Another Eating Disorder Post?

I've written before about my eating disorder but I'd like to be a bit more honest/specific this time around. Instead of focusing on the food, I'm going to write a little about where it comes from. Why? Because I only just realised that to heal myself I'm going to have to figure out the answers to all the questions about my behaviours, what's sitting behind it all. And perhaps it might help someone else too.

I am a Compulsive Overeater and have been since I can remember. The first time I remember eating past the point of full, without feeling in control was when I was 7 or 8. My Great Aunt and Uncle had me after school every Thursday and they would give me all the lollies, ice-blocks, sausage rolls, hot chips and tomato sauce I could possibly want. We didn't have this type of food at home, except for special occasions and I felt like Augustus Gloop in 'Charlie and The Chocolate Factory'. I hated school and didn't understand the other kids or the point of all the rules and schedules. Apparently I woke up every morning, surprised that we had to do it all again that day. I was classed as 'eccentric' by my family and had few friends, I gradually understood that to fit in I had to stop telling people what I was really thinking and then things became easier. But I ate to fill myself up and numb the anxiety, sadness and loneliness I felt.

I still compulsively overeat for the same reasons. I will eat like that, generally by myself, quickly and secretly. I will eat until I hurt, beyond that I will eat until I hurt, then wait a few hours and eat to that point again. Something inside of me enjoys sabotaging my body, I enjoy hurting myself because it stops me from feeling the other feelings that I can't do anything about.

People often speak of eating disorders as being about control and in my case that is correct too. I eat because I can control that feeling, I can create it and maintain it and I understand it, it has been with me since I was a child. I have scars all over my body from hurting myself this way, scads of deep stretch marks, four more scars from my surgery to remove my gallbladder (I don't believe this would have happened if I'd treated my body with kindness), pre-diabetes and a body that acts much older than it's 29 years.

We all have our addictions, our weaknesses, our Achilles heel, mine just happens to be fed with copious amounts of food. It's a long term journey but over 10 years ago I wouldn't have thought I'd be able to have the life I have now with my Bipolar. I'm strong and I know I'll find a way to treat myself with the love, care and respect it deserves one day - I hope that whatever your self-medication, that you also find your way there too.  

Fuck knows

Robin Williams died today.

I've always just written whatever I've wanted to on this here blog of the times but anything I say about his death or life seems so cheesy and unworthy. So I'll say this; his death has made me sad on many different levels and I'm grateful to have been privy to the parts of himself that he chose to share with the world.

In other news, I am procrastinating the shit out of studying which is BAD. This semester is the most important one I have and the last one I'll have (if I pass well enough) before I graduate. I began University in 2003, keen to become a main titles designer with a Fine Arts degree at Canterbury. Long story short, it is now 2014 and I am finally on the verge of finishing my first degree, a BA in Psychology which will be a massive triumph in the face of many adversities. That is if I manage to get my head out of my arse and study properly.

Fuck.

So petrified of failing that I seem to be failing before I've even started.

On a lighter and more positive note; my hair has been chopped off and I love it.

And... end scene.

Fear of Failure.

I am someone who spent a large portion of their life not trying because if I tried I would never have to fail. 

It sounds completely ridiculous and really it is. I decided at an early age that my older sister (by 4 years) was the smart and pretty one so I would have to find another niche. It turned out that mine just involved gradually getting fat, lazy, angry, bitchy, mean, loud, opinionated and very rarely turning up to class. When I did turn up, I really needn't have bothered as I managed to get myself in far more trouble being there than not. 

I managed to create a sad reality where I was the victim, my sister the perfect heroine and to try at anything wasn't an option I even considered. Then I was given the choice to essentially be kicked out of school or go overseas by myself for a year as an exchange student. So that's what I did and after that year was over, I was traumatized into a much better (or at least less pathetic) human being. 

Nevertheless, I still to this day live in constant fear of my potential. I was told so often by teachers and parents that I was absolutely brimming with the stuff but that my attitude got in the way of utilizing it. I think Dylan Moran's sketch on potential is hilarious and true. If you never go near your potential then you can live in the hopes that it could actually be a palace, filled with glorious snobby women, faffing around but what if you went to use it and it turned out it was just a sad little kitten, sniveling in a dark, cold corner?

I've been fat for more than half my life, longer than I've been crazy even (well diagnosed at least, who can really even pinpoint the beginnings of crazy?). Now that I'm well on the way to not being that version of myself (16 kilos less and counting), I'm proud of my efforts but petrified of what I might be when that fat suit is removed. What will be left?

I don't have expectations of a sudden modeling career blossoming into existence, I simply fear attaining my first massively important life goal ever. I've never done that before, apart from working to get into Fine Arts School, my goals have felt so unattainable and therefore at a safe and acceptably far away distance. 

So what happens when you achieve something you thought was impossible for yourself? I'm almost halfway through finishing my study so that at least feels like it's at a comfortable distance still. Most of my life aspirations were sabotaged by my mental illness for such a long period of my life but these past 4 years of relative mental stability have opened up doors for me that I thought were locked to me forever. All the professionals had advised me that I would forever be on heavy mood stabilizing and mood lifting drugs, that my life would always feel either numb or powerfully intense (without medication) and thus inhospitable for 'normal' life. I gave up on having a career that I could care about, a person I could fall in love with, children I could connect to, because to have those things I would have to be on those drugs and when I was on them I couldn't feel passion or true feeling for anything.

So, with a shit-ton of therapy, an incredibly supportive family (beyond supportive really) and a partner who risked his heart with a crazy person, I have the life I gave up on a long time ago, without the meds. The insane thing is that I'm really fucking happy and yet still scared shitless of getting cocky, reaching too high and screwing it all up. Deep down I still feel that if you never really try or care enough about anything then you can never truly fail or lose it all. 

I read a book.

Tonight I read a book called 'Brain over Binge' and it helped me to realise that sometimes therapists guide their clients to look too much into their behaviours and emotions. Sometimes there is an answer and sometimes it's simple and not altogether linked to your other psychological bullshit issues.

I had always thought that my binge eating was the last thing on my list, the least dire of all my issues. The likelihood of me eating myself into a coma wasn't as high as my suicidal thoughts and plans one day reaching fruition. So I put my energy into the many types of therapy, treatments, medicines etc and about six years after I was first diagnosed I could confidently say I was a mostly stable and functioning human being who didn't have the inclination to live under a duvet forever or consistently fuck the most inappropriate people I could find anymore (to name just a few things I did in the past). 

It turned out that binge eating couldn't be dealt with like all my other issues, it wasn't about my emotional baggage (because for the most part I had dredged through and worked through most of that in years of therapy), it was about my lower brain's desire to reinforce a bad habit/addiction. 

I'm not going to go over the entire book but in essence, all the things I'd tried (OA, therapy, diets etc.) had failed dismally. Giving up control, taking control, none of it worked for me and I thought I was alone in that because OA is full of people who are living with the 'illness' and consider themselves to be recovering. I always hated that idea, that I'd always be stuck with yet another fucking illness. It took me long enough to come to terms with my Cyclothymia and stop hating it and myself for being wired differently to most others. 

This book sets out to try and help people who have had no success in the other programmes on offer and instead of making it complicated and super personal and gut wrenching (ha, pun), it makes it simple. Not easy but simple. To stop binge eating I have to separate myself from my lower brain which keeps telling me to eat all that shit and to not stop until I feel like vomiting, and not argue but sit with those thoughts. Listen but not react or interact with them, as it's main goal is to get me to eat but me, myself and my higher more evolved brain doesn't want to. So I will choose not to do as it says. 

I will choose to not binge eat anymore, because I've done it since I was 11 and I FUCKING hate it and myself for doing it. I'm 28 years old and I refuse to listen to that stupid self-sabotaging voice in my head any longer. 

Will keep you posted on the outcome of this new-found realisation. 

Your food, your food, your food is my drug.

I saw a film called 'Thanks For Sharing' a few nights ago that focused on sex addiction. I thought it would be some puff piece where they lightly attempted to inject some sort of message into the storyline but filled the rest up with a shit-ton of puns about sex. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the film and even more surprised that I felt a real connection to the pain of their stories.

I became keenly aware of the addict crossover world years ago when I fessed up to myself that I had a compulsive binge eating problem. At the time I was navigating myself through the minefield of baggage that was entangled up in the shizzle of my bipolar mess, so my therapist and I decided to focus on keeping me alive and deal with the eating issues later. This often happens when someone has more than one major issue (such as smoking and drinking), the focus goes on the addiction/mental health issue that is more dire and the lesser evil is swept under the rug for a bit. Many addicts have more than one addiction, as do many people with mental health bullshit, in fact I'm yet to meet someone who has collected just one. Often you're just not that aware of the others until the black hole sized one is more manageable or drug dulled.

The odd thing for me was realising that compulsive binge eating was very much an addiction and how similar my experiences with it were to my friend who was a recovering alcoholic. I'm sure people would love to think that they're not and I'm definitely not saying there aren't plenty of differences (I haven't heard of any binge induced comas for instance). But the lies, deception, shame, guilt, complete lack of control whilst actioning said addiction, those are good friends for all addicts. No matter what substance we're abusing, we're trying to drown and numb something fucking dark that's located deep inside us.

In many ways I'm lucky, my addictions haven't killed me yet. I say yet because I may develop diabetes, have a stroke or heart attack due to my addiction to food. I managed to be a recovering OE for a few years but I recently figured out that I've managed to justify my inner addict for months now due to other health issues. So it came creeping back, stifled slightly by my late bastard of a gallbladder which attacked me for six months before I was able to get it removed, I was unable to eat anything high in fat, spice or with any alcohol content without having a severe gallstone attack. Much like my late grandfather who survived a double aneurism and was thus unable to drink, not drinking didn't make him any less of an addict and not eating shit food hasn't made me less of one either.

I'm not sure where to go from here but I think I might search out my old OA book again and see where it leads me. I tend to follow paths like this to avoid impending doom problems that are closer to home, so perhaps if I just dealt with those I'd binge less anyway. Sounds so simple, if only self happiness was as easy as it deceptively sounds.

YouTube

Yellow you,

Hope all is well in your world?

Here is my short and shameless plug for my vlog channel. If you've known me awhile then you'll know I used to do this on the regular about um... too many years ago and I decided I'd like to start it again. I'm enjoying the sharing and the creative process so we'll see where it goes from here.

If you'd like a geeze, here it is.

Nun night :)

A Handful of Ginger-nuts and Fear.

I often come on here to vent or process something I've been pondering for awhile and can't seem to get out of my head. So this might be a little mish-mashy but if you normally read this then that's probably not going to phase you.

I did two vlogs last week which have gotten no support vs plenty of angry comments. It's hard not to feel a little bummed about the feedback but then again I wasn't under any illusions that posting a vlog on body hair and women's choices was going to get many pats on the back. Emer O'Toole (the woman who brought about that conversation for me) showed her gloriously hairy pits on TV quite some time ago and my comments were based on that. She's an incredibly brave woman (although it saddens me that she'd have to be, to simply stop shaving her armpits publicly) and even responded to a tweet of mine. It was well worth it to hear her on my side and supporting me, with all the crap she gets, my YouTube abuse is merely a spec in comparison with what she has to deal with.

My other vlog was one for a channel I'm hoping to start about parenting (not judging or advising, just discussing) and the issues that I feel would have/still would help my partner and I as parents. I feel like there are so many things that aren't talked about and I'd really like to open a conversation up about them. I have a long way to go before I manage to make videos that are getting it right though, as I'm a rambler and need to learn how to edit right down to the point. So that's a work in progress.

Something else I've been thinking a lot about, which is a recurring theme for me in my blogs is self-sabotage. I am incredibly guilty of this type of thing, not consciously (most of the time) and it took me a really long time to stop doing it in my relationships. The thing is though, as I've been peeling back the layers and working on myself and everything that makes me messed up, each layer gets harder and harder to get through. My first one was probably being unable to be alone, I learnt how to enjoy my own company through months of solitude when I was 15, by myself, in France, unable to speak or understand any French, for a year. Steep but important learning curves. Actually what real learning isn't steep or dangerous or somewhat traumatising?

So anyway, after that it was probably about five years of therapy, pain, tons of medication, mistakes, mess, relationships, draining my parents, sadness, numbness, adventures, manic, debt accruing, madness that were my early twenties/Bipolar out-of-control-ness-ness. When I was somewhat stable it was relationship learning (that never really ends though) with my first real partnership with someone who was able to see me outside of my mental illness and not be scared. Then learning how to fit into a family that was already there before me as a Step-Mum, falling in love with a gorgeous three year old and creating a relationship with her. Then I was able to attempt to tackle my binge eating with a lot of therapy and nutrition education (I definitely still struggle with this but much like most of these lessons, I think it's one that will always be there, evolving as I get older).

Currently I'm trying to get through my deeply ingrained fear of exercise (so far I've managed to start enjoying going to the gym), but at the same time I'm finding it so frustrating. My relationship with food has gotten very strange, when I'm alone I want to eat and the self-sabotage is so crazy because I'm well aware of it. Perhaps I need to go back to the 15 year old lesson and learn how to enjoy being by myself again but without food to comfort me. I have to find things that I enjoy that don't include stuffing things into my face, because whilst I've managed to mostly keep out of binge eating territory, I'm eating for the wrong reasons. Yes I could just make sure there was only healthy food in the fridge but I don't think that's particularly fair to my partner and Step-Daughter (I already keep ice cream out for that reason) and it's not the what, it's the WHY.

After that many years of therapy I still can't quite get down to the why properly. I'm not normally scared of this type of thing but for some reason I'm scared of what I will have to deal with emotionally if my partner goes to work and I don't pick up that muesli bar, handful of ginger-nut biscuits and terrible romantic comedy.