My Story with Binge Eating

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog and this blogpost is going to be a little bit different from the others. As you can see in the title, I am going to talk about binge eating and some of my struggles about it.

*Trigger warning*!!

If you are undergoing sth similar and you think you might be triggered by my story, please feel free to leave the page.

I've decided to open up to you guys about it as I found that keeping this locked in the bottle doesn't really help me from recovering from it. It's quite hard for me to share this to my close friends at first too because I just felt ashamed to talk about it. But at this point, I want my story to be raw and I really hope my journey of recovery can help someone else. Even though doing this is a kind of painful reflection to myself and it leaves me feeling a little naked. But I've noticed that in the end of the day, getting naked in this way and allowing myself to be vulnerable help a lot.

Okay, so here we goes...

So it all started in my first year of college when I suddenly realized the growth of my appetite. As someone who really enjoys food, I feel like food gives me a lot of happiness so I always dined out with my friends in my freshmen year, and we simply went to a lot of new restaurants to try out different food. Then, the gradual change of my body shape reminded me that I was no longer the super skinny girl eating whatever I want without gaining fat. When I looked into the mirror, I felt conscious about the increase in size of my thighs and arms. And when I weighed myself, I found myself fat as I gained a few pounds. So that's the time I told myself: " you would be so much happier if you could lose some weight" Then, I started to go on diet and workout regularly.

- 2 years ago when I was on extreme diet and was pretty skinny

Everything seemed fine at first until I was aware that some of the extreme behavior popped out. I weighed every single food I ate and counted calories in every meal, every day. I also workout aggressively to burn the "extra" calories. I restricted my diet by forcing myself to follow all these dietary rules: no carbs for dinner, no fast food, no unhealthy snacks, no added sugar... (seriously there were endless of them). Sometimes I would even skip meals when I had "cheat meals" or a "cheat day". What's more, I tried so many diets including intermittent fasting and "detox" stuff. At first, it worked for me as I lost 2-3kg (yes, only 2-3kg), but then after a few weeks, my weight reached a plateau and none of the diet methods work for me anymore. I failed a zillion times. This was really frustrating and I felt like a complete loser.

- always forced myself to gym even though my body told me not to

This is when this little bastard BED knocked on my door and said : “hi I am here and I am gonna make your life a living hell.”

- My lockscreen wallpaper to stop myself from overeating

I ate so little calories (less than 1000) on weekdays and constantly starved myself, and I binged mostly on weekends. I was constantly hungry so when I had the chance to dine out with family/friends, I treated it as my cheat meal so I could eat crazily.

- Struggled between eating balanced diet and having guilty pleasure

What's worse, I would stuff my face with all the snacks I saw: chocolates, biscuits, crips etc when I was alone. Guess what, I wasn’t even enjoying the food, I just unconsciously put them all into my mouth until my stomach was going to explode. Every time when I woke up the other day after a binge, I looked super bloated and I told myself that I am disgusting.

- flat tummy before binge vs severe bloating after binging

Then, I felt so so so guilty after it and I would cried for a long time or even a day. This all-or-nothing mindset ruined me and I couldn’t focus myself from school and other things coz I just kept blaming myself for eating all those crap.

I searched online and I saw people say if you puke, you have no remorse so I tried but I don't know why, I failed again. Then, when I realized how ugly I would be when I put my fingers into the throat and threw out, I stopped. Instead, I did A LOT of exercise (mainly cardio) trying to burn the calories from binging. After all these, I would get back into the cycle of restricting, binging, feeling depressed and working out aggressively. Over a year, I swung between compulsive exercising and binge eating. I knew something was wrong with me but I didn't know what that is. So I looked up my symptoms online and found that, although I wasn't bulimic, I still had a slight eating disorder problem.

I plucked up my courage to tell the first person who is my mum but she didn't think it's a big deal so she would just ask me not to focus on losing weight. (but at the same time, she would say I am fatter than before and ask me to lose some weight lol) Then, I finally decided to seek professional help. The regular counselling sessions with my therapist helped a lot.

I am very very happy to say that I am fully recovered from it now. I have no more fear food and my relationship with food is great. If you guys are interested to know how I overcame it, I will write another blog about it and maybe share some tips to stop binge/emotional eating. As I know, women are 4 times more likely to have an eating disorder if they are dissatisfied with their bodies. Also, more than 75% of people with an eating disorder go without care. I don't want anyone around me to suffer the same pain as I did, and I want to empower all the girls to love their bodies. Also, eating disorder should not be a taboo to talk about and we shouldn't feel ashamed if it comes to us one day.

So yeah, that's what I want to say for now and I hope it's not too much of a long ass story for you to read.

See you in my next one ;)