“What did you binge on today?”

I love the suspicion in her eyes.

While surfing the interwebs, I came across a post on an eating disorder “support” forum asking what people had binged on today.

Normally, this wouldn’t interest me because I don’t really care what other people have eaten, it just makes me feel guilty for what I have consumed. However, some of them made me cringe.

“a apple and a can of diet soda”
(Why are you even including the diet soda?)

“4 walnuts, 1 teaspoon of peanut butter, 2 carrots, 1 anchovy, and I looked at a piece of cake the wrong way”
(I may have added that last one.)

“half a cantaloupe”
(I honestly can’t ever remember which is the cantaloupe and which is the honeydew.)

Oh, my dear Ana friends, I get it. I’ve been there. I remember when eating a cup of oatmeal felt like a binge. But a binge it is not.

I can feel like an anorexic, but that doesn’t make me one. Just because you feel like you binged doesn’t make it one.

Try 6 cups of rice (with butter), a large pizza, 2 liters of pizza, a hamburger, a huge batch of fries (with fry sauce), a whole jar of peanut butter, a pot of pasta, a whole batch of soup, do I need to continue?

Now granted, most days are not that bad. But when I binge and purge, I binge. If I don’t, I just purge. Eating a normal meal and purging feels like binging because normalcy terrifies me. But again, that doesn’t make it a binge.

I’m sure it would annoy an anorexic person if I was like, “I totally restricted today! I only ate 2500 calories!,” it bothers me when people say they binged when they are actually restricting.

I realize this probably makes me a petty person. Oh well.

 

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Apples and carrots

And peanut butter.

That’s the food I have in the house. That’s what I’ll be eating for a bit.

I’m ok with that.

I’m not really bulimic because…

1. I purged about an hour after eating. I didn’t purge because I as trying to remove calories, I as purging to get that damn food out of my stomach.

I do this a lot: purging to remove food instead of calories.

Honestly, a lot of the time, I don’t care about the calories in terms of purging. I tend to assume that after I eat it, it counts. I have no definitive way of telling how many calories will be absorbed and how many will be purged, so they just all count.

I just hate that feeling of having food in my stomach.

Sometimes I try to wait it out. It rarely works. I’ve purged several hours after eating. At that point, I don’t even know if it’s a physical feeling I’m trying to rid myself of or a psychological feeling. The knowing that I didn’t purge.

2. Sometimes I don’t even try to purge everything. I just purge until I get a certain feeling in my stomach and body. There have been times I’ve known there’s still some food in there, but I just stop because I achieved what I was looking for.

Strangely, other time I need to get everything out, taking extra precautions to make sure I do. (I won’t go into that because I don’t like giving people ideas.)

3. My desire to exercise doesn’t outweigh the pain and fatigue from my fibromyalgia. I am incredibly lazy.

I used to spend hours in the gym. I used to walk/run miles each day. Now, I’m doing well if I walk to the bus stop half a mile away. I consider walking around the store to get binge food a workout. (Though, don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent an hour or more walking around the store being indecisive.)

I could keep going, I have a long list of reasons why I’m “not really bulimic”. However, these are the 3 main ones that bother me the most. It’s not uncommon to bent over the toilet and think to myself, “I’m not really bulimic.”

 

Is it crazy…

That I kind of really want this?

The one place I felt sane

I have realized that the one place where I feel truly sane is inside the walls of the psych ward.

Why?

I’m not sure.

I looked around at the other patients and thought to myself, “I’m not like them.”

I remembered this thought today while I was purging and thinking, “I’m not really bulimic.” (I’ll explain that one on another post.)

I think I have a denial problem.

But seriously, sitting in the hallway yesterday waiting to be released and watching some of the other patients, I felt very, very sane. I don’t know how to describe the feeling.

I’ve also come to realize that, when I want/need to, and I don’t have evidence contradicting me, I’m very good at convincing others that I’m sane, intelligent, wise, collected, a great leader, so on and so forth.

And yet, when I’m home, I feel anything but.

I tried using a potato peeler to cut my skin off earlier in the week. I’ve considered cutting the fat from my body, I’ve tried stabbing myself. I’ve thought of jumping from buildings and bridges, walking in front of moving cars, and tried various ways to kill myself.

I thought repeatedly of putting a sharp knife down my throat last week to prevent myself from eating or binging and purging. I frequently have visions of being mutilated or killed. My mind is filled with horrible images I am afraid to tell others.

I live in chaos.

I hide it well.

I so often feel legitimately insane.

Until I went to the psych ward. Then I felt sane. Oh, so sane.