A PERSON WITH ALL THREE DISORDERS!

by Ginnykins
(Key West, FL, USA)

Until I was about ten years old, in 1948, my eating habits were "normal". I disliked vegetables, though, so to make me eat them, my mother hid a piece of candy under my dinner plate. If I finished everything on the plate, I would get to retrieve the candy. Whether that reward system caused what happened next (and was the cause of the eating disorders), I have no idea.

I only know that I soon found myself going into the refrigerator after dinner and taking out oranges one at a time until I had eaten the entire dozen in the fruit bin. I was an only child, growing up in a household with my two parents and two maternal grandparents, both of whom were quite elderly and spoke little English. No one said a word to me about the oranges. Either they didn't notice or they thought a child eating a dozen oranges was normal!

After World War II, housing was difficult for returning servicemen to find. We took in my mother's brother, his wife and little daughter and my mother's sister, her husband and their little son. Dinner was a big affair, with the women cooking and the children playing. I, on the other hand, found myself binge eating, going into and out of the cold pantry, each time peeling and eating the fat off the pork chops that had been put there until dinner was ready. Again, no one reprimanded me when they found out, but they did get a big laugh out of it.

Fast forward ten years. I was struggling to hide the amount of food I was consuming, even when I wasn't hungry, and then starving myself for a few days to keep my weight reasonable. By that time I was doing some modeling in the department store in which I worked. I had to stay a small size in order to keep the job so I binged and starved (see bulimia signs and anorexia symptoms).

The years passed. I married, but the abnormal eating continued. I would eat a big meal, then continue eating snacks while watching television with my husband, who also never seemed to notice. We were married eight years, no children, and I was in a continual struggle to keep my weight normal. Somehow I managed to do that, but life was a succession of daydreaming about food and eating food and then starvation dieting.

After my divorce, I had a serious operation for the removal of a fibroid tumor that weighed ten pounds. The emergency surgery and recuperation ended the binge eating, but instead I couldn't eat at all! If I put food in my mouth, I tended to gag. This strange reaction caused me to go down to a hundred pounds and my friends thought I was dying of cancer. But I thought I looked great and reveled in the bones sticking out of my body (see What is Anorexia?). I went for a physical and my doctor asked if I thought I was thin, as he traced his fingers over my protruding bones. When I said, "no," he let it go and even when I bluntly said I had an eating disorder, he made no comment. So I let it go, too.

After two years of anorexia symptoms, my appetite returned but not to normal. The binge eating returned.

I continue consuming huge amounts of food, even after a regular meal (see compulsive overeating). However, now that I'm in my seventies, I'm not as concerned with my shape. I never starve myself, but I'll force myself to lay off the abnormal eating for a while. Then the out-of-control eating returns and I'm right back where I started……a twelve-year-old who can eat a dozen oranges at a time and not feel full.

I believe if this behavior began now rather than sixty years ago, someone would have offered help.