Has anyone beaten bulimia on their own?

[MolkosTeenageAngst]

I have had bulimia since my mid-teens, I’m now in my 30s so about 20 years. When I was in my teens I didn’t really binge, I was largely starving myself and would purge after eating anything and was underweight but I managed to get myself eating again, however my eating has remained disordered and the purging has continued. For around the last 10 years I will binge ahead of a purge, the extent of my bulimia has fluctuated over the years but never gone away.

It is quite bad at the moment and I feel I have no control over it. I feel like I hardly ever eat healthy meals and my portions are massive. I eat large amounts of junk food and my brain is constantly thinking about food. I eat okay at work but I live alone and as soon as I get home I am overeating. I regularly try to stick to diets, avoid buying trigger foods and try to get a handle on it but within a few days I am binging and purging again. I have a high stress job and as soon as things are hard I will give in to my cravings.

I have tried to get help twice, once aged 17 and I was told in my local area children’s ED services went up to 16 and adults didn’t start until 18 so there was no help available to me. The second time was around 4 years ago, I had an appointment with a psychiatrist due to other MH issues and talked about the bulimia, she sent a letter to my GP asking he refer me to the local ED service but he said as my weight was in the normal range he wouldn’t make the referral.

I really want to get a grip on thi. I know the health risks and I have tested my blood sugar and it is in the prediabeties range, I get palpitations after making myself sick, I can’t see a dentist but I have permanent toothache and I know this will be making it worse. I’m scared of throat cancer and that I will die a premature death because of it but I cannot face seeking help through the nhs just to be turned away again and I can’t afford private therapy even if I thought I would be able to seek it out, I feel a lot of shame around it and it’s hard to admit to do I don’t know that I could express it to anybody again. I want to work through this on my own but I don’t know how or where to begin or what methods i could try.

Has anyone managed to beat this on their own and, if so, how did you do it? Were there online resources or a particular diet that worked? If anybody can point me in the direction of anything I could use to get past this I would be really grateful.

I'm sorry you're in this situation. I also have bulimia, not as longstanding as yours, but have other co-morbid mental health conditions alongside the eating disorder.

Your weight shouldn't be a barrier to a referral to ED services, however I know how hard it is to access them if your weight is not low. However, your GP should still make the referral.

Christopher Fairburn has written some good self help books.

There is no 'diet' that will work. The advice to try to prevent binges is regular eating - 3 meals and 3 snacks a day.

I would encourage you to try and seek some kind of professional support, but I understand why it's so difficult to do.

I recovered for a long time and then relapsed but am trying again now. Self help groups can be good have you tried OA or EDA?

I highly recommend Brain over binge by Kathryn Hansen and her podcast too (I’d suggest reading the book first). She is a recovered bulimic who did her own research into bulimia after she’d had lots of therapy but no success in stopping. I have had issues with bingeing in the past (not bulimic but yo-yo diet and bingeing). Reading this book and joining Rebelfit - which does regular “missions” where you assess your eating habits and exercise - have helped me to improve my diet, reduce my bingeing significantly and improve my body perception.

I would be wary of brain over binge. I'm not sure how evidence based it is and it is run as business. @LakesideView without wanting to minimise your experiences, yo yo dieting is significantly different to having an eating disorder.

Thank you, I will look into the books suggested (but keep in mind that they may not all be evidence/ science based).

I do have other MH conditions alongside the bulimia, initially I think it was a secondary issue to some of the other issues I had going on but now I feel like it has grown and become a predominant issue. I appreciate professional help would probably be the best solution but I don’t think I meet the criteria for the locally available ED services based on being dismissed previously so I would like to try and tackle it by myself first.

It sounds like everyone so far agrees it is the bingeing I need to work to tackle rather than the purging? Is the feeling that if I can get control of the bingeing the purging will stop? I admit I will often purge even after eating a normal meal or snack, not only after overeating, do you think that matters in terms of beating this? I feel like even if I only ate 3 meals and 3 snacks a day the urge to purge them would still be there but I don’t know if there is a way to get past that? It doesn’t help that after years of bulimia it is effortless to purge now (I don’t need to use my fingers, I can just contract my stomach muscles on command) and I often do it without thinking when I use the bathroom but once I have purged a meal it definitely triggers the binge purge cycle.

I think I will try from tomorrow to make a healthy eating plan and try to stick to set meals and snacks and see if that helps. I have previously done the 16:8 which helped a bit as there was an evening cut off point where I had to stop snacking so I will see if that helps too.

The criteria for ED services should not be based on BMI. I had to really fight for support from ED services, and was incredibly lucky to have the support of the CMHT. If you look at the NICE guidelines it tells you what you should expect from an ED service. If you feel it's not the right thing for you, then I understand that, but please don't put off asking for professional support because you feel you don't meet the criteria. ED services are slowly changing for the better, but there is still a lack of funding and services are forced to prioritise, unfortunately by weight it would seem. You have a long standing mental health condition and you absolutely deserve support if that's what you decide you want.

The theory is that you are less likely to binge if you don't restrict. If you are purging after a 'normal' meal that complicates things, but it might help reduce how much you purge. Is there anyone you live with or who you could enlist for support to help you avoid the bathroom for an hour after you eat?

All of the advice is not to diet or to restict in any way at all. Your idea of 'healthy' will probably mean that you are still restricting in some way, or imposing rules on yourself and what you can eat. Breaking rules can trigger feelings of guilt and make you more likely to binge and purge. Part of the process that the self help books go through is tackling fear foods and rules.

Another book that might help is getting better bite by bite by Janet Treasure. She is very well respected in the ED community.

I have some insight from personal experience. I recovered. Gradually over years.

For me my eating disorder wasn’t really about food. I think sometimes all the focus on eating ‘properly’ never really gets to the root cause of the problem whether you are trying to get better via self help or with the support of a professional.

Lack of ability to feel and sit with my own feelings and find ways to be expressive was the biggest part of my problem. The more I allowed myself to feel things and name the emotions and address things that I needed to, the less my eating disorder was an issue. I needed to focus on identity and self esteem too, to get well. Yoga also helped.

One book I found really useful was Sensing the Self by Sheila M Reindl

Yes but it took a while. I found ‘getting better bite by bite’ a good book but I also used a technique as described by @Senseofsomething with living to sit with my feelings and rather than start bingeing just learning to think through why I was doing it and what feelings was it diverting my attention from.

I also kept a diary and marked every day with a tick or a cross and as I’m numbers orientated it helped to see the ticks increase over time as I didn’t binge and the crosses decrease. It took a couple of years and it’s just my personal experience. I also learnt to train myself into a everything in moderation mindset and not restrict myself and feel ‘bad’ if I ate something I felt I shouldn’t.

Sorry you're having a tough time op.

Not bulimia but ocd (including germphobia).
Which I think was largely related to stresses I was going through and it sound like that might be a trigger for your bulimia too?

I found that when I removed the stress factors, the disorder loosened its grip on me a lot. And after that initial hurdle, it just started to slowly disappear over time.

I noticed it comes back a little (but in a 'haha isn't isn't odd!' kinds way, nothing debilitating) only if those particular stressor return.

So for example, living with my parents was a big contributer. They can visit for a little while and everything is fine but if I had to go home for a week or travel elsewhere with them, guarantee there would be some weird quirks rearing their head again.

Is there anything specific as a stressor that has been around since this started that you could maybe look to reduce?

I also agree with @Kenneldogsrock that getting away from the idea of foods I shouldn’t eat was important. For me that was because once I ate one ‘bad’ thing my brain would think ‘what the hell, might as well binge now’ as I had already ruined my attempt to have a good day.

Lol just realised it sounds like im blaming my parents xD there was obviously a fair few more things to it than that lol.

Thank you. I can relate to those of you who say that you had to learn to sit with your feelings as I think this is something I don’t do very well. I feel like I spend a lot of my time trying to keep myself occupied so I don’t have to face how I really feel and the binge eating/ purging is probably part of that. I struggle with self harm too and the two started at around the sane time in my teens so I guess the cause is likely the same.

For me things are better when I am around others, I am able to eat more normally as I feel like I would be judged if I was bingeing but I live in my own so I struggle to moderate myself at home and I guess I am bored and lonely a lot of the time. I have social anxiety and tend to avoid making plans in favour of being at home but then deep down I am lonely and unhappy here but my anxiety gets in the way of making any changes to the way that I live.

I definitely relate to those saying they had an unhealthy relationship with food in general and that they saw foods as ‘bad’ and thus eating one ‘bad’ thing would trigger a binge. I am very much like this and find it hard to stop ‘snacking’ once I have started.

I am quite motivated by charts/ numbers and being able to visualise my progress etc so the idea of logging ticks and crosses based on whether I have binged might work for me. I am also going to try and meal plan and allow for 3 meals and 3 snacks a day, I am awaiting assessment for ADD and am terrible at planning, shopping and cooking meals which I don’t think helps as I will have no food in and then go to the shop after work hungry and end up buying a large pizza plus cake and other treats etc and then eat it all and then have to purge. I might try and get into the routine of pre-planning my meals and snacks for the week so that I can try and be in more control of what I’m eating and so that I don’t need to go shopping for food when hungry and stressed after a long day of work.

Thanks for all the advice and support and I hope it’s ok if I use this thread to share how I’m doing as hopefully having some other people to answer to will help me stay motivated to stick to this.