Authors: Kathryn Hansen
I threw the empty Diet Sprite bottle away, but I put the Pop-Tart wrapper in my desk drawer. I told myself that, since I would never binge again, I wanted to save the wrapper. It would be a memento of sorts—a token of my last binge food. It would remind me of these dark days, and one day I would be able to look back on them and laugh, or maybe cry—I wasn't sure which.
I closed the desk drawer and got into bed. My roommate (let's call her Julia) wasn't there; she was home with her family for a few more days. I felt such shame when I thought about her, because I had eaten so much of her food the previous semester. At first, I thought she hadn't noticed the small items I'd swiped here and there—a few cookies, a bowl of cereal, some crackers. I usually hurried to the store to replace the food, but as it turned out, she knew all along.
A few months into our first semester, Julia had begun hiding certain foods. In some of my binge eating episodes, I'd searched everywhere for her food, finding a pack of cookies in her clothes hamper, some snack cakes under her bed. She'd also kept an unopened box of honey buns in a small plastic drawer between our beds for over two months. She wasn't hiding those from me, simply storing them there until she got around to eating them. But that box taunted me. During binges, I would check to see if it was open yet, and I was always furious when it wasn't. If she would just open that box, I could sneak just one. ...
During one binge at the end of that semester, I decided that Julia would surely not eat those honey buns before we went home for the holidays. I opened the box and ate all but one, along with some of her hidden cookies. Then I went to the library to study. When I came back later that night, I noticed that something was wrong: all of Julia's food was gone. There was none on her food shelf, none in the refrigerator, none in her usual hiding places, no remaining honey bun in the drawer. It was all gone, and she was too. My heart sank with shame.
Until that point, Julia had been, at least outwardly, easygoing about me eating her food. "That's fine, you can have as much as you want," she would say after I told her I'd eaten a bowl of her cereal or a few of her cookies. But understandably, she had been getting annoyed over time as I abused her generosity. So that very night, I ran out to the grocery store and bought what I hoped was enough food to make it right—what I guessed I'd consumed all semester.
Back in our dorm room, I laid out all the groceries on Julia's bed, along with a self-help book for bulimics, which I was reading at the time. I added a letter, explaining to her that I had been diagnosed with bulimia and had a hard time controlling myself during binges. I apologized for my behavior and confided to her that I was seeing a therapist and a nutritionist. I told her if she had any questions or concerns about my disorder, she could talk to me or read through the book.
That night when Julia came into the room, I pretended to be asleep. I listened in embarrassment as she put all the food away. The next day, she wrote a kind letter in response to mine, forgiving me and offering encouragement and support. We never talked about the incident, and we'd both gone home for the holidays three days later. Now I stared at my roommate's empty bed, wondering if our relationship would ever be the same.
2
: A Typical Day of Purging
I
was glad my roommate wasn't back at the dorm yet, because I knew I couldn't face her just now. She had been one of my good friends in high school, and I hated the fact that I had wronged her by stealing from her last semester. I also hated that she now knew this embarrassing secret about me. I was also worried that I wouldn't be able to stop myself from eating her food again.
Surely I can control myself,
I thought, even as I stared through the dark at all of the food Julia had left in the room.
As I tried to go to sleep that night, I thought about the first time I'd lain in this dorm bed, five months earlier. I'd been so thin then that I couldn't lie on my side, because my hip bone jabbed me on the too-firm mattress. Those were the days when my weight still reflected my anorexia, not my emerging bulimia. I hadn't had any misconceptions about how thin I was when I'd entered college. I hadn't had a distorted body image. I'd known I was underweight, and part of me liked it. I didn't have to feel guilty about eating or occasionally bingeing. My binge eating had just been starting to pick up then, but now it seemed totally out of control.
I could no longer feel my bones, even though I was still very lean. I knew I'd needed to gain the weight I had my first semester, but I didn't like the way I'd done it. I felt driven to binge by some force beyond my control, and I feared the scale would just keep escalating.
I have to somehow take control and make it stop,
I told myself, reaffirming my vow that January 6 would be my last day of bingeing. I'd exercise the whole next day and then start over, getting back on my nutritionist-approved meal plan and returning to work on my therapy goals. At last, I fell asleep.
GYM PRISON
I didn't wake up until 11:00 a.m. on January 7, and the first thing I noticed was my terrible headache. I resentfully got out of bed and began packing for the gym: three sets of workout clothes and some fruit and crackers. On the days after binges, I wore only sweatshirts and sweatpants to hide my bloated body. I'd need three sets, because I always sweated profusely and had to change a few times during the day.
This day, I followed my typical post-binge routine, alternating working out on the stationary bike, the elliptical machine, the stair climber, and the treadmill. I stayed on each machine for an hour or two, then went to the locker room to change my sweat-saturated clothes and refuel with some healthy food before returning to the cardio area.
Throughout my first year of college, I'd do about four hours of cardio and lift some weights on days after binges; but as the years went by and the pounds piled on, I increased my load to about seven hours of cardio plus the weights. I hated it. I despised working out purely to compensate for a binge, and I resented having to spend my days at the gym. I passed the time on the machines by studying or reading, but it was still monotonous and exhausting. The binge was never worth the price, and it was during those long hours at the gym that I most wished I could be successful at self-induced vomiting.
When I finally finished my workout sentence on January 7, I showered, dressed, and felt a great sense of relief—the slate had been wiped clean. Even though I knew my exercise hadn't burned as many calories as I had consumed the day before, my tired body and the scale told me that most of the damage was undone. I always weighed myself before, during, and after my workouts, and I generally lost about five pounds. Most of it was probably water weight from sweating so much in my heavy clothing, but it still made me feel better to see the numbers on the scale go down throughout the day.
It was dinnertime when I finished working out that evening, so I drove toward the nearest sandwich shop. Even though I didn't eat much while exercising, I wanted to get back on track afterward with a normal, nutritious dinner because I knew that skipping meals or eating too restrictively would just lead me to binge again. Tired as I was, I had a new, more positive outlook as I drove away from campus and into town.
Maybe this semester can be different after all,
I thought. I told myself I would not spend any more days binge eating or overexercising, and I would eat normally and be healthy from now on.
As I continued down the road to the sandwich shop, however, my stomach began growling and my new confidence began to fade. My hunger made me anxious, because I felt my insatiable appetite was my enemy. When I was hungry, I couldn't trust myself not to overeat. After I finished a large turkey sandwich and baked chips, I was no longer physically hungry, but I still felt empty.
EXHAUSTING URGES
On the drive back to my dorm, I started wanting to eat more. I contemplated stopping at a nearby gas station—one of my regular spots—to get more food. I hated the fact that I had these incessant thoughts about bingeing. Why couldn't I just stop thinking about food? Why couldn't I just stop needing to eat unreasonable amounts of it?
I became very anxious as I got closer to my dorm, and I wondered if I would be able to fight my desire. Would I be able to resist my roommate's food all alone in the dorm room? I knew all the logical reasons I shouldn't binge again, and I certainly didn't want to undo my day's worth of working out and have to repeat the workout the next day. Furthermore, I couldn't afford to binge again because I had track practice the next morning, and I couldn't run well feeling sick and bloated.
But no amount of reasoning could turn off my desire to binge. In fact, nothing I had tried up to this point was effective in stopping my irrational thoughts and feelings. When I did manage to not binge, it felt like a painful struggle, as if I were denying myself something vital. That night was one of those times. From the moment I left the sandwich shop, I was consumed by cravings to binge, and I fought them most of the night. I tried using logic, I tried using strategies I'd learned in therapy, I tried distracting myself, I tried relaxing, and I tried sleeping. But I did not sleep much, I certainly didn't relax, I wasn't able to distract myself for more than a few minutes, I didn't make any important therapeutic gains, and I certainly didn't outsmart my urges with logic.
When the sun came up the next morning, January 8, I still had not binged, but I didn't feel victorious. I felt exhausted and depressed. The fight didn't even seem worth it. At least on the previous night when I'd binged, I'd gotten a good night's sleep. Now, instead of running at track practice feeling bloated and sick, I would have to run sleep-deprived. It seemed I just couldn't win. Even if I did resist my urges to binge, they still got the better of me. I knew it wouldn't be long before they would return, and I didn't feel capable of putting forth so much effort to cope with them day after day.
So only two days later, I broke all the promises I made to myself and binged again. I found myself back at all my regular snack shops and fast-food chains. Afterward, full of shame and self-disgust, I threw away the Pop-Tart wrapper from my desk drawer and replaced it with a potato chip bag—the last item I'd eaten during this binge—and told myself that it was
truly
over now. I again overexercised the next day to compensate for my latest lapse, and I again felt renewed after my workout, determined to start over. I was successful for a few days at a time, only to eventually succumb to my desire to binge. This cycle was repeated over and over.
I didn't understand why I was caught up in this pattern, despite my efforts to figure it out in therapy and in self-help books. I didn't understand why I was so ravenous, why I thought about food constantly, why eating normally was near impossible for me, and why I broke promise after promise to quit. I hated having to deal with my cravings day in and day out, and I hated that I was wasting valuable time bingeing and then compulsively exercising, yet I couldn't seem to stop.
This cycle—my pattern of bulimia—hadn't developed overnight. It was a process that had begun slowly, the summer before my junior year of high school, when I first began trying to lose weight.
3
: Choice and Consequences
M
y decision to lose weight wasn't deliberate. I didn't think I was fat. I didn't tell myself I needed to lose
X
number of pounds to look good. Dieting was something I inadvertently fell into, then chose to continue.
I had always been a super-skinny kid, but when I entered high school, I started filling out, as teenage girls should. During my ninth- and tenth-grade years, I put on about 15 pounds, which put me at a perfectly healthy—and still thin—weight of about 118. I no longer looked like a skinny little girl, but more like a woman. The additional pounds didn't cause me much grief at first. At that time, some of my friends were becoming conscious of their weight and were beginning to diet. I actually thought dieting was ridiculous and wasn't afraid to tell my friends so. My diet was generally healthy and normal, and for quite a while, I didn't give it much thought. I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I stayed very active.
I was on the cross-country, basketball, and swim teams, and I was the pitcher on the softball team. I was, and still am, a person who can eat a lot and stay thin because of my activity level and metabolism; so although I usually ate more than my friends at school, I remained thinner than most. Nevertheless, as I saw the numbers creeping higher and higher on the scale throughout my first two years of high school, I began to worry. As my sophomore year came to a close, I was wondering when the weight gain was going to stop.
A month after tenth grade ended, in June 1997, I had a tonsillectomy that set off a change in my eating habits. After the surgery, I could not eat normally for a couple of weeks, so I quickly dropped some pounds. The first time I weighed myself after this, I was at a gym near my home. I had joined a few months before, so I could work out and lift weights to become a better softball pitcher. My goal at the time was a college scholarship to play softball; but that summer day would eventually change my life's direction. That day also marked an immediate change in my reasons for working out at the gym. I remember stepping on the scale, reading 111, and being unsure how I felt. Part of me was a little uneasy because I knew weight loss would hurt my strength as a pitcher, but another part of me was excited. The tonsillectomy seemed to have resolved my dilemma about the weight I'd gained in high school. It was a perfect solution because I'd lost weight without technically dieting.
My excitement was tempered by the knowledge that I would probably gain the weight back soon enough; my throat was healed and I could eat normally again. However, after seeing my weight loss, I was tempted to keep restricting my food intake. After all, I'd been successful at doing something many of my peers were trying to do—losing weight—so why would I want to gain it back?
There was another factor that tipped the balance in favor of dieting. I was, just at that time, not motivated to work on my strength because I was facing a change of coaches. The night before my tonsillectomy, I'd found out my high school softball coach—whom I admired and looked to for encouragement and direction—was no longer going to coach our team. I was quite upset about that and temporarily didn't care if my pitching would suffer if I didn't gain the weight back. So I decided not to go back to my carefree, healthy, normal eating habits. I instead chose to begin dieting—even though I didn't call it that.
I would not eat normally again for nearly eight years.
SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
I began restricting my food slowly that summer, first by cutting out most junk food, then by eating fewer calories and exercising more. My family—my mom, dad, and older sister—didn't seem to notice this change, most likely because they were busy preparing my sister, Corey, to move away to college. In no way was my behavior a cry for attention during this time; their distraction simply allowed my dieting to go relatively undetected.
I knew I would miss Corey when she left. We had a lot of good times together as kids, with only a two-year age difference; however, we were as different as sisters come, and we definitely had grown apart as we entered our teen years. She was outgoing, carefree, popular, and had a partying side; I was shy, intense, and preferred to be either alone, playing sports, or with one or two close friends. When I entered high school, I felt like I was known primarily as "Corey's little sister, " which was certainly not a bad thing, but I did look forward to shedding that label.
As Corey prepared for college, I heard more than a few comments and warnings about the "Freshman 15"—the pounds college freshmen tend to put on—from her friends and my family. Previously, comments about weight did not interest me; but now I started listening. Corey had always been thin—not as skinny as I was growing up, but her weight was never a concern. She was—and still is—beautiful, and it bothered me to hear others suggest that she suddenly had to start watching her weight. It seemed to justify my emerging impulse to control my weight too.
Beginning that summer, my motivation for working out became less about getting stronger for sports and more about preventing weight gain, so I upped the aerobic exercise (specifically, running) and decreased the weight lifting. My pitching suffered that summer, but my running improved by the day. Even before I started dieting, I'd been the best female cross-country runner my hometown, outside of New Orleans; and as I lost weight and trained, my times drastically improved. By the time the cross-country season began at the start of my junior year, I was becoming one of the top female runners in all of Louisiana.
Despite all my outward success, I was struggling with what seemed to be a monumental internal problem: my appetite. After I began purposefully dieting, I started feeling ravenous; I started thinking about food more than I ever had in my life. I began to fear my appetite, and although I tried to fend it off with healthy meals and snacks, I worried it would drive me to eat much more than I wanted to. So I didn't give myself much freedom around food, and I avoided places and situations where I knew I would be tempted to eat unhealthy foods. This only made things worse.
By the middle of eleventh grade, I'd begun slipping every now and then—eating more than I had planned or eating something very sugary or fattening. This made me very anxious about weight gain, so I began running more to compensate. Even after cross-country season ended that year, I continued my rigid and grueling training schedule. I didn't really like running much, but it suddenly seemed worthwhile to train even harder. Running more gave me freedom to indulge once in a while, and I wanted that freedom because my appetite seemed to be increasing exponentially.
By the time softball season started in February, I was down to about 105 pounds. My uniform from the previous year was sagging, and I had to tighten my belt a notch or two to keep my pants up. Most of my teammates' uniforms were tighter than they were before, and although they complained about gaining weight, I know now it was healthy and normal. My teammates and new coach noticed my weight loss, but they didn't make a big of a deal of it. I didn't think it was a big deal either.
My pitching that year was indeed much worse than it had been the previous year. I knew the weight loss and concentration on running were compromising my game—and softball was my favorite sport, the one I wanted to continue to the college level. But I didn't have the courage to turn back. I also didn't know how to turn back; normal eating, once so easy for me, had become elusive.
During softball season, I decreased my food intake even more. Without as much time to run due to softball practice and games, I remember not wanting to eat more than a couple of sunflower seeds on the bench, because I thought they were too fattening. I remember lying about my eating during that time to my parents, my coach, and my boyfriend. When our team went out to eat after a game, I'd tell my coach that I was going to eat when I got home; when I got home, I'd tell my parents I ate on the road with the team. On weekends when I went out with my boyfriend, I'd tell him I'd eaten at home; then, when I got home, I'd tell my parents I'd eaten with him.
The more calories I cut, the more ravenous I felt. Every time I skipped a meal, it fueled my appetite. Food became a priority in my thoughts. I lost the ability to truly focus on the rest of my life, such that school, softball, my friends, my family, and my boyfriend began to fade into the background. I was heading toward anorexia, even though I didn't believe my dieting was severe enough to qualify as an eating disorder. I typically had a large portion of fruit for breakfast, a couple pieces of bread and more fruit for lunch, some crackers after school, a normal-portioned and balanced dinner, and a small bowl of cereal before bed. I ate about 1,000 calories a day even at my all-time low; but with my activity level and fast metabolism, that was like starvation.