Dear Dee:

I am very relieved that today, until sometime after 11 am, it was so much cooler than the insufferable heat of the last three days (it is warming up now, after 12 pm). You must love the sun a whole lot to be happy in that heat wave (were you?)

I too suffered from a couple of EDs for the longest time, and still dealing with some anxiety around food, eating and around body weight/ image.

I think that EDs and Body image are closely linked and that these linked topics are complex. Much of it is caused and maintained by social messages that people repeat to us: family members when we were children, all the way to online commercials. I think that binge eating is about feeling better, sometimes after depriving ourselves from food (rebelling against the intentional deprivation), sometimes not, and the purging is about not wanting to gain weight, a symbolic undoing of overeating (symbolic because we don’t purge all that we overeat, and therefore, we gain weight).

To make my response more personal to you, I read some of what you shared earlier that may be relevant to your binge eating (this is why I am posting to you later than I expected yesterday):

Sept 2020: “I have a really hard time communicating and saying the things I want to say.. I have a really hard time with communication as a whole, speech isn’t something I’m very good at”- it is way easier to use our mouths to overeat (and the reward is immediate), than it is to learn to communicate more effectively.

“I have a hard time setting boundaries with people”- same thing: overeating is easy and instantly rewarding; setting boundaries with people is difficult.

“I resent my father because I just don’t know why he would do that considering my mother is an amazing woman”- it is very difficult to truly resolve a troubled relationship with a parent and eventually experience the reward in doing that. It is.. easy to resolve our desire to eat as much as we want to eat and experience an instant reward.

“I would like to think I was just about the easiest kid ever to have”- to your parents you were the easiest kid ever, I imagine. But your life as a child was not easy.

“I act as if nothing is wrong for me.. I don’t know how to act as if anything IS wrong”- again, it is difficult to acknowledge and address what is wrong within us, it is easy to overeat and the reward is instant.

Nov 2020: “I don’t like to dwell on negative feelings so I just feel nothing”- but the difficult feelings are still there when we “just feel nothing”, and we overeat to feel better.

Jan 2021:  “About a week ago I was met with some very intense abdominal pain… So I head over to the E.R… eventually have an ultrasound, and CT scan. They had given me some morphine for the pain.. in conclusion after all the hours I spent in that room they came up with nothing. All they had to tell me was that I am quite anemic, which I have of course already known for years… At 22, I already have about $7,000.00 in medical debt”- it may be those feelings underneath the “just feel nothing” that have led to the ER visits and the medical debt. Maybe.

anita