A Message from a Recovered Patient, Christina:


    It's hard to say how it began, when it began, or why I felt the way I did. If I were to think back, I remeber being the only girl in my fourth garade class who had to wear a bra. I remember being taller and always in the back row in elementry school class pictures. I simply delveloped quicker than many of the girls in school. When I was younger, I was a gymnast but had to stop when money became tight. I cpntinued to go to dance for a little while after then, but I just wasn’t the sporty chick in school. My lunch was usually cheese fries, which was common in the middle school caffiteria. I tried my best to avoid participating in gym class.

            I was a gothic girl with an attitude and cuts up and down my arms. Everyone I hung out with wore fishnets and chains on their pants and we listened to death medal. It was the cool thing in my mind, all because Cory liked it. Cory was a year older than me and I loved him more then anything. We made pacts that if one of us cut ourselves the other would too. This was to try to help eachother stop cutting. Well that didn't work. It turns out that Cory, the love of my life, cheated on me with one of my friends. This was in middle school and it was only a kiss, but to me that was everything. I thought I would be the only girl he would ever kiss. We broke up, and he went to high school. In 8th grade it all changed for me with him being gone. I didn't wear baggie UFO pants, and I didn’t get much joy out of cutting anymore.

            I found a new love, THE GYM. Working out became my favorite thing to do. Everyone in my family was fat, and I knew I never wanted to end up like them. Shortly after I decided I would try to eat better and go on a diet. Within weeks “eating better” became eating less and less, until my meals dwindled to just salad and water (and that was only when I was forced). With every bite of salad and every sip of water, came 100 crunches on my medicine ball in my room. I would go to the gym and work out. Then I would do crunches. Then I would go for a run. I lost a good amount of weight and was down to a smaller size. But in my mind, all I thought was “what if I could lose even more?”

            Around this time, I remeber my best friend saying to me, "It's great… you can eat whatever you want and just throw it up. You never feel full and you won't gain any weight. And you can really eat anything!" So I tryed this new "diet", and it worked. I could eat salad and throw it up. So I didn't mind eating salad a few times a day if I knew I wasn't going to keep it down for long. Then I thought, if I'm going to throw up I might as well eat whatever I want, and as much as I want because I will never be full as long as I throw up. It started as an occasional binge and purge with a few days of restriction. I was back to what I thought was a normal eating pattern.

            Then I switched high schools, and didn't make many friends. My dad and step mom got a divorce. My mom's acoholism worsened, and so did my eating disorder. In 10th grade, I was diagnosed with Ulceritive Colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. It wasn't a severe case, and I was still able to hide my not-so-normal relationship with food. The funniest part about it was that it felt normal to me. I thought this was how people stayed skinny. This is what they all do when they want to have a bad food: they eat it and then they throw it up. It all made perfect sense in my head.

            At the end of my senior year I was in the hospital for 2 weeks with stomach problems. I couldn't eat anything without throwing it up. However, the difference was that this time the vommitting was not self induced. My body simply rejected the food. But, secretly I loved every minute of it. Despite the pain and agony I was in, despite all the crying, I was loosing weight since I couldn’t eat. During my stay in the hospital, I got worse and worse. I was put on steriods, which made me retain a lot of water. My Ulceritive Colitis got better, but the steroids made me FAT! The doctors said it was just water and once I was off the medicine I would go back to my normal size. I refused to believe them.

            The weight made me hate myself. I would just stand in front of the mirror and cry and scream at the top of my lungs, and then cry some more. I couldn't stand the sight of myself. My thighs were like two jumbo ballons. My stomach looked like I was pregnant, and my face was a big round ball. I wouldn’t leave the house, except to go to the gym. I binged and purged, and then took fat burners. I would go to the gym in  sweatshirts and pants and do 3-5 hours of cardio, and follow that by sitting in the sauna for at least an hour. I remember one day I almost passed out in there, and had to lay on a bench in the locker room for awhile before I could drive home. Still, no one knew. I was so good at keeping my secret and I loved that.

            Once I graduated high school, I was binging and purging 2-5 times a day. I got my personal training certification and eventually got a job at a gym. This was perfect! I could finally learn how to eat well while teaching others to love working out as much as me! But my clients couldn’t train like me, because that would be over training. Over trainin continuously breaks down the muscle tissuse without ever giving it time to grow. I knew that I couldn’t let that happen to my clients, but I thought that I was different because after all I was so much more experienced than them.

            The gym I worked at was very focused on bodybuilding. I was always interested in this. The owner was a figure girl, along with some of the trainers. I wanted, more than anything to do a figure show. So I started training, 45 minuntes of cardio every morning on an empty stomach and lifting 6 days a week one body part a day . Meals were every three hours on the dot and I had my cell phone alarm set to keep me on track, in addition to one gallon of water a day. I was so dedicated. In the meantime, one of the trainers introduced me to his brother in law, a tall muscular built blonde who was in the coast guard. We met and began to date. He fully supported my dream to compete. As time went on however, he became less enthuiastic about the show and hated that we couldn't do things like split a dessert or stay out late because I was always on a schudule. He had a meaner side to him, a whole different person almost- extremely controlling and over protective. I won’t go into detail about our relationship but all I will say is that it made my bulimia again grew worse and worse. I knew I'd never be able to do a figure show while I was bulimic.

            The last year of my eating disorder was the worst by far. The binges were huge and I started taking laxatives, in case I didn't get every last bit of food out, and diuretics so I didn’t retain water from the laxatives. I also overdosed on fat burners a few times and layed in my bed for 3 days straight unable to do anything, I felt like a drug addict. I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom without falling. I decided that this was it. I couldn’t do it to myself anymore. I've made this promise to myself countless times, with every bite I'd swear this is the last binge and I'll do better tomorrow. Then, I would wake up the next morning to an uncontrollable desire to binge again that day. This time it was different though. This time I was ready for recovery. I would do whatever it took to get better, to end this visous cycle once and for all. I quit my job to spend the entire summer focusing on recovery. I was sure I'd have to go to rehab, but the insurance didn't cover it and there was no way for my mom to afford it. So, I had to do it on my own. I stuck to my food plan from my nutritionist and the days began adding up. It started with one meal, then two meals, then progressed to one or two days. It took me about 2 months of out patient treatment with Dr. Erwin before I could get an entire week of freedom from bulimia. But I remember after that first whole week feeling this huge sense of accomplishment. I still had urges but I learned to control them. I learned to allow myself some slip ups, because no one is perfect. Through support groups, I learned Iwasn’t alone, and I had a serious problem. But it was okay because I wasn't alone. So many others felt just as I did. We all felt like the fattest girl in the room. We all felt that everyone was staring at us because we were fat and ugly, when really they just liked our shirt. We all felt a loss of control around food. We all felt a high when we didn’t eat or when we threw up while our friends just sat back and kept all the calories they have consumed. We all just wanted to be one size smaller, just a few pounds lighter. But it's when you are truly happy with yourself and learn to love and accept who you are, that you can be fully recovered.