BED - new to the forum

@MrNorris Welcome! 🥰 I hope you get many insights and experiences from people here 🍀 You're not alone, and you truly matter 💖 Sending you lots of love your way 🐾💕

@MrNorris hi there. I had food problems for a very long time, some of which included binge eating, so I’ll share in case it is useful.

I’m now 32 and started to have disordered eating at age 12. I was a fat child and lost weight very suddenly at this age, by going on a diet an older cousin was doing. I went on the diet because she wanted company and it sounded fun but becoming a normal weight utterly changed my life very quickly. I suddenly started being seen a lot at school and stopped being bullied. I was also seen by family, friends of family and just people generally. In combination with becoming a teenage girl, I noticed how being a healthy and then low weight brought me a lot of attention and positive affirmation and removed the suffering I’d had from bullying due to my weight. The experience of life amongst other people changed very quickly and completely for me and from then I became hooked on trying to control my weight, food and anything related.

Initially this resulted in severe restricting and physical exercise obsession with a bit of bingeing in between. At age 18, over the course of a few months, this developed into regular binge eating, which lasted for several years. The first few months I’d still restrict in between occasionally but the bingeing soon took over. For about one year and a half the bingeing developed into something completely uncontrollable. I am a short woman and started at a low weight and would be consuming somewhere between five and eight thousand calories in a sitting (I think), mostly two times in a 24 hour period. I was constantly trying to control it but it got to a point where whatever time of day or night, if the binge feeling came, I would basically go to any lengths to do it. It became increasingly hard to be around other people as I was deeply ashamed of it and would resort to extremes such as consuming large quantities of fats or frozen or spoiled items in the middle of the night, or anything I felt i could hide better from people under the same roof. I eventually stopped having much social interaction and ended up staying on my own, at which point I would spend hours a day bingeing and and spent all the savings my family had given me after turning 18 and a grant I had received from the government to go to university on bingeing. Of course I was gaining weight uncontrollably and daily would be in a situation where I would be in so much pain from the eating that I couldn’t breathe properly, some of my organs that were being pushed upon ached and I would have to find the least painful position to be in until the feeling passed (usually lying down on my side to some extent).

When the binge feeling came, it felt like something would come over me and I was a completely different person or being, with only one motive and no parts of my ‘regular’ self were there. When the feeling would come on and never sticking to the constant resolutions I’d make was utterly out of my control. So I thought this illness would get the best of me in a few years and that would be it.

I eventually found tricks to control it, make episodes happen with longer gaps in between and then stop it all together (apart from the odd episode every few months or years). I’m not quite sure how this happened but I think it was a combination of having given up, being forced to stop caring or fearing things I did before about my appearance and health, refocusing my attention onto things that were more healthy  to me than the things I’d been focusing before and trying to just accept the situation and not ‘beat’ it. 

Over the course of about 10 years I actually managed to lose all the weight and stop binging. Despite this, there was still absolutely nothing normal about the way I went about eating and my other life habits or behaviours that I thought could affect my weight. Food thoughts, food plans, diets, exercise plans and body thoughts dominated my mental space and behaviour most of the time. 

I have  tried everything you can imagine to get the situation under control and was desperate for peace of mind but also was convinced that my life will always be dominated by an eating disorder. 

A few years ago a friend with an addiction suggested I try a 12 step recovery programme. I tried one and did what the programme suggested. For the first time I experienced some peace of mind from my obsession, which ultimately controlled my life up to then. However, it was not long lasting and I soon found ways to convince myself why the programme wasn’t quite right for me. For a few years I was conflicted and would dip in and out of it as I did find more relief there than I had anywhere else. At some point, I accidentally came across a sponsor from another 12 step programme focused on chronic compulsive eating. This person not only related everything I was saying regarding my problem but also spoke about living in a way that I’d imagined. They helped me to see that the food obsession had actually become my solution to my difficulties and unease with life and introduced me to a fellowship of people just like me who have learnt to live in another solution.

Following the programme of action suggested there, I have not only found relief from many of my obsessive food and body related behaviours (which I thought were so deeply ingrained it would take years or just be impossible…). I have started to find sanity in every other area of my life. From my ongoing anxiety about everything, my relationships with family and friends, which had been problematic for a long time (and I never understood why), my work situation, my need for safety/stability and excitement/spontaneity at the same time, which make it difficult to be satisfied by anything in the long run (from jobs to lifestyle choices to where and how I want to live - you name it). It might sound like a miracle, and sometimes it feels like it is, but through applying this programme, everything in my life that bothered me has started to fall into place and I’m starting to appreciate, enjoy and contribute to life again. Sometimes I forget that compulsive eating is what brought me here because so much more has positively changed.

I hope this helps and remember that you are not alone!