A Journey to Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has a journey to travel. However, not everyone has an eating disorder. This is my story, my journey to recovery from binge eating disorder.

Where It All Began: Childhood

I wasn’t always fat. In fact, I was a very athletic and physically active child.

But I have always loved sweets.

My earliest memories of bingeing are eating desserts, and sneaking them out of the kitchen like a stealth ninja so my parents couldn’t see or hear me.

I was incredibly good at that. Too bad you can’t get awards for sneaking food, I would’ve won the gold for sure!

Pictures of me at age 2 show a big, round belly on a pudgy-cheeked cutie (if I do say so myself!) Cute on a toddler, not so cute on a grown woman.

I had that belly until I was about 10, although it wasn’t as prominent the older I became. I always thought I was fat when I was young but isn’t that how it always goes? You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

I have many memories of riding my bike to a gas station with my friends, getting 2 candy bars, then riding to our elementary school playground and devouring the candy as fast as I could.

Then there was the time my cousin and I bought an 8-pack of donuts and I ate 4 of them in one sitting. I was as happy as a clam because my mom was at work and my dad was at home with the stomach flu (wow, what a detailed memory!), so neither of them had any idea what we were up to. My cousin ate 1 or 2 and I thought she was crazy for not eating more.

In hindsight, I should’ve realized eating 4 at once was not normal, but I was just a kid.

Those were the good old days- when I could eat like that and not gain weight because of how active I was in sports and just being a kid.

Fast forward to me at age 16. I started driving to and from school, so I lost the exercise I had been getting which was walking 10 miles a week. I was down to very little exercise, but still sneaking food.

So, what do you think happened next?

You got it. I started gaining weight. And not just normal weight gain, like a kid who’s growing, but significant weight gain.

An Eating Disorder Emerges

Ah, the college years…

Oh boy, my (unknown at the time) binge eating disorder was in full swing by that point. I was on my own, no one to tell me to eat my veggies or restrict my desserts, and I was overeating at every meal.

The only exercise I got was climbing the freakishly steep hill from my classes to my dorm each day.

That small amount of walking provided my body with no relief from the copious amounts of junk food I continued to feed myself.

I liken this time period to being like a kid in a candy store…alone…who goes home and her parents are gone for the weekend. So…yeah, to say I overate (and overate all the wrong things) is an understatement.

Needless to say, this period of my life was when my eating disorder really ramped up, and I had no way of stopping it.

Diet Failures

Looking back on my wedding day, compared to today, I was really quite thin.

Ok, thin might not be the right word there…how about not being as obese as I am now? Yes, that’s better.

A few years after my husband and I tied the knot, I decided enough is enough. I needed to lose some weight.

The Atkins Diet

Yeah, I had no success with that. I mean, come on- no carbs? Forget it! I couldn’t live on just meat, eggs, cheese, and diet soda. Blech!

After being super excited about it and spending $100 on Atkins-friendly food at the grocery store, I gave up– after only one day.

Weight Watchers

Did I have success with the Weight Watchers program? Of course. Did it last? Of course not.

I followed the points system as best I could and had some success. I never got down to a normal weight, but I took off about 25 pounds at my most successful go of it.

The thing about it is, I was using all of my points to eat sweets. I had mastered the art of losing weight, whilst still eating junk, I had cracked the magic code!

Weekends were always my biggest binge days. At that time (I’m not sure how it is now), Weight Watchers would allow us to have extra weekly points to use as we saw fit, in addition to the daily points allowance.

I took that opportunity to eat small amounts of sweets throughout the week, and save all of the weekly points for my weekend binges.

It worked! I was able to lose weight and binge. It was the best of both worlds.

Of course, it didn’t last for more than a few months at a time. I would always crumble under my eating disorder’s weight and go way over what I was supposed to be eating, then figuring I had blown it anyway, I’d have the biggest binge yet. You know, to make up for the lost time.

Pregnancy: Part 1

Alright, now comes the part of my journey that was hell on earth for me.

No, it’s not the fact that I became pregnant, I was overjoyed by that- it’s that I was so sick with hyperemesis gravidarum, that I could barely eat anything. It was the first time in my life that my body rejected food on a continuous basis.

The good news is that I lost 25 pounds in the first 2 months of that pregnancy.

The bad news?

My body went into starvation mode, which was obviously not only bad for me, but also terrible for our unborn son.

Luckily it was at that point that I turned a small corner and was able to keep more food down.

Long story short, I ended up gaining back 35 pounds, so a net total weight gain of 10 pounds for my whole pregnancy, which is actually the amount my doctor had said would be a good enough amount to gain seeing as how obese I was to start.

Ironically enough, our son was a 10 pounder, so technically I didn’t gain anything…right? 😉

Postpartum: Part 1

After our baby boy was born, it was a free-for-all for me once again.

I felt great, had stopped vomiting multiple times a day, and could eat as much as I wanted again! Woohoo!

The pregnancy weight came off pretty easily (I was breastfeeding), so I was in the sweet spot. Literally. I ate sweets upon sweets upon sweets. I mean, come on! I was at a weight that was 10 pounds below what I had weighed when I became pregnant, I deserved it, right?

Soon enough though, I was packing on the pounds at the speed of light.

And once again I realized something had to be done.

Diet Failure…Again

I went back to Weight Watchers off and on about 6 times throughout the years. Losing weight, only to gain it back again and again.

Finally, I came to the horrifying conclusion that I was doomed to live a life of obesity, obesity-caused illnesses (although the only complication I had was high cholesterol, luckily!), and premature death from complications from obesity.

To say I felt depressed and hopeless was an understatement.

A Diagnosis

Over the years, I had been seeing several different therapists and psychiatrists because our insurance was changing every few years with job changes.

Finally, my last psychiatrist told me he thought I had an eating disorder because of the way I talked about my relationship with food and my weight fluctuations.

I thought he was a tad kooky because I had always thought I was just weak and had no self-control or willpower.

The questions he asked perplexed me.

(You can get a sampling of questions similar to the ones he asked me here.)

How did he know all of my food secrets, the different ways I had interacted with food all those years, and what an unnatural and unhealthy way I had of eating?

Still, to this day, I can’t help but think sometimes that my eating disorder is my weakness, and it’s all my fault.

I feel self-conscious because I feel like most people who don’t have it, or aren’t familiar with it, just think I’m a pig and that I am making up excuses for overeating.

Related: Why Do You Overeat?

A Journey To Recovery From Binge Eating Disorder: Part 1

In 2016, I decided enough was enough. I had hit rock bottom with my struggles and I needed help.

I joined a support group of people just like me, with food addiction and unhealthy behaviors and relationships with food.

And guess what?

My life totally changed.

I followed their suggestions and I began losing weight! The group was not solely focused on weight loss, it was more focused on the reasons behind the compulsive behavior.

It was about cutting out foods that I couldn’t eat “normally”.

I worked really hard, and of course, I wasn’t perfect at keeping certain foods out of my mouth all of the time, but I did my best, and I was accepted by the group, flaws and all.

The self-loathing, self-disgust, and self-consciousness didn’t go away completely, but it greatly diminished.

I made wonderful friends that understood exactly what I was going through. It was magical.

I lost 88 lbs and 4 clothing sizes over the span of about 18 months. I felt on top of the world!

I liked clothes shopping again! I hadn’t felt like that since I was about 15.

And then it happened…

I got pregnant again.

Oh, boy.

Pregnancy: Part 2

I went into my second (and last) pregnancy dreading the morning sickness which I knew would inevitably come. I had flashbacks of the hell I went through with our first son.

But you know what? The second time around was different, as many people had told me. I felt really tired all the time in the beginning, but not horribly sick. The bad morning sickness came in the 3rd trimester, oddly enough.

I was able to eat like normal, but I soon discovered that I was craving sugar. I had cut sugar out of my diet for so long that the cravings had disappeared.

So, why were they coming back?

I had stopped going to my support group because I was bingeing again and didn’t feel I belonged there anymore.

Everything fell apart.

I started snacking again- another thing I had given up so that I wasn’t thinking about food every couple of hours. While pregnant, I needed to snack because if I let myself get too hungry I would feel nauseous.

I was eating every 2 hours like clockwork.

And you know what?

I gained weight like a madwoman! I don’t know why I was surprised…

The day I went in for my repeat c-section I weighed 15 pounds less than the heaviest I had ever been- the day I had walked into the support group meeting.

However, I was 9 months pregnant with what we soon found out was an almost 11-pound baby. But still…I had gained about 70 pounds of my hard-fought weight loss back!

Postpartum: Part 2

Surprisingly enough, I lost 40 pounds in the first 2 weeks after our second son was born. I thought that was a bit much, but the nurse said it was normal with having had such a large baby and all the fluids that I had retained during pregnancy were now leaving my body.

I was overjoyed with the quick weight loss; I enjoyed looking at myself in the mirror again! I didn’t even feel much like eating, my husband had to remind me to eat. That was a first!

I was, however, suffering from postpartum depression and anxiety– but that’s another issue.

I got up one morning, feeling a little off.

That night, I felt extremely ill. I shook uncontrollably on the couch while sitting next to my husband. He worriedly asked me if I needed to call the nurse on call. I told him I could wait and I would call in the morning.

So I went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up with a fever, vomiting, dizziness, and weakness. I think I may have even walked into a wall or two.

Long story short, I ended up in the ER and was admitted to the hospital overnight for observation. I was severely dehydrated and had acquired an infection from the hospital I had given birth in just 3 weeks prior. (I was admitted to that same hospital.)

My baby boy was only 3 weeks old and I had to spend the night away from him!

To say I was a mess is an understatement.

Packing On The Pounds…Again

When I came home from the hospital and started feeling better, it was a free-for-all once again. My appetite was back, and I felt the need to make up for the lost time, again.

Over the next 6 months, I managed to eat my way back up to the weight I was at when I went in to have our baby. I hadn’t been weighing myself over those 6 months because I didn’t want to face the fact that I was completely out of control with my eating.

A Journey to Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder: Part 2

Finally, I realized I had to get serious, once and for all. I needed to get back to the place where I had had success and recovery.

So, in February 2019, I went back to my support group. They welcomed me back with open arms.

It felt like I had never left.

It was about a month after I went back to the group that I became willing to give up sugar once again- I am a stubborn one!

I realized I needed to do whatever it took to get back to recovery.

A Hopeful Future

I have such hope and excitement for my future. I know I can take the weight off again- and keep it off- because my life depends on it.

With the help of my support group, and the determination to live to a ripe old age, I can and will do it!

Sometimes being stubborn isn’t so bad after all.