Eating Disorders

As a kid I was a chubby kid.  I realize from my younger daughter I would have grown up and skinnier but I got a complex before that happened.  Now I tell my daughter she is like a Great Dane puppy.  She has size 8 adult shoe and is in the 4th grade.  Once she grows in her feet her body will stretch out.

My years growing up I had a mom who tried every diet and was (still isn't) never happy with her body.  As I entered the middle school age, an uncle close in age to me had nicknamed me chubs.  When he went to college I was DETERMINED not to let him call me that anymore.  I began to eat only a salad after school and I prided myself in using only on 20 punch lunch card throughout the entire year.  I was able to skip supper because my mom had seen me eat my earlier supper - the salad.  I most definitely was anorexic then and still didn't earn the honor of my uncle who was like a brother because he greeted me with Chubs when he returned the next summer even though I was without any body fat and not healthy.

Fortunately I had a high school coach who got me out of the cycle because she told me I could be good if I put some weight on.  I did - and became somewhat normal throughout high school.  I never saw myself as thin, but athletic - I was very critical about my looks.  So it was a huge surprise to me when my school voted me Homecoming Queen my Senior year.  Ironically, my influential uncle was the King the year he graduated.

Being an overachiever, as very common with someone with an eating disorder, I began college two days after graduating.  Once again I had been challenged by my guidance counselor.  I was in love and want to hurry through college so that I could get on with my life.  I was on a path to get my BA degree in 3 years - my counselor said it was impossible.  I set out to prove her wrong.

To make this possible I lived with my brother who was going to be a senior at the same university.  However, he was married and I came to find out I was very jealous of her in a weird way as I always wanted a better relationship with my brother.  This arrangement led to a job at a pizza place and the fear of adding too much weight made the eating disorder rear its ugly head.  At first I only got rid of the pizza I ate.  Over the next 2 years it increased to a point where I wouldn't keep anything I ate.  I knew where every bathroom was on campus.  I knew I had a problem.  I sat in on an eating disorder support group and began to attend regularly. It was members of the group remembering a former member of the group who had gone to treatment and died one month after treatment due to a heart attack - her electrolytes were messed up.  This was my wake up call.  I met with the leader of the group and we made a call to my parents who helped me to arrange a month over Christmas in 1987 to attend treatment.  I didn't think I was as bad as some of those girls - I was only purging 5-7 times a day - I didn't think anything of it. I was sick.  At that time I weighed 156 pounds and was very thin at that weight.

I learned that food will always be my enemy. Dieting and restricting food is very dangerous for a person like myself.  I have struggled internally as my weight reached new highs year after year.  I have been on every diet out there and always came back to Weight Watchers which worked with the earliest weight gain and I became a lifetime member at that time.

With over 100 pounds to lose to get back to the weight I was when I entered the hospital all the diets out there took too long and my willpower would wilt.  I have decided if I can get 60 of the 100 off at this point, I can come to accept myself there.

hCG has given me the willpower that I do not have on my own.  In treatment we learned to follow the 12 steps of Overeaters Anonymous (OA).  Instead of alcohol, the substance we learned to avoid and become powerless to was sugar and refined flour.  Is this not the principal this protocol is based on?  Detoxifying my body seems to be the right thing to do.  It is why I feel this is the answer to my many years of internal struggle.