it while I was there, I don’t know, but what I do know is that I will never forget these words. And not because they hurt me, but because I knew why they were said, and I knew they accurately described where I was. In as gentle a way as possible, knowing that being direct was the only way forward, my partner told me that he no longer found me physically attractive. And I knew that it wasn’t because he thought I was ugly, I knew his vision of me hadn’t become distorted. I knew exactly why he didn’t find me attractive anymore – because my body resembled that of a small child. I don’t know if it was around the same time, I assume it was, I stood on some scales for the first time in years, and the number 36 came up. At 22 years old, I weighed 36kg. I went through puberty early, and I think it is a accurate for me to say that I looked more “womanly” at 12 than I did at 22. There was absolutely no way I could blame my partner for feeling the way he did.

And so at that point, with a gentle nudge from my dearest darlings, I decided to do counselling. I’m sure it was a sigh of relief for all of them. Like they finally had given me enough gentle encouragement and reassurance to make me see where I was, and want to get help. And half of that was true. I did see where I was, and I did want to get help. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to get help for myself. It was for their sake. To make them feel better. To take some of the burden off them. Don’t get me wrong, there was a part of me that knew maybe this would be it, maybe by sitting with a counsellor, I would see the hurt, the pain, the suffering I had experienced in my life, caused for myself, and caused for those around me.

 
To a certain extent, I did see all of that. I was able to recognise it. For the first time ever, I could recognise that I did have A LOT of emotional trauma behind this. That my ‘why’ or ‘how’ wasn’t purely based on wanting to feel physically empty, it was actually more rooted in wanting to feel emotionally empty, of not wanting to feel my emotions, the negative ones, at all. After a lifetime of having to deal with emotions that I didn’t feel safe to express, that I felt guilt around even having, I became addicted to being able to indulge in the physical act of purging, which was actually an act to provide me with a sense of emotional relief. Of being free from years of pent up emotion. And I started to notice patterns. While majority of the time I was just purging because that was the way it had been for so long, I started to notice that sometimes when work felt stressful, or there was an uprising of emotion, I would very intentionally binge and purge. In general and regardless of my mood, I was eating and purging, and then on top of that I was beginning to feel my feelings for the first time in a long time, which led to binging and purging. It was a trap. I was purging when I felt fine, when I wasn’t feeling distressed, anxious, sad or guilty, and then I was binging and purging when I was feeling any of those and more.

I sat with a counsellor for 6, maybe 8 sessions, while we were in Canada. And while often there was an entire session filled with me crying, I think deep down I was still convinced I didn’t really have a problem, or at least one worthy of help. And so, 6 or 8 weeks later, I had my counsellor convinced that I was fine. That I had the tools to move forward from here. And this made me really angry at first, because she was a professional and how did she not see through whatever I was and wasn’t telling her? I straight away assumed that she mustn’t have been a very good counsellor if she couldn’t understand that I wasn’t okay. Could she not read my mind? This was likely the first time, when I realised I had made someone truly believe I was fine despite telling them little snippets of where I was, that I was aware of the fact I was sick.

However, despite acknowledging I was sick during this time period, I realised that actually, it was me that was convinced I was fine. And I was bought back to the fact that I never went to her because I thought I had a problem, I went to her because my loved ones thought I had a problem. This was just my normal. And I think the deeper roots of that were that I didn’t feel worthy of her help. I didn’t feel like my problem was big enough. I had been exposed, and intentionally exposed my self to, a lifetime of experiencing people with less than me. Less opportunity, less food, less money, less love, so how could I sit comfortably with having anything? How could I allow someone to help me when, despite the fact that I was not far from being hospitalised, I had more than so many people in the world?

I don’t know whether it was a combination of all these things or just one main thing, but I was so sure that I didn’t need help, didn’t want help, didn’t deserve help, that I had managed to convince myself that I was fine. That I could carry on this way and be fine, live a full, healthy life.

By now, all rationale thought had left me, and I was feeling like a complete outsider. Like no one understood me, and no one ever would. I felt isolated in my thoughts, all while trying to move through emotions I hadn’t let arise before. I lost all my confidence, I hurt a lot of people. It was just me, my thoughts, and my bulimia. Of course I still had incredibly happy moments, I still had my partner by my side, unwavering in his ability to love me no matter what, but the darkness was becoming more and more prevalent. And I still thought I was fine otherwise. I hated when friends approached me out of concern, it made me angry, and I wanted the conversation to end. Because I wasn’t able to, or just wasn’t ready, to articulate just how deep the addiction ran. How it seemed impossible for me to have a life without bulimia. It’s not that I didn’t want to have a life without bulimia – I did, my body was getting tired, deeply tired, and not the kind of tired that you ca sleep off after a few days, a tiredness that was in my bones. But I could not comprehend how it would ever be possible for me to not have bulimia in my life. It had become an every day coping mechanism for me.

At some point between the end of our Canada trip, and landing back at home, it finally occurred me that I was sick, and probably getting sicker. I would say the purging had decreased a bit, I definitely felt like I was making some progress. But I still had such distorted and restricted views on eating. My relationship with food was entirely based on negativity. I was aware that people actually DID need food to survive, and that I actually did look sick, like all the girls I didn’t want to end up looking like. But I still couldn’t see myself being any other way. Eating disorder brain is one of the most powerful things I have ever witnessed.

And don’t get me wrong, I was still convinced that my body didn’t actually need food to run, despite acknowledging the need for food. I began to think I was a special case. I didn’t loose my period, I still had energy, I could still do everything I had always been able to do, but I was becoming more and more aware of the potential future ramifications of not dealing with these emotions, and not addressing the physical side of things. And I guess I was trying – trying to eat more, trying to feel more, to express more openly. And I really do feel like that was helping. But I was foolish to think it was that easy.

I became pretty scared of what my future might look like – one riddled with physical ramifications from starving myself or at the very least restricting what I was eating for the last 10 years. 10 of the most crucial developmental years. I knew, after studying human biology, what could and likely would happen. And even though that scared me into trying to make changes, it was far from easy. Every time I had a slip up, I felt so ashamed of myself that it just led to more slip ups. A spiral every time. It took a very long time for me to be able to be gentle with myself every time I had a relapse. To be able to cradle little Mo and say ‘it’s okay, you don’t have to let that turn this into a relapse, this was never going to be a quick fix’.

Recently, I was talking about this topic with my Vedic meditation teacher, which was actually my main inspiration around writing this, and within that conversation it dawned on me just how long the ‘recovery’ process is. It took me years, after purging every day, every meal, to be able to break the habit of even purging once a week. And if we revisit the diagnostic criteria of bulimia – being that someone is classified as being bulimic if they purge once a week consecutively for 3 months – then I would say I was bulimic right up until I was 25. And just because I no longer fit the diagnostic criteria, didn’t mean that I didn’t have slip ups.

I would be lying to myself, and to all of you, if I said that my healing journey was over. I’m certain that I’m not where I want to be yet. I still struggle with sluggish digestion especially around certain foods, infrequency in bowel movements, imbalanced vitamin and mineral levels and all the other realities that are present after a decade without proper nourishment. I still struggle to eat 3 meals a day comfortably – as in, without feeling full or bloated. And I’m okay with that. I have been retraining my brain to remember that full and bloated are two very different things, and that being full is a gift. Nourishing my body to the point where she feels satisfied and full is a beautiful thing, not something to feel guilty about. I am very aware that it will take time because for an entire decade, nearly one third of my life, I didn’t have to digest anything. My body had quite literally forgotten how to digest. And she does pretty well, in fact I think she’s an absolute star given what we’ve been through together, but there’s still work to be done.

On top of that, I’m not sure the mental component of having such a severe eating disorder will ever go away. I am still very aware of the old, residual thought patterns. Sometimes, still to this day, I quite literally have to take myself to a bathroom mirror and remind myself that I am worthy of this nourishment, that I need it to thrive, that I deserve it. Perhaps once every 3 or 4 months these little pep talks happen – and I’m not sure if these intimate little mirror moments will ever not be a part of my life. And that’s okay. Obviously it would be great if they weren’t necessary – and for the most part, they aren’t, but I’m okay that they’re here, because they remind me of my strength. Of the fact that I have been able to retrain my brain, to break down those thought patterns, to feel emotion and express it in a healthy way.

Now I’m here. At 28 I feel fuller in more ways than I can count, and it’s incredible. Life feels full in all the right ways, and I’m eternally grateful for it. Having become a qualified Ayurvedic practitioner and cook has me dreaming more that I ever have before, actually allowing myself to realise that the sky IS the limit when it comes to the opportunities I have to create, to serve, to love. And while I’m not yet 100% certain where my line of work will take me, right now I feel incredibly passionate about this work. About helping people who have been on, or are still on, similar journeys. Because there’s power in experience. One thing I constantly wished when I was in the depths of my eating disorder was that someone else could understand it. Understand the lack of control, how automatic the act of purging is, how half the time it didn’t even feel intentional, I didn’t even have a conscious thought around it, and then I would be smacked with a wave of guilt and shame after purging.

And so my reasoning for writing this post, for being completely blunt and honest, for not sugar coating any of it, is because for the first time in my life I can see a life without bulimia. It’s taken more than a decade for me to be able to see this. And I truly believe from the bottom of my heart that it is absolutely integral for people to understand how deep these levels of dis-ease run in the body. I hope this post can inspire people, can educate people, can help people feel understood. I really encourage anyone and everyone to reach out, whenever they feel ready, to openly discuss these things we go through as humans. We are nothing without connection and understanding. I want to take the taboo element out of this conversation. Humanity needs to be able to get comfortable with the uncomfortableness of this.

I could write a book thanking each individual that has helped me get to where I am today. Literally, it would take me forever. There were so many people that played an integral role in this journey – from those being on a similar journey who I could share the burden with, to those with next to no idea about eating disorders, but willing to be there to learn. But I know that each and every one of you know who you are. If I’ve spoken to you about this journey already, then you can count yourself as one of those vital to my journey. Because at some point, you provided me with a safe container to freely express emotion and what this has been like for me. And that above all else, was the most integral part of the journey so far.