Independence Day

I won’t start this column with any razzle-dazzle.

I’ll start it bluntly: I have binge eating disorder (BED). I haven’t been super transparent about this diagnosis/affliction because I have struggled to come to terms with it myself. I developed anorexia in middle school and went to treatment for it in my freshman year of high school, three years ago now. Something like a pendulum effect happened— I swung from one extreme to the other as a result of being unable to handle (tolerate, regulate, whatever word you’re inclined to use) my emotions, which were stirring like a silent, invisible hurricane in my head.

This hurricane devolved into a tropical storm at times, but it never stopped spinning. When things got hard, the winds ramped up. The emotions began stirring, and I turned to behavior use. For me, because restriction was a vice that I had cut out of my life, I turned to what I considered to be ‘emotional eating.’ If you’ve read my column before, you know that write a lot about emotional eating. This is because emotional eating had become very important to me at the time of my writing, as it was a battle that I was attempting to win, but failing to navigate on my own.

I did a lot of rationalization of my behavior use. A lot of that can be seen in my previous columns. While emotional eating can, of course, be an adaptive behavior for some, it was not adaptive for me. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I would compulsively eat and overeat every day, multiple times a day, and call it ‘emotional eating.’ It’s not an inappropriate name for my behavior— it was emotionally-driven eating. But a more appropriate term for my behavior, especially in recent months, would be the B-word. Bingeing.

I wrestled with this idea of compulsive overeating and bingeing for a long time before I ever spoke it into existence. My therapist had no idea that I was struggling with food and, to be honest, I didn’t either. I considered my binges to be acts of self-soothing and ignored the way that they ruined my self-esteem. I ignored my weight gain by avoiding any and all thoughts about my body. Whenever anyone would assert that I had an issue, I would become extremely upset— how dare they! I’m in recovery from anorexia! What I didn’t realize was that I had never healed from the initial presentation of my eating disorder.

The monster had shape-shifted into a newer, fresher, more trustworthy form, and I didn’t doubt it for a second.

How could I? After being told in my anorexia recovery that I had the freedom to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, how could I possibly doubt my everlasting permission to eat? It’s a tricky line to walk, but I had crossed it— big-time. In the worst spots of my BED, I was spending more money than ever on food, eating every second of the day, and failing to focus on anything but food. Another full-blown eating disorder had formed right under my nose and I hadn’t seen it coming.

One amazing thing I’ve realized about eating disorders, though, is that there’s never a ‘too-far-gone’ point. You are never unrecoverable. I made the decision to enter treatment, starting at the Partial Hospitalization level, moving up to the Residential level, and, currently, back down to Partial Hospitalization.

Being in treatment has given me a second (third, fourth, whatever it may be) chance at my life. At one point, I had lost all hope in my ability to enjoy life without the pleasure of food. Now I’m building confidence in tackling that belief. I’m less afraid of going out to eat because I believe I have the ability not to binge in front of my loved ones. I am regaining physical health and stability through properly nourishing myself throughout the day. I can leave my room without worries of being unable to go back to my safety signal— food. I can breathe again. It’s not always easy to breathe, but at least I’m breathing. At least I’ve opened up some space for the real me to show.

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Just like Jenni Schaefer details in her book, Goodbye Ed, Hello Me, I am learning more and more about who the real Bella is. The real Bella enjoys spending time with her boyfriend (Ed hates getting close to people and being vulnerable with them). The real Bella enjoys reading books (Ed hates idle time and understimulation— Ed convinces me that I can’t be happy if I’m not overstimulated, especially with food). The real Bella gains energy from being around others and thrives off of connection (Ed thrives off of isolation and hates socialization). I am learning so much, from things as simple as my favorite color to things as complex as my core beliefs.

I am so proud to be where I am.

To me, victory is sticking to my meal plan. Victory looks like 3 meals and 2 snacks a day. Victory is saying ‘no’ over and over again to the urges that try to take me off track. I refuse to get back to where I was— a slave to food, to my mind, to the eating disorder.

For the first time in years, I finally feel like myself again.