Bio: .....I remember being about 4 or 5 and feeling as if something was different, wrong, "too private"....as if I was not healthy, but growing inward, and disturbed. In retrospect, I was carrying more sadness than any child should have borne.
Now, I am 65, and more whole than I have ever been. I am grateful for expert psychiatrists, medicine, hospitalizations, and friends like Megan Roach, that I have met along the way.......
I think I was born with shame. For too long, I have felt guilty simply for being, for existing -- as if everyone had the right to be, but not I.
In 1967 I developed anorexia nervosa. In some ways it was my cry to not exist. I felt guilty for weighing anything, and wanted to be No Thing.
I was 16 years old, and already mired in mental illness. Today I am 65 and have survived rather triumphantly. I would like to explain how I have survived, thanks to binge eating.
Surely, many will know the term Binge Eating as an eating disorder. I have been hospitalized numerous times when my binge eating seemed so beyond my control, that I felt it might perforate my stomach; and I have felt so helpless in the face of Binge Eating that I thought my only way out of the pain it induced in me, that suicide was my only option.
Binge Eating Disorder (BED) usually involves eating large amounts of food when not hungry, rapidly, or eating that way past satiety, and usually when alone, in secret. BED does not include any compensatory actions that are seen in bulimia nervosa, when one may exercise or use laxatives or vomit, to compensate for excessive eating. I am a lay person, and I am describing from my vantage point; certainly your physician, or an eating disorder professional can aid in better understanding of these monstrous illnesses.
After recovering from my own time with self-starvation, I went to an opposite pole. I began to eat anything and everything I could get my hands on, with a sense of nothing ever being enough.
I was in college at that point, and I stole food in the dining room and out of the dorm rooms of other students. I would sit in the cafeteria at the trays of what others had left behind, and eat that.
I ate out of garbage cans. In retrospect, I believe I was, in part, experiencing psychosis. I do not think I could help any of what I was doing, nor was I truly aware, in reality, of how my actions must have seemed to other people. All I wanted was to eat, all I wanted was the food.
And throughout all these ensuing decades, I have continued to binge. The rapidity and voraciousness of my eating have slowed down, but I still binge -- particularly after eating with others in social situations, and when behind the closed doors of my apartment.
Shame filled me. My body became fatter and fatter. At some point I lost track of how large I truly am, and how I come across to others. I am very very large. My body has in some real ways broken down, because I eat so much and I rarely exercise.
But, after many hospitalizations for eating dis-order, and attempts to heal in conjunction with therapies, nutritional, cognitive, personal, something has helped me like never before in my life.
I have thrown off my shame.
I have embraced who I am - my weight, my body, my binge eating. It is part of who I am, and that is very very okay with me.
Perhaps in retrospect, I truly owe a debt to food and to binge eating. It has kept me alive -- dousing my horrendous life-long suicidal thoughts like nothing else. When I am in very bad emotional pain, I use food: to anesthetize, to comfort.
This has been my path. I am who I am, and that includes being an individual who binge eats. I am fat. I am alive.
And I give thanks, for it all.
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