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I knew about your struggles with bulimia. I didn't know you struggled with anorexia too. My only real experience with it was when my husband was on suicide watch (depression) and two women in his ward struggled with OCD related anorexia. My heart still breaks for them. I don't know how they overcome it.
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Eating disorders are a very strange animal, and a person can cycle through more than one of them in her lifetime as she goes through the phases of her illness, from its worst to being on her way to remission.
The joke is that a bulimic is a failed anorexic.
Anorexia is not a praiseworthy thing by any means but it requires a steely will & focus. And if, after a time -- in my case, just about a year -- this effort exhausts a person, she may lapse from her adamant fasting. And the lapse is likely not to be as simple as eating a sandwich. (As people sarcastically urge them to: "Just eat a burger.") No. It's likely to occur as unleashing of the floodgates, into a flat-out binge. And then, in horror over what she's done, she may recover some of her steely will & attempt to undo the damage by purging in some way. Overexercising with a purpose, in my case.
Then, with a therapist's care, a person may conquer the purging impulse, without healing the bingeing impulse, and end up with symptoms of binge eating disorder. And when that calms down, will simply end up with a bad tendency to overeat.
It's all in remission now. That happened more than 12 years ago. The thing that I still have to watch for in myself is bingeing.
But I remember the demonic possession of anorexia pretty vividly. I think it's like being in a manic phase. (I've got a bipolar friend & we have discussed the similarities.) Yeah, it's definitely about more than being skinny. Women & very young girls die from it. So it's sad that it's become an easy term of disparagement & synonymous with simply being thinner than the person making the accusation.
