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Julie
July 23rd, 1997

I am 32 years of age as of this August, and I would like to relay my story and how I am overcoming my eating disorders.

Child of divorce, introverted, with a mother who danced professionally: one could say that the soil was fertile for some sort of eating disorder, and I had them all. It started when I was about 14 and I remember I finally decided to take constructive action to eat normally when I turned 24.

I was the obedient daughter who managed to stay on both parents' good side through an ugly divorce while maintaining a 3.8 GPA etcetera and so forth. Meanwhile I was alternately binging and purging and steadily gaining weight and hating myself.

I "ran away" from home on scholarship to an elitist 4-yr college, as any goody-goody who wants to forget a shattered home life would do. Under the usual pressures that come along with your first year away, I managed to gain some weight and then promptly lose it. My grades fell, I lost a few scholarships, bounced between majors and finally entered a deep depression which was only ameliorated by one anorectic summer.

It was this my 20th summer that I finally achieved my goal-weight and then continued to pursue more weight loss. I was running 6 miles a day and subsisting largely on raw unsalted sunflower seeds. When I returned to school in the fall I was ecstatic and manic. I had bought a new wardrobe, I was tan and I was getting all sorts of compliments.

I immediately plunged into the academics with my newfound energy and took 20 credits, joined all kinds of activities and totally booked up my time in general. As I came to the realization that I was unable to maintain an unrealistically low weight, my overscheduled time wielded out of control and my world crashed around me only a few months before I was to graduate. I sought professional help but the counselors were too interested in getting me on antidepressants and I just wasn't buying that.

With the encouragement of friends I thankfully graduated, but just barely, and with no prospects for a job. However, for the third and fourth years of college I had lived in a language house at school, speaking French in the common rooms and keeping a journal. This turned out to be my ticket out of the golden cage, as it were. A friend arranged nanny positions in France for the both of us. Mine was in Paris and hers was in Fontainbleu, a suburb of Paris.

I spent three months there taking care of three children and being immersed in the language that I loved. Many of the usual self-destructive cycles fell by the wayside as I cared for others besides myself. In a way I look at this experience as a sort of instructive shock therapy: jetting off to another continent where suddenly I belonged to a family structure in which I had to constantly be thinking on my feet. (E.g. what was the word for "light switch", what is the exchange rate again, how do you get to the post office, etc). I continued with my "therapy" by buying a month-long Eurail pass, then flying over to Israel to live on a kibbutz for four months, then caravaning to Egypt for 6 weeks, then flying over to Greece to spend the summer in the Islands.

You might be saying, oh that's great if you're rich. Well let me tell you, being *poor* was the best part of this "therapy": I travelled on my life savings of $1500 for a year and a half. What I learned was to be extremely resourceful and to think in the present. While I was just trying to survive from day to day and get the most out of this wonderful travel experience, I began to eat in order to live rather than living to eat. And I have some irreplaceable memories to boot.

Somehow I think staying home and seeking traditional modes of therapy would not have been as much fun, although if I hadn't had a friend to set up the nanny job that's probably exactly what I would have done...upon graduation I was really not motivated or organized enough to jet off to Paris on my own.

I returned to North America with a travel companion from Vancouver BC to her hometown, about 3000 miles from my own. The survivalist training continued: instead of wiring home for money (which I have never done to this day) I Greyhounded to Seattle with $80 in my pocket. I knew no one but within six months I had a nice apartment and was working as a legal assistant.

The eating disorder reared it's ugly head again, however. I had made a rule for myself to shun the scale and I had been successful for most of my travels; however, working in a professional capacity must have made me a little more concerned with outward appearance and I began weighing in and berating myself.

I guess this was the reality check: if you live without the refrigerator, you don't raid the refrigerator! The problem is, most modern kitchens have a refrigerator! As soon as I moved from my apartment into shared housing, I made a rule that I would steal no food from housemates, an activity that I had indulged in all through college. I could go down the street and buy food at the grocery store, all I wanted, but I could not steal.

This was the first constructive rule that I made. Constructive because it was not forbidding completely, just forbidding actions that would be hurting others.

After doing the bulimic thing for a couple more years I finally hit on a formula that worked for me and I began to employ it on my 24th birthday: Break the cycle. Eat what you want, when you want. But no purging! Ever. But if you do, it's OK. Just try not to do it next time. Try to maintain a comfortable weight. You did this as a child, you can do it again.

And most importantly: You have as much time to get over this as you need. It may take years. Don't rush it. The longer it takes, the more lessons you will learn. Etcetera. I played these reassuring tapes over and over in my head.

And since I am faced with the decision to eat and what to eat several times a day, I got plenty of practice, I figure. In this way, getting over eating disorders may be easier (at least for me) than, for instance, quitting smoking, which so often is replaced by other vices. But it may be harder for that same reason as well: everywhere you go, there it is. And there you are! Confusing. In any event, I always consider myself a "recovering" anorectic, a "recovering" bulimic, to borrow an adjective from Alcoholics Anonymous.

I rarely weigh myself, but that activity is not completely forbidden either. I seem to stay at a normal healthy weight all times of the year, with my only regular exercise being walking since I don't own a car. I feel sorry for my friends that diet. I am so glad to be off that bandwagon. The important thing to me is that I am comfortable at my weight and that I maintain it without effort.

There are analogous mind patterns from eating that carry over into all activities, in my particular situation anyway. Anorexia = severe control of time via frenzied activity. Bulimia = complete loss of control over time. Now I constantly reassess eating (E.g. What am I hungry for now, at this very moment?) and constantly reassess how I will spend my time (E.g. Based on my experience, what path should I take now?) Overall, things are more dynamic: uncontrolled in a controlled way, or something like that. It's a lot like travelling: a much more interesting and fun way to live, if you can deal with the scariness of frequent imperfections and unplanned events that come up in a dynamic world.

I am continually rediscovering eating. I eat what I crave as I must have done at one unadulterated time as a child. I avoid synthetically reconstructed nonfat foods and Nutrisweetened stuff, always opting for food in its most natural state. I have this purely anecdotal hypothesis that when you eat the foods you crave in their least processed state, you choose adequate nutrients and calories better than any dietitian could.

Speaking of which, I have recently passed the exam for licensure as a Registered Dietitian and I have three years into a doctorate in Nutritional Science. I plan to finish in a couple of years and I would like to do my postdoc in Geneva. I hope to pair outpatient counseling with research and to help as many people as possible.

Anyone out there who is recovering and would like to help others I would encourage you to be so so honest with yourself in making sure that your battle is long over before helping others with theirs.

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