Bingeing & Purging to Stay Alive

I hear it so often. "I could never be bulimic. I hate throwing up." Yeah? Me too. I laugh every time because it implies I must have started purging because I have some weird fondness for throwing up. But that's not true. I don't like it, but that is practically irrelevant at this point. Bulimia is my addiction. I binge and purge because I feel an irreconcilable urge to do so. I never planned on making this my life; it just kind of turned out that way.

I spent the first six years of my eating disorder trying to convince myself I hated food. I considered it a sign of weakness to admit I was hungry or that I had any desire to eat. During those six years I secretly longed for the ability to make myself throw up. It is a sick thing to wish for but not entirely crazy when I considered what I thought to be the only alternative-depriving myself of any food I deemed "bad." If only I could purge, I could eat all the things I so rarely was able to enjoy. To the casual outsider, that is what bulimia is-"eating whatever you want and then throwing up." It is only those who have experienced both its glory and its horror who know that it is actually much more than that.

I quickly caught on to the mechanics of successful purging, and in the beginning, it was great. I started trying things I was always too afraid to try before. Food was fun again. I still remember the first time I ate an entire box of chocolate chip cookies. I stared in amazement at the empty box for a good five minutes. I was both horrified and fascinated all at once. I had just done what I never in a million years would have done before. But it was okay because I could get rid of it. Erase the guilt and go on as if it never even happened. I was going to be okay. Or so I thought.

Bulimia quickly took control of my life. School, friends, and anything that once meant something to me were now secondary to this new activity. Life now revolved around food-reading about it, looking at it, finding it, buying it, and bingeing and purging on it. I started rearranging my life to accommodate my obsession. Classes were no longer a priority. I went when I could tolerate sitting still for more than an hour. Homework and papers were something I did while waiting for food to cook, in between binge and purge sessions. I was late for everything. I always thought I could fit in just one more binge and purge before I left. I learned to be fairly quick when I needed to be, but usually not quick enough. Three-hour night classes were a nightmare. I tried to binge and purge quickly on the ten-minute break they gave us but almost always lost track of time. I got tired of walking into class late so I just stopped going.

The library was no longer a place to study but a place to purge when I felt too ashamed to purge in the dorm bathrooms again. I made at least two trips a day to the grocery store to stock up on more food. I quickly learned to vary the places I went as not to look too suspicious. At first I tried to hide it all from my roommates. I didn't want to binge in front of them so I was constantly stuffing my backpack full of food and carrying it around campus searching for new places to binge and purge in private. When people asked me why my bag was always so full I told them it was full of books and I was on my way to the library. They believed it for a while.

Soon it became too much to hide and I decided I didn't care anymore who saw me bingeing. I openly binged in my room in front of my roommate. I stayed up all night on my computer, getting up sometimes eight or nine times to purge. She knew what I was doing but didn't know what to say. It was soon so common that it was not awkward at all. We even joked about it. She saw me coming in with armloads of groceries and knew it is going to be a busy night.

I was constantly exhausted and tired but there was no time to sleep. I thought every binge and purge would be the last one of the night but it never was. I started to judge the quality of my purging by how dizzy and shaky I felt afterwards. If I felt fine I must not have purged everything. I would eat something to keep from fainting, but nine times out of ten this just led to another binge and purge session. The cycle repeated itself until I was literally too tried to stay awake. Sleep was the only welcome interruption.

I quickly started losing contact with friends. I made excuses as to why I couldn't go out when really I was just too afraid to be away from the one thing I had come to both crave and despise. When I did go out I felt unbearably anxious and uncomfortable and couldn't wait to get back to the familiarity of bingeing and purging. At the end of my junior year my roommate and once best friend decided to stop talking to me. She told me she couldn't live with me anymore. The same girl who watched it all happen and laughed about it with me was now leaving. I hated her for it but at the same time understood and wondered why she didn't do it sooner.

The things that would have once repulsed me no longer did. I refused to start shoplifting food like so many bulimics do, so I had to learn to be creative about finding cheap or free food. I never turned down food offers. I used to take advantage of campus events where I knew food would be provided. Food left lying around or even in the trash suddenly didn't look so bad.

I was always hungry because I didn't allow myself to keep much down without purging. Eating a normal meal was too complicated. Somehow, bingeing and purging all day became easier than eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Why drive myself insane trying to find something to eat that I won't feel guilty about when I could just eat whatever I wanted and then purge? I became obsessed with food. When I wasn't buying or bingeing on food I was reading about it, looking at pictures of it, dreaming about it. My idea of normal was extremely skewed. I knew this and yet I couldn't seem to think any other way.

I longed for restriction. I missed the days when I could easily control what I ate. I missed being able to survive on minimal food. I still craved feeling completely empty, only now I could only achieve that through purging. Anorexia was definitely its own nightmare. I got to a dangerously low weight of 62 lbs. while anorexic. I was constantly tired, weak, and hungry. I was left almost completely isolated from the outside world. Despite all of this, I still found bulimia more debilitating. Anorexia was clean, quiet, and simple. Bulimia was messy, loud, and complicated. I used to be neat and organized in everything I did. I had the perfect bedroom, the perfect grades, and a seemingly perfect life. Bulimia left no room for organization. I dreaded the post- binge and purge clean up because I knew things would never stay clean for long. I filled up two large garbage bags every night. The carpet around and under my desk was ruined with food stains and my computer had been spilled on so many times there were several keys missing. I had to be careful not to get puke on my shoes. "Aim straight to avoid splash-back," I told myself.

Everything would be done "right after this purge." A lot of people describe experiencing a "high" right after purging. For me it was usually right after the binge and before the purge. I had this idea of the purge being the end of the madness and thus once it was over, all would be well. It was almost a manic feeling right after a particularly out-of-control binge. I felt larger than life, like I could accomplish anything just as soon as I purged. The purging would cleanse and empty me in such a way that I'd feel renewed and full of potential. I'd finally be able to write that paper, clean my room, whatever. I felt awful now, but all would be well just as soon as I purged. I continued to think this way even after learning otherwise. Everything would not get done "right after this purge" because "right after this purge" I usually felt even more miserable.

There is a common misconception that the act of purging is very straightforward. The movies make it look so simple. A girl eats an entire pizza, feels guilty, and then goes to bathroom and gets sick. All this takes place in a matter of minutes. Sometimes it was that simple, but most of the time it was much more laborious. I quickly learned that a simple heave or two wasn't going to cut it in terms of getting everything out. I was going to have to be more careful if I wanted to keep from gaining weight. I decided I needed to start weighing myself before bingeing and after purging in order to ensure I was emptying completely. I discovered the phenomenon of "rinsing" which is really just a term for drinking glasses of water and then purging over and over again until "rinsing clear." This is when I knew I was getting everything up-- or as much as I possibly could. Sometimes though, the scale refused to budge. When this happened, I would panic. How could there possibly still be stuff inside me when I just spent the past forty-five minutes purging? I started feeling unaccomplished until I was throwing up blood on a regular basis.

A couple years after I first started purging I also started cutting and burning myself. The first time I cut was in reaction to a very stressful event that left me scared and desperate for anything that might help me feel better. Oddly enough, cutting did make me feel better temporarily, just like bingeing and purging. I usually cut in response to a very intense emotion, usually anger or frustration. Watching the blood flow after cutting was strangely calming. Soon though, self-harming also became a form of self-punishment. Whenever I thought I said or did something foolish, or often in response to feeling guilty after bingeing and purging, I would burn myself with matches or hot curling iron. Just like the eating disordered behaviors, the positive effects of self-harming behaviors were short-lived. As soon as the initial feelings passed and I saw all the new scars I was creating I no longer felt like I did when I was actually hurting myself. I used to be very secretive about my self-harming. I was careful to always cover my scars and would make up one crazy excuse after another if people did happen to see them and ask how they happened. Over time I became less concerned with covering up, and I no longer went to great lengths to hide what I did. I now see my scars as artifacts of my past and mistakes to be learned from.

Today most of my friends are the people I met in hospitals or treatment centers. My best friend is also bulimic. I worry about her everyday. It hurts me that she is in such pain. It's not fair. She deserves to be happy and healthy. I want her to like herself. I want her to see what everyone else sees when we look at her. I'm mad she has to go through it at all and I'm upset I can't seem to do much to make it better. Her being self-destructive is not okay. I don't know why I hold myself to such different standards.

If this life is making me so miserable, why do I continue to live this way? Most people don't understand that eating disorders are about a lot more than food or wanting to be thin. There are hundreds of reasons why people develop eating disorders, or why they continue to deal with them for so long. It can take years of therapy to uncover all of the reasons. Often, eating disorder symptoms are used to cope with difficult events and situations. Bingeing and purging and self-harming have become my most frequently used "solutions" to problems. I turn to them when I'm stressed, angry, sad, or anxious. They are very flawed coping mechanisms in that their effects are usually very short-lived. In treatment I have learned all about alternative coping skills, but somehow being self-destructive still seems like the most available option. I usually crave immediate as opposed to the long-term gratification, making the symptoms seem worth all of their accompanying side effects.

There are also those times when I felt like I was passively trying to kill myself by staying in my disorder. There have been periods in my life when I felt so defeated and hopeless that I was pretty certain I wanted to die. I was using the bulimia as a slow way to bring about my death. I no longer see my eating disorder in this way. It now feels like the only way I know how not to kill myself. Now I feel like I'm bingeing and purging to stay alive. Sometimes the urge is so strong that I feel like I'll literally collapse and die if I don't act on it. It makes no sense, but this has never been and never will be a logical illness.

There is ambivalence in recovery from any eating disorder or addiction. It is not as simple as just wanting to get better. Getting better comes with a whole slew of responsibilities and unknowns that often seem more daunting than staying sick. I am stuck. I am stuck between wanting to get out of this terrible place and clinging onto something I'm not sure I know how to live without.