Worried I'm heading down a bad path (maybe an eating disorder?)

Hi SleevedLife,

well, first KUDOS for you to open up and telling it all, the bad, and the worst. 

I am in a monthly behavioral group that meets once month and addresses all kind of issues, before and after VSG. I remember very well when our therapist said, "Be careful and mindful after surgery to not turn your food addiction in to another addiction after surgery"!

It sounds like you might be on the path of being bulimic and the way you describe it, it is all the classic signs. Excess exercising, chewing and spitting out food, eating junk food and then vomiting tec.

It is more of an psyche problem then it is a physical problem in my eyes, since I shared this experience with a good friend.

Regardless of what it is for you, please, please get professional help and give yourself the chance to address your personal demons and learn along the way. It is not always an easy journey, but I know for a fact that there is help out there........go and seek it out!

My thoughts are with you and I wish you all the best for the future.

Sincerely,

Rita

I think most have nailed the need for therapy and assistance and I agree this is still an eating disorder/addiction even if chewing and spitting doesn't have an actual disease name. I wanted to touch on the "do it myself" mentality. My daughter and I have this discussion often as that has been her mantra since birth. She will go out of her way to do something the hard way just to do it on her own. If its easy, she thinks that's a failure. On the other hand, she expects perfection from herself. She comes to me when her "do it myself" has put her in a bad spot. I always ask her a series of questions that you may want to ask yourself:

1. How many other people do you know that truly do EVERYTHING completely on their own?

2. Are you Jesus or do you have some greater power than the average human being that makes you feel the need to take on the burden of absolute self-sufficiency?

3. How is that working for you?

Help is not a sign of weakness. No one was ever born knowing everything or able to solve every problem. Don't consider it "help". Consider it an education. It helps my daughter to view any outside assistance as education rather than a "handout" or "pity". If you are anything like my daughter, I'm sure you will do just fine taking care of yourself once you are properly armed with the tools and an education for the situation, and you will once again be the master of your own fate.

no advice, no lecture.  how about a cyber ? 

Please forgive the direct nature (and length!) of my response to your post.  I’m in the middle of a work day but felt your post required immediate attention.  I think you have an eating disorder.  It’s called bulimia.  I suspect this because I was bulimic too for a very VERY long time.  I was also resistant to therapy, which is probably why the disorder lasted as long as it did for me.  I have lost so much to bulimia (my back teeth, some esophageal damage, etc) but the biggest thing it took away from me was TIME.  Eating disorders rob you of the ability to be present (with your feelings, with your friends, with your career, with your life), and it takes up a lot of brain space in planning what to binge (and purge) next.  Then there’s the actual doing of it, which causes you to blank out, feel nothing, and lose time you could have spent addressing the problem in the first place.

At this point, I wouldn’t advise you to simply try and stop the behavior.  It’s a symptom, not the actual problem.  For me, the actual problem lay in my emotions and my inability to feel them.  For example, a client of mine would call and demand something or other that I couldn’t satisfactorily provide.  The interaction ended well (bulimics are the consummate people-pleasers, after all) but a few minutes or hours later, I would be eating a cookie or a piece of cake or chips or donuts, or, more often than not,  all of the above.  I would eat all of this, simply thinking that I needed a “break” and that this food would provide it.  But the truth was that I felt bad that I had to say “no” to a client and was stuffing my bad feelings with food.  A short time later, I would realize that if I let the food hang around in my digestive system, I would gain a bunch of weight, which caused me to panic, which caused me to purge.  The purging felt cathartic.  It was the ultimate stress relief.

So, the next time this happens, I would find a calm moment afterwards, and ask yourself, what incident triggered this behavior?  What had me so upset that I had to stuff it down with food?  Give the question a few minutes to float around in your consciousness.  I’m sure a response will come to you shortly thereafter.  Could it have been something simple, like having to scold someone?  Did you have to pick up someone else’s slack without being thanked for it?  It could be some little thing.  It could also be some big thing.  We all have reasons to be upset.  The important thing is to realize that we are upset in the first place, and that is what drives us to binge.   If we can find the triggers and address them, we can actually stop the binge and purge behavior.

When you have more experiencing realizing what you triggers are, perhaps you could try stopping the behavior mid-binge.  You can try and bring some consciousness back to your consumption, and shorten the length of your binge.  Eventually, you’ll learn to just become conscious of how your feeling and will address the feelings instead of going the round-about path of binging and purging. 

My friend, I wish you the best of luck on this journey.  It sounds like the behavior is new so it would be great if you didn’t allow it to take root and become part of you.  You can always PM me if you have questions or need some encouragement.  I’m rooting for you – you CAN beat this thing.

P.S.  Sorry, I have to hop on everyone else’s bandwagon and tell you that therapy was key to my recovery.  You might want to at least give it a try.  What could it hurt?

 

 

 

You've developed a transfer addiction. Not a common one, but they happen.

Are you familiar with the concept of transfer addiction? Here's a little brain science thing: Our brains can hijack the reward system that's built into us to encourage us to do good things. Once we start to get satisfaction from that thing our brain adapts and starts giving us a dopamine reward for a negative behavior. That dopamine feels good and we crave that reward especially in times of stress. The result is the compulsive kinds of addictions like overeating/binging, gambling, etc.

When we give up one behavior that caused a dopamine reward and don't fill the space with some other thing (in my case, hiking) some of us who are especially prone to these compulsive behaviors develop a new behavior to fill the hole left by the old one. That's a transfer addiction.

I'll go ahead and say it: You probably need to get help dealing with this. There's no shame in that - a good number of folks on this board (myself included) have needed counseling to help in this process. You may even benefit for a while from medication to deal with compulsive behaviors.

I understand you don't want to get counseling. I think you might need to overcome that reluctance to be successful, but you've got to make the decision.

Meanwhile, we're here.

I think it's great you've acknowledged it's a issue, but the only way to resolve this is figuring out what's causing you to continue it despite knowing the risks.  I wouldn't want to see anyone harm themselves and you are.  Please know this is not something to be ashamed of, but like a diabetic you need help managing this.  If not with a doctor please see a nutritionalist

No long post here. Just short and simple:

YOU NEED HELP!

If you didn't need help you would have stopped this behavior already on your own.

GET HELP! You know you need it or you wouldn't have posted.

You are brave. You are strong. You will beat this with the right help.

Good luck and God bless.

 

I had written a long response here, but OH ate it up.  Grrrr.   How dare they have technical issues in the midst of my personal crisis.  ;)  Heartless *******s.   So here is my second attempt at a post.

 

 

Thank you to everyone that responded.  I've read each of your responses - some of them I've read several times - and I really appreciate it.   Please forgive me for not responding to each one personally, I just don't have it in me right now. 

 

I was up for half the night thinking about what you all have said and thinking about where I should go from here.  One of the PPs really hit the nail on the head when describing how isolating this is.   Secret shopping trips, secret stashing of food, secret "binges" (or whatever you'd call them),  hours of exercising alone.  I got the sleeve surgery with the goal of having MORE family time and better quality family time, but he last few months it has been quite the opposite.  Even when I am with them, I am distracted... thinking about the next "binge" or worrying over hiding the evidence.  

 

Before I had the sleeve surgery, when I was deciding that I was going to have bariatric surgery, I made a promise to myself.  I promised that I would welcome change and that I would be open to professional advice.  I don't have a great track record with taking professional advice - which probably makes me sound both jaded and arrogant, and maybe I am.    But as I was heading in for bariatric surgery I had to admit that the status quo wasn't working.  I wasn't successful on my own.  I needed help.  So here I am a year later, ******g things up in a big way and stubbornly refusing professional help.  In fact, not even wanting to approach a professional.  Given patterns I've already established, it should be obvious where this is all going.  It's going to get worse.   I don't want that to be true, but I think that is the most likely and logical outcome.  That's the trajectory I'm on right now.  

 

So I think  I need to go back to that original promise I made to myself.  That I'd be open to professional advice.  As many of you pointed out, in various ways, how is doing it  on my own working out for me?  ****ty.   I'm failing.  I can't seem to stop on my own.  If I could have, I would have.    So without something changing, some sort of outside intervention, I know I'm going to continue to fail.  This will only get worse.  I can feel the momentum of it  - it gets bigger and bigger.   I have to do something different now before this really overtakes me completely.

 

So I dug a business card out of my purse this morning.  It was from a counselor that visited our support group once many months ago.  I liked her.  She seemed down-to-earth, non-intimidating.    I haven't called yet.

 

I never thought when I made this post that it would lead me to seriously contemplate reaching out for professional help.  I thought it would just be a cathartic vent, maybe I'd get a few slaps of tough love, and that'd be it.  But  I think hearing such unified concern from people here took me aback.  So here I am, holding the business card of a counselor and seriously thinking about calling.

It sounds ridiculous and melodramatic, but making this call feels impossible to me.  Every single part of me hates the idea, 100%.  But the rational part of my mind (what's left of it in this regard, anyway) knows I need to "get over it" and call.   I don't even know if I'll tell my husband about it or not.  I should, but ...  I don't know. 

 

So my goal today isn't a calorie or exercise goal - but my goal is to call.  To make the damn appointment.  **** I don't want to do this, but I have to...  this will seriously take all day for me to get over myself and just make the damn call.

 

I hope you all can understand if I'm not posting here as frequently as I used to.  I'd feel like a fraud offering advice to anyone about the sleeve when I've ****** it up so much myself.   Maybe once I get my act together, I'll start posting again.  But, for now, just know that I'm cheering each of you on from the sidelines.   I'm taking my signature down too, because even that 143 pounds lost feels like a fraud. 

 

Thanks again for listening, and for letting me vent.   Sorry to babble so much.

 

(((HUGS)))) I was bulimic for 15 years and it was very hard on me. I don't know how I did it but I just finally quit COLD TURKEY about 4 years ago. I think the thing for me was I WANTED TO STOP MORE THAN I WANTED TO BINGE/PURGE. I was very lucky that I quit cold turkey after being that way for so long. I think what REALLY helped me was going on a forum with other bulimics and talking to them. That was MY therapy. I couldn't afford a therapist at the time. Hell, I could barely afford my rent and bills at that time. Those people really helped me a lot. If you can afford therapy, please consider it. It may help save you from this turning into a multi-year problem. When I finally got some money, I had to spend thousands to fix my teeth that were very messed up from bulimia. I was so happy I could smile again without feeling deeply ashamed that I knew I'd never go back to bulimia. Please get help NOW. You don't want destroyed teeth and a terrible smile--you don't want your thoughts to revolve around what you're going to eat and when you're going to be able to purge it. Chewing and spitting IS binging and purging--even if it's in much smaller levels with a sleeve. You will feel much better if you can fix this behavior. I know how you feel and it appears some of us on here have dealt with this before. I know how hard it is to accept help. I, too, am anonymous on here because I don't want people like my parents reading about my innermost thoughts on the web. I feel safe and protected on Obesity Help--with people like me--who I can share my feelings and thoughts with.

Well, I didn't make the call but I did send her an email.  Hopefully I'll have an appointment soon.

 

 

ACK!