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Disordered eating patterns: NEED HELP BADLY, binging, purging (exercise type)

I'm ready to admit that I have a problem. I'm ready to tell my school conselor too because I trust him and he is a very nice man.

I think the easiest way to put it is that I have disordered behavior when it comes to food and exercise. I have unrealistic un-recomended goals for myself. Im not happy with myself. I feel fat often. My routiene lately is to binge eat in the morning and restrict the rest of the day and exercise or restrict all day and then binge at night. I exercise, not to tone up or feel confident, but to make myself not hate myself, to burn calories. Thats what it really comes down to and thats pretty sad. While Im on the machines I keep track in my head which foods I've burned off and what more do I have to do. I take ritalin sometimes to supress my appetite. I wish I could get perscribed something because sometimes it feel like I have this urge of insatiable hunger until a package of something is empty or my stomach hurts. NEVER BEFORE. I think cigarettes are gross but sometimes I smoke them because I think itll take away my appetite or speed up my metabolism. Its not my moms fault. Just because she was bulimic doesnt mean Im 100% sure to be **** up. Its like every comment I've ever recieved about my weight is burned into my brain, never to be forgotten. When my boyfriend touched my thighs and arms I unconciously grimace. I feel so huge and gross next to him.

This is how my day went

1. oooh yes, I'm 130 today even though I ate ice cream and cookies! hooray for me.

2. oatmeal 150 (unsweetened)

3. seaweed salad and vegetable tempura. my bf was giving me a hard time and I was like "I JUST WANT VEGETABLES OKAY???" and he was like "you know, you have to let go sometimes" (or something along those lines) and I was like "TRUST ME, I DO!!" I was being such a bitch. I wonder if he notices any of my weird behavior. One time I chewed chocolates and spit them out but I guess he mustnt have noticed?? Also, hes always trying to peek at my phone and when he sees that Im calculating calories or writing down foods I GET SOOOOOOOOOOO EMBARASSED. as if trying to lose weight means I accept that I'm fat and disgusting....which is pretty much true. Or that I'm so stupid that I can't just listen to my body and I have to calculate it because Im an airhead american.

4. Smoked weed. Got the munchies, hard. I ate a little seaweed salad. Then, I started to crave junk food. I quickly steamed a carrot and ate it with wasabi and ginger, thinking it would take the edge off my hunger...WRONG. I ate 2 HUGE bowls of bryers strawberry iced cream(120/half cup), prolly half a gallon. 2 rows of extra chunky chocolate chip cookies (80c each). I cant even indulge like a normal person. I have to torture myself with the numbers. I've been trying to thank god and pray before eating but sometimes Im such a monster I just eateateat.

5. Smoked a cigarette, drank cups of green tea, looked online at pictures of emaciated girls, went to workout for over an hour.

Now I'm back here. Making confessions because Im tired of hiding from myself. The only thing that consoles me after binging is burning calories and/or planning to fast or restrict the following day.

Atleast I finished off the junk food I bought. Oh, and I drank a hot chocolate (150c)

If anyone has ideas of how I can overcome this total ****, lemme know.

I just want to be happy, but sometimes it feels like being thin is mas importante. wow, what terrific values!

P.S. dont bother if youre just going to say something that we both know wont really help like "youre at a healthy weight, you arent fat"

first off stop smoking weed its not gonna help you not eat as much.
but other than that just se a calorie goal for the day somewhere along the lines of 1200 calories and try to make sure you eat that every day when your body gets used to that much food it will stop being hungery all the time.

Hi veganchild. Are you here to try to get into recovery? There isn't much we can do for you, you need to seek outside help and professional counseling and support.  There are so many problems that I see you going through, I'm not sure what kind of support we can even give you.  In addition, Calorie Count is all about healthy weight maintenance and we cannot and do not support those with eating disorders who are unwilling to seek professional treatment and get into active recovery. 

However, there are some resources we can point you to so you can get help:

• Matthew Tiemeyer's Eating Disorders page on Calorie Count
• Matthew Tiemeyer's Gudie to Eating Disorders on About.com

In addition please check out the Eating Disorders Resource thread with hotline numbers and websites to help you and your family get the help you might need.

Original Post by veganchild:

P.S. dont bother if youre just going to say something that we both know wont really help like "youre at a healthy weight, you arent fat"

Well... what do you want us to say then? Carry on doing what you're doing? Obviously that isn't working for you.

I think telling your school counsellor is a good move, perhaps you could also talk to your boyfriend about your eating difficulties. He's obviously concerned about you.

You also need to stop smoking and quit looking at pro-ana sites. They're full of **** anyway; why fuel your eating disorder when it isn't making you happy?

Hi veganchild.  Your bingeing is most likely caused by restrictive eating.  I was on that cycle too and also purged by exercising and it was the most depressing time of my life.

I know, we all want to be thin to look good and feel good.  It is not wrong to want that.  I was one who wanted to speed things along and thought the more excessive restricting I did the quicker the pounds would fall off.  Oh, they fell off all right, but that promoted bingeing, which of course led to obsessive exercising.  It really took over my life.

Do seek the help of your guidance counselor, it will help telling someone who has connections to people who can help.  Do know that your situation is not unusual and you are not a freak.  This whole mess that girls (and I'm sure boys too) get into can get started by a single comment when we are young.  I was told by the very skinny girl who sat in front of me in 7th grade that I looked fat wearing corduroy pants. Things like that stick in our brains forever, don't they?  And that gets us thinking we must be fat, leads us to dieting, and of course we want to succeed so we are very careful about dieting, then all of a sudden our bodies inspire us to binge.

But bingeing is our body's normal response to dieting; it is trying to keep you from starving.  It is your built-in survival instinct at work.

Try to eat whenever you are hungry--but try to maintain good quality in your food choices. And don't choose a salad when your body is telling you it wants something heartier. It is excessive hunger that will set off a binge.  You may gain weight by doing this, but bingeing will soon be eliminated if you keep taking care of your hunger.  Eventually, if you stay well-fed according to hunger cues, your food intake will drop and your weight will normalize. 

My best advice is to eat as a child would.  Very young children eat only when hungry, and if there's no junk food around, they will eat the healthy stuff that is around.  And they stop when they are full.  Their head is not full of calories and fat grams because all they need to do is listen to their bodies.  Have you ever seen a baby tighten up his mouth, not wanting his mother to stick any more food into his mouth?  This is because he is in tune with his body and knows he's full.  It is when we stop listening to our own body's hunger cues that things get fouled up.

thank you for your response. I'll try to keep the 'eat like a kid' thing in mind. :)

vc,

you're stuck in a horrible, vicious cycle that is only going to intensify and perpetuate your deep, festering self-hatred.  your disorder is serving a purpose for you--you are giving yourself a reason to continue beating yourself up and to run away from whatever it is about yourself that you deeply fear.  are you afraid that if you didnt have your disorder you wouldn't have an excuse for all your "failures" and "inadequacies?"  are you afraid that if you didn't have all the distractions of your miserable habits that there would be nothing left?   do you think you deserve this kind of non-life-style?  you are running, both figuratively and literally, and hiding from yourself and from pain that you don't want to deal with.  you are making emotional turmoil into something physical, tangible and distractive. you are poisoning yourself so that no one else gets the chance.

i have never been through what you are going through, but i firmly believe that all of our disorders are manifestations of pretty parallel issues.

on some level you probably know that if you were to eat three balanced meals and snacks a day you would be able to maintain your weight and be healthy. but then everything you're running from might catch up to you and stare you right in the face and make you get down on your knees and polish its shoes.

hmm. thanks for letting me see things from your perspective. I'm really trying. Today I haven't worked out or overeaten or undereaten so things are going well. I hope I can keep this up.

working out is definitely a good thing but I don't want to do it for the wrong reasons.

have you ever tried making a meal plan and forcing yourself to stick to it? sometimes giving yourself too much flexibility makes it easy to slip back into negative habits and patterns.  there are physiological factors at play here, too, and, like swanhilda said, restricting sets you up to binge. 

i say this because real, lasting change requires a committment and a concrete plan of action. 

it's great, though, that you are making progress!  finding a point of moderation is hard work.

i apologize if my blathering last post sounded like i was putting words in your mouth.  i guess i just really firmly believe that disordered eating has much deeper roots than sometimes we want to think.  that's why it's so hard to "just stop" or "just eat"...because the disorder was created to serve a purpose, whatever it may have been.

I've been trying to eat 'normal' yesterday and today. I had 1410 calories yesterday and I gained a tiny bit of weight. I'm just going to try and stick from 1200-1400 and see what my body does.

That's a pretty low number, but it's a good start while you try to adapt mentally to changing your eating habits.  you will want to shoot higher so that you are able to get adequate nutrients and arent restricting your body. otherwise your physiological needs may contradict your progress.

good work on making necessary changes :)

Original Post by veganchild:

I've been trying to eat 'normal' yesterday and today. I had 1410 calories yesterday and I gained a tiny bit of weight. I'm just going to try and stick from 1200-1400 and see what my body does.

 Vegan, you are still undereating.  A teen needs a bare minimum of 1500 calories.  And that's the bare minimum.  Most actually need more. 

You have a whole host of issues to deal with and even after all of our advice, if we can't get you to eat the minimum, I don't know how we would even go about the other problems you have with food, weight, purging, etc.

I highly suggest you see a professional. We here at CC can only help people who are willing to help themselves.  This includes getting outside support.