My disordered eating, part 2

I wrote fairly recently about my experience with anorexia. At the end of that piece, I hinted that after a while, the pendulum began to swing to the opposite side of the spectrum – and there is stayed for a number of painful years. I became a binge eater, and it took me a long time to recover from it.

It started when I was a child. I basically fucking loved sugar and couldn’t get enough of it – hardly remarkable. But there was this secrecy, which I don’t see in the children I have in my life. I’d steal money from mum’s purse to go and buy three chocolate bars, and would eat them one after another in quick succession. Sugar made me feel good.

In my late teens and twenties, I made many late night walks to 24 hour shops, where I would sneak out of wherever I was living or staying at the time, trying to shut the front door as soundlessly as possible so as not to wake people up, and walking to the only shop that was open late so I could buy ice cream, biscuits, chocolate, anything to fill myself to bursting, at a time when most of the people in the houses around me had their heads on a pillow. If the shops were closed, I’d go to the vending machine at the train station, where I could buy Yorkies, Mars Bars and Double Deckers regardless of the hour.

I remember traipsing supermarket aisles, staring longingly at all the foods that I could barely wait to shove inside me, driven by a deep urgent hunger, a hunger that was rarely physical (I went years feeling hungry all the time only to then go years without ever feeling legitimately hungry probably even once). The insatiable appetite pushed me to do what I’d done countless times, even though I knew from experience it would only end in one way. It would be different this time, my thoughts told me. This time, it really would make me feel good. I deserved this, I wanted this, I craved this and I needed it. The need was a driving, urgent, inescapable thing. It overpowered me more times than I can count, from as early at seven in the morning, often through to the early hours of the following day.

I’d be hyper-alert to the people around me, holding myself back, trying to restrain this monster inside me that wanted to put one arm on whatever shelf had the carbs and sugar on and just sweep everything into my basket. I imagined that people could see what I was up to, that I was, in other people’s days, one of those sad people who didn’t have a life beyond eating. I couldn’t let them see the full force of what was going on within me, that in some ways, I didn’t have much of a life beyond eating.

I felt like an animal, except that everything I wanted to tear into was sourced in artificially lit supermarkets and wrapped in layers of plastic. But I was also an animal that was tentative and nervous rather than wild and ferocious. I ate in secret bursts, fuelled by adrenaline and watching my back.

My memories are characterised by emotions that I write about often: shame, anxiety, and a profound sense of loneliness. I didn’t know how to get through the day without finding myself completely out of control once again.

Long after I’d recovered from anorexia (although body and particularly facial dysmorphia lingers to this day), food was a daily battle.

* * *

Bingeing is about secrecy. But it leaves clues.

I would eat and eat in my bedroom, and would silently beg whatever god might exist that my step mum wouldn’t smell the food. The shame of being caught would be too much to bear. One time I hid a half eaten cheesecake in her and dad’s wardrobe, shame crawling through me, flooding my whole body with a sense of worthlessness.

I used to shove food from other people’s plates into my mouth, quickly and in secret. I would do this at home, but also when working in a restaurant. Many middle-class women with long sleek hair would leave a whole fishcake untouched and uneaten on their lunch or dinner plates. Instead of binning their leftover food, I’d tuck myself into a corner and, I’m cringing admitting this, I would shove their food right into my gob, frantically chewing and swallowing as much as I could before getting caught or needing to get back out on the restaurant floor.

When I lived in Australia, I went through a major eating disorder relapse that saw me gain 2 stone in a matter of months. To clarify: I’ve always had a super fast metabolism and can pretty much eat anything these days and keep a stable weight. Those two stone were the result of eating in excess of 10,000 calories a day, often at nighttime and always alone. I once woke up choking on my own vomit, scared that I might have just put myself in real danger, and sat up, disgusted with myself to my core. Minutes later, the idea of going out and getting more food having crawled into my mind, I was impelled to listen and found my heavy swollen legs walking me through a part of town I didn’t feel safe in, at 1am, to buy more food.

That is the insanity of addiction. The very thing that took you to hell is the thing you turn to to try to get you out of it.

{Diversionary but important side note: Speaking of hell, it’s not coincidental that I started to spiral out of control once again after amassing around 18 months of eating disorder recovery when I joined a church in Sydney. The deeper I got sucked into church life and Christianity, the worse my eating got. I went to a church counsellor, who asked me strange questions to try to get to the heart of the matter: Were my family Freemasons? Would I renounce all other faiths I had ever associated with? They weren’t, and I did (with great sadness, since studying A Course in Miracles had been a big part of my life for a couple of years by that point), but the pain-fuelled eating didn’t stop. It was only years later that I looked back and saw the real pattern: that I was deeply unhappy in the church, was trying to find a place and a group of people where I belonged, because I was one of the vulnerable people that the messages of love and belonging had hooked right into. And the eating was almost my soul’s way of trying to metabolise the unpalatable aspects of what I saw in the church – the unanswered questions about certain people’s conduct, the lack of transparency around where the tithing money went, and the sense of slight disconnectedness with the rest of the human race that grew rather than diminished by being part of this thing.}

But let’s get back to the eating disorder. In recovery, I learned that there were things I could do to interrupt a binge:

I could put food in the bin. Didn’t work. I’d just fish it out again and carry on eating.

I learned that putting washing up liquid on food really stopped you from eating it. I did that with the cheesecake that day at my dad’s, and chucked it away… only to get it out of the bin, scrape the top layer off so I wouldn’t get sick from eating Fairy liquid, and carried right on eating it.

And crucially, I learned that one of the best things I could do to interrupt a binge was to phone someone else in recovery and tell them about it.

The self-hate you feel from properly bingeing is animalistic. I felt absolutely repulsed by myself, by my inability to stop or to control myself. It was as if I was under a spell that forced me to go against what I wanted with the whole of my being, which was simply to get through the day without having to go through this entire ritual of getting food, eating food, hating myself for it and then eating more, more and more, my hand stuffing food in my gob while another part of me begged myself to stop, continuing to eat long after my stomach was hurting, long after I was full to bursting.

Because food is a permanent part of our lives, and because it brings people so much pleasure, it feels hard to convey just how painful binge eating disorder is. It did feel like having some sort of disease, being so controlled by this part of my mind that I was essentially a prisoner to myself.

I hated the way bingeing affected my body. I hated myself for doing it. I hated the utter powerlessness of watching myself walk into the same situation over and over and over and over again. I hated the loneliness. I hated how out of control I felt. It was a shitty, painful and expensive time in my life.

Recovery

Sitting on the top deck of the 337 bus sometime in the early 2000s, I was heading from Putney to Sheen where my dad and step mum lived, and had once again broken my abstinence – a term used in Overeaters Anonymous, the 12 step fellowship for people recovering from eating disorders, to describe the period of time abstaining from starving, bingeing and purging (depending on your particular constellation of ED behaviours) – and was a few thousand calories into yet another deeply disappointing binge.

As the sugar-induced glucose pulsed through my bloodstream, I felt a crushing sense of defeat. I was beyond desperation. I’d tried and tried and tried again to get a grip on my behaviour, but this compulsion to eat, to cram food endlessly into my mouth and my stomach, had taken me straight out of a meeting and into yet another artificially lit supermarket filled with foods that were my enemy dressed up as friends.

The difference now was that I had someone to call, someone I could call. My sponsor answered the phone immediately. “I’ve relapsed again.” It felt like a confession. Awash in self-disgust, I got off the bus, carrying the plastic bag full of shit food that I didn’t want to eat but which I knew I couldn’t trust myself not to.

“Just put it in the bin, sweetheart.” I have no idea if she said those exact words to me, but it feels like she did. Compassion. No judgement. Understanding. Kindness. Words of wisdom from someone who’d been there. These were not things I had the ability to offer myself, so she did it for me. “You can start your day again, right now. Draw a line in the sand. Carry on with your meal plan for the rest of the day. Eat what you’d committed to eating. This doesn’t define you.”

That day, mercy visited. Somehow, I found the strength to part ways with the carb-loaded carrier bag. I was sickened by myself, and so fucking tired of this half-dead so-called life. But I also wasn’t alone anymore. I didn’t have to do it all by myself. Someone - this amazing woman - had my back. I carried on with my day.

I think I’d been hoping for a moment of resolve so complete that it would change me. I wished for the kind of surrender I’d experienced three or four years previously, when at 18 years old, I’d hit rock bottom from the reckless, out of control drink and drug taking that had made me into a shell of a person.

But my recovery from the eating disorder didn’t have a neat before and after.

That day was not the end of my eating disorder, but I do believe it marked a turning point. It was a moment of mercy, offered to myself through the guidance of a fellow sufferer, someone who knew from personal experience the hell of using food as a weapon against herself. I lost touch with my sponsor many years ago, as I’ve done with so many people along the way, but I hold immense gratitude to her for what she offered me.

* * *

I appreciate so many things about recovering from binge eating disorder. I love being able to put a lot of sweet foods into a basket in the supermarket with no sense of self-consciousness or worry about what people will think. It is, after all, just some food, and I am without shame because the secretive, shame-fuelling behaviour I used to do won’t be part of my day. I know today that those biscuits or that cake are just part of the food shop or are for a particular event or purpose, but the point is that they’re not going into my body in one fell swoop and I have nothing to hide.

I love being able to trust myself around food. I can have bread and biscuits and chocolate and ice cream in the house without losing the power of choice about when and how much I consume. I’ve kind of lost a lot of interest in food over the years. Sometimes I have to force myself to eat these days. It’s not what it once was to me.

I love being able to eat a meal with friends or my boyfriend and not feel panicky about not having enough to eat, about needing more. I find that I can eat food with others and only have part of my attention on the meal, rather than the whole thing. That’s genuinely something of a miracle.

And these days, I stop when I’m full. That’s also a miracle. I used to be physically unable to stop. I’d will myself to stop, would do all of the techniques to remove myself from the food and the food from me, but as I wrote about above, I would always find myself putting the next handful into my mouth. Actually, these days, I think I stop before I’m completely full. It’s like I’ve discovered this ability to eat enough, and my brain has figured out that I don’t need to be so full that it hurts in order to feel satisfied.

Being able to trust myself around food is… well, I can’t quite put words to it.

It’s freedom.