All about My Story

Thank you for coming to my blog.  I wanted to create this blog in an effort to share the knowledge I gathered in my short outpatient treatment for Binge Eating Disorder (BED) and how I have carried that information into my everyday life.  

I will start by giving you a little bit of history about me.   My love affair with food started very early in life.  I learned to bake and cook with my grandmother and mother.  Much like any child that grew up in a small town, you have an identity as you grow up and giving up that identity is sometimes so hard.  The identity becomes your protection.   Part of my identity was being a bigger person.  I can remember being big all the way back to junior high.  I remember some eating disorder behaviors being present in high school.   I lost my dad at a young age, my mom in my twenties and recently my stepfather.  As I tried to cope with the loss of my stepfather, my reliance on food became more and more prevalent.  I had no one left to be proud of me, so why did I care if I lived or didn’t live.  The pain was just entirely too much.  I somehow lost all of my identity when no one needed me.  That is how distorted my thinking became.  Never mind, that I had an amazing family that still needed me and a handful of friends that still liked my presence.   I had pushed the majority of them away with what I now label as my behaviors or defense mechanism.  I’ll hurt you before you can hurt me.   A few refused to go and a few chose to live in the background.   

I remember the day I was told it was believed that my eating disorder was serious enough to seek outpatient treatment.  I remember all the crying and thinking no, I couldn’t be this bad.  Truth be told, I was there, I knew what I was doing to myself; but somehow you are always the last one to admit it.  As well, I remember being terrified of telling all those people that loved me so much and how un-proud of me they were going to be.  I was being so weak.  Truth was they were all so proud of me for getting help for what they all knew was a problem.  

As I entered treatment, I thought I’ll go, they will make me eat right.  I’ll follow program and that is all I have to do.  And for the first few weeks, that is exactly what I did.  I thought this is too easy; I’ll be out of here in no time.  This is no challenge.   Until one Friday, I didn’t finish my meal and I had my first breakdown in program and it lasted for 5 whole days.  I really peeled back the onion than.  I won’t go into specifics, but thanks to very good treatment friends and counselors that waited for me to be ready.  I came through it and I got out of my “honeymoon phase”.  I started to face the real emotions behind the eating and really got to dig into my treatment and making myself whole again.  

I learned about grounding and really learning to sit with my feelings.  Knowing that it is ok not to be perfect and not labeling my faults as failures.  That was probably my biggest hurdle was learning to not use the word failure.  Most people would look at me and say there is no way she can have an eating disorder, she is big girl, she is not skinny.  They are so very wrong.  Eating disorders come in many forms and they impact people of all shapes and sizes.  

However, what I learned in treatment is that if I take it one meal, one snack at a time.  Food isn’t evil, it is so very yummy.  I learned to eat a whole host of new foods.  No foods are off limits, I just had to learn that they were not medication and eat them in reasonable amounts.   I threw away my old best friend the scale, the numbers are no longer important, it is how I feel on the inside and that I take care of me first.  I love to take care of others, but you can no longer take care of them if you are too busy harming yourself.   I will reveal so much through my little posts each day, but hopefully, this gives you enough information to want to keep reading about my adventure and to learn about why supporting people going through this process is so important.