Food Recovery
Food Noise
I think about food all the time, I can’t seem to stop. Why do I keep thinking about food and why can’t I just stop myself from eating? I don’t undestand why I don’t stop myself when it should be something so simple and so easy.
It’s something I feel great embarrasment and guilt about, eating in secret and hiding food, feeling incredibly sick and uncomfortable and yet I still continue to do it. How do I stop? How can I heal from this? Why did I start doing this in the first place?
I’m on a journey to try and find answers to these questions although I think I know where it stems from already.
How It Started
I was 13 when I started getting comments about my body, I was always thin growing up but once I became a teenager and my body started changing (as it should when you are growing out of becoming a child) I started getting called “sugar hips” by a foster mother because apparently the sugar I put in my tea was “going straight to my hips” … As a growing teenage girl your hips are supposed to grow, it is biologically normal for these changes to happen but as a 13 year old I was not taught that the changes and the growth happening to my body was normal. So I decided I needed to lose weight, it took one comment for 13 year old me to start counting my calories and weighing myself every single day. I would have mental challenges with myself on how little I could eat and how much weight I could lose each week.
When I was 14 I was only 49 kg and still fixated on how small I could get and the same foster mother that called me sugar hips encouraged me to use laxatives to help me lose weight, so 14 year old me started having a laxative after every meal. I didn’t know how negatively this would affect my body, all I knew is that I wasn’t allowed to put on weight because if I did I would receive comments and judgement. I eventually could not make a bowel movement without taking laxatives and even then I was barely making any bowel movements, I was beginning to become extremely weak, I could barely lift a tub of yoghurt.
How it’s Going
After moving to a different city, getting married and moving into our own place my relationship with food is still very complicated, I tried healing from an eating disorder on my own but it was a constant struggle between wanting to lose weight again and trying to have a positive body image as well as trying to have a healthy relationship with food… I could not do it on my own and I still can’t do it on my own.
I am now almost 25 and have only recently been diagnosed with binge eating disorder after opening up to my psychiatrist about my eating habits of binging and restricting and the struggles of how I see my body. My psychiatrist encouraged me to see my GP to get a referral so I can see a dietition, not to help me lose weight but to help me learn how to better my relationship with food.
I haven’t yet seen the diatition but when I do I plan to continue to write about the journey towards healing from binge eating disorder…. Part 2 coming soon
