Bulimia Help

When I think about how different my life was just one year ago today it’s pretty hard to believe I was ever that person. Yet in truth my entire life had been plagued by two issues, the intense anxiety that life seemed to cause me and the comfort that I could apparently gain by using food and eating disordered behaviours as my security blanket. In the earlier years of life I overate whenever I could, I could spend months trawling through the why’s and what if’s but for now I’ll just stick to the facts. At 13 I found a new trick – starvation. It made me high, ‘in control’ and it’s physical effects made me more popular because lets face it, the world is crazy. Suddenly no matter what people said about me, thought about me, did to me, didn’t matter anymore because I had the most powerful anti-anxiety drug in the world, and I had ‘control.’

Cut to April 12th 1999, age 14, alone in my bathroom, in a mid afternoon frenzy I dance with the devil for the very first time. I still have my diaries from those days, generally they are too painful to look back on even now, I thought I was on to something wonderful, it was like I had been given the answer to all of my prayers but the hard cold reality of it all is that I would spend the next ten and a half years of my pitiful life a slave to Bulimia Nervosa.

I know I've bloged about this before, but honestly it gets me so emotional. If you have a spare five minuted please visit

www.somedaymelissa.com

It terrifies me that this could have been any one of us, it still could be. Melissa Avrin had bulimia for five years and lost her life, I had bulimia for over ten years and somehow I am still alive, its luck and nothing more. I want you all to fight extra hard tonight, today, whatever you are going through, Ive been able to see the beauty in this world during the past year, it is worth the fight, life is beautiful x x

In just 19 days time I will have been in recovery for an entire year. Finally I have taken my life back, after ten and a half years of hell, I am not winning, I have won. I can honestly say I feel that I have beaten bulimia even in this short amount of time.

Living life is amazing, it is the greatest thing there is. The hardest thing in this world might be to live in it but the best thing in this world is also to live in it. So I've decided I will be leaving here soon, it is time to move on. I plan on visiting once a month maybe just to check in, to keep reminding people that recovery is possible, to keep my own personal story alive so that hopefully everyone can continue to see that this can be beaten!

God I never thought I would get the chance to write a blog like this, I have tears in my eyes just thinking about it all. You can be here, you can be writing these words, believe in me, believe in yourselves and never believe in bulimia again.

I have a load of you on facebook and it would be great to have even more so we can keep in touch once i've gone. You can find me by my email address (JUST TAKE OUT THE SPACES AND X's - I don't want it turning up in a search so I've done it that way)

c XX ath X eri X ne_ 3@XX hot X mail.co.uk

I wish you all the best of luck, BULIMIA CAN BE BEATEN I AM LIVING PROOF <3 x x

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to share a new strategy I've been using really successfully recently. As most of you know I'm a massive fan of structured eating, even though I'm not as strict with it anymore because it's pretty natural to me I still make sure I eat every 3-4 hours and have three meals and one or two snacks a day.

But there are two main times when those cravings to overeat and binge are still around.. 1)When I have a hangover 2) just before my period is due.

Firstly and very importantly I've really learned to accept these feelings, I know they will happen, I know that it doesn't mean I will relapse and I know that I don't need to be so afraid of feeling this way.

So when I have these days I've started to adapt my structured eating so that I can eat every 2-3 hours. It's really working for me and I imagine it might be beneficial to others. For example rather than having my usual breakfast I will split up the food, have half of it at 8am and then eat again at 10am. So say if I was going to have some porridge (oatmeal) with a banana and a glass of fruit juice for my breakfast I might just have the porridge and then eat the banana and fruit juice a little later. I also usually add an extra snack in on these days.

I'm finding it really beneficial so I thought I would share. I really wouldnt want to eat that regularly most days as I find the 4 hour gap is perfect, but on those handful of days each month it seems to be a really effective method.

So it's been nearly eleven months of recovery for me now, but I know alot of you really struggle with structured eating at the start so I wanted to share how I personally took it on. I must stress this was my own approach, some may not find the methods I used helpful at all but here we are...

*Structured Eating is when you eat every 3-4 hours through the day, usually three meals and two or three snacks, eating foods from all the food groups, not banning anything and trying to make sure you get a healthy amount of calories every single day*

For the first few weeks that I used SE I was really strict and almost obsessive, at times it felt like I had replaced one obsession with another but I had faith that soon it would come naturally to me and I wouldn't have to be thinking about food and meals and how I was eating every second. This did happen, things get much easier I promise. It's hard to know what we should be eating, how much etc so I did as much research as I could, found out about the benefits of good nutrition, read about different foods, where I could get carbs, good fats, protein and fiber from etc. I knew a lot of it already but it really helps to read some of the benefits. The somethingfishy website has an excellent resource for reading about vitamins and minerals from foods too. With as much knowledge as I could find, I started my plan.

Recently my mind is consumed by wanting to do lots of exercise so I can get fitter, hopefully live a longer life but yet also 'so I can look better' I only ever had a brief fling with exercise addiction around the age 15-16 (i'm 25 now).

In honesty I probably should do a lot more exercise than I currently do for health reasons alone, but I'm scared this might lead me into a whole different place, i'm scared if I see my body changing I'll get really obsessive again.

Has anyone tried to exercise more in recovery if you we're not addicted to exercise before? I want to be the healthiest I can be, but I don't want to fool myself or get myself into a situation where the only thing that matters is weight/shape/fat/looks again! I guess i'm scared I wont find the balance because I always have to have everything in excess x x

Yesterday I sat out in the park on the grass under trees for four entire hours enjoying the sunshine. Today i'm sat here, someone is cutting the grass at the Chinese centre over the road and I'm inhailing the lovely smell, god I love summer.

Normal activities for the summer you might think? Not for me.

I have had such severe Hayfever for the past six years that going outside for a minute used to be unbarable, I used to have to OD on all my medication just to get by, last year at Download Festival I took an entire months worth of allergy tablets in three days! Summer is usually hell, I've ended up in hospital with breathing difficulties from it a few times too. I'm not even taking medication this year my symptoms are there but they are so minimal I don't need to take anything. I know allergies can start at different times of year, but I always get them early in the season so I'm pretty sure they wont get much worse than this.

I can hardly believe my luck, But whats the difference? FOOD! Good food, good nutrition, I had no idea it could have an impact on how our bodies react to allergens until I did some reading up! So there we have it, another awesome positive to come from recovery. I could literally burst with happiness, I know alergies are nothing compared to what some people live with but I've always found them so debilitating it's a whole other level of freedom!

I hate days like these.

I feel so low and so depressed. Im still fine food wise, no real desire to b/p more that normal. But I just find myself sat here in a daze that I can't snap out of, things seem foggy, I can't even find the motivation to tidy the house or do anything but sit here and stare into space.

Ideally I'd just like to go sleep until my fiance gets home from work, in reality I know that wont even help. What the hell is wrong with me? I hate not being able to snap myself out of days like this because I love happy positive full of energy me, I hate sad lonely depressed me.

Hi everyone! Often I have people asking me how on earth I made it so far in recovery, how I started, what helped the most and so on, so I thought I would write a new blog about it. Apologies I know this is old ground for a lot of you, but if it can be helpful to anyone I thought it would be good to share. Looking back I will say that there were/are six main things that have helped and continue to help me through.

1) Hitting rock bottom.
It's sad that it often takes feeling like you've hit rock bottom before you want to get better, I see a lot of people mention this phrase and it was really true for me too. I was bingeing and purging continually, multiple times every single hour of every day, I couldn't sleep at night because I was so scared I wouldn't wake up again, I had pains everywhere, it was the worst time in my whole ten years of bulimia.

2) Wanting recovery more than ANYTHING and accepting that changes will happen.
This is a tough one. On my day one I must admit I was more like 80% committed to this than 100%. But I did want to get better more than anything, I told myself that no matter how scary it got, how much my weight changed, how hard it was to feel emotions without being able to binge and numb them - anything had to be better than the life I had been living. Luckly I soon found out this was true and I'd say within the first few weeks I completely talked myself into being committed to recovery 100%.

3) Finding this website
Speeks for itself really! This website played a very large role in saving my life.

4) Using structured eating

I had lunch with my fiance about an hour ago, as part of it we had the most amazing sweet potato wedges, but when I saw he's left most of his on his plate after he had finished my brain started to go into overdrive. I was sat there thinking how I just needed to eat them all.

I've been doing so well, I know my relapses always start with overeating even if it's minimal so I am really trying to stay on top of it. I also knew that if those wedges were not out of the houes I would have had to have eaten them all the second he left. The bulimic in me also knew full well that him putting them in the bin would not stop me (I know thats disgusting btw but it is a behaviour I have resorted to in the past) so I asked him to flush them :')

I love having him know how crazy I am sometimes (and I mean crazy in a lighthearted way) he flushed his leftover food and then we just had a giggle. It's amazing how I can even laugh at myself sometimes now, more importantly I knew I was safe again because the fixation was gone.

It got me thinking if anyone else has come up with some different methods to stop b/p or asked people to help them in random ways?x x