Anatomy of an eating disorder 

The year I turned 50, I had a dream experience that put a final end to a decades-long eating addiction...

In this dream I was visited by a figure from the past... someone that I had rarely thought of in 35 years.

The visitor was my first boss, a fearsome Catholic nun.   She was also the first person in my life to die.

Let’s start at the beginning  of this story…

When I was 16,  I found a job at a local Catholic hospital.  I worked in the kitchen, serving food

and delivering it to the patients.

My boss was, as I said, a fearsome  Catholic nun.  She was always in a bitter,sour, angry mood.  
The feeling around her was almost evil...but I wouldn't allow such an idea...
After all,  she was a nun...a holy person...and I was supposed to be a good Catholic girl. 
I couldn't allow such a wicked thought, for heaven's sake!

She was also the first morbidly obese person I had ever seen.

She was literally bigger around than she was tall. 

On the pretense of tasting the food before it was served, she was always sampling each dish.

She was constantly eating.   I never saw her without a plate of food in her chubby hands.

When I arrived for work each day she was seated in her customary corner eating and glaring at us kids. 

When I left for the day she was still there…still eating. 

She seemed to stare at me, in particular, the only girl on staff.
We stayed out of her way as best we could, though we found her strangely fascinating.

One day I came to work and sister was gone.  She had died suddenly. 
We were a bit shaken.  She was not very old.

But life went on after her passing.  We all felt a sense of relief as her angry presence dissipated.
 

Then, suddenly, things took an ugly turn for me. 
Just 72 hrs after her passing, I woke up with a full blown eating disorder. 
Literally....It happened in my sleep.

From that morning on, ALL I could think about was food.  My mind was completely invaded. 
It was as if I had been taken over by something horrible and unyielding.  
Suddenly, I found that I couldn't concentrate on my studies, my job, friends and family. 

Only food.    It had such an overpowering quality that everything else was blocked from my mind.

I fought the compulsion in every way I could think of, but I could never win.

This was 1967, long before anyone spoke of such things. 
I felt sure that I was the only one in the world experiencing this.

It was a terrifying experience and it impacted my life in many ways... 
For example...relationships were out of the question unless they allowed for a lot of secret time.
I found that I had to have a stash of food with me at all times.  I was frantic.
I acted like a starving person. 
This secretive aspect made no sense in the context of my life, but that knowledge did not make
any difference.  There seemed to be no way to reason my way out of this!
I was afraid to be around people for fear they would discover my problem.

I would eat with friends, only to go home, purge and eat again.  The vicious cycle escalated.
Nothing made sense anymore.

What made this even stranger was that prior to this, I was always thin, as was everyone in my family.  
I didn't have a lot of time for food...I was active in my studies, volunteer work, physical activities. 
Food was just a necessary interruption to keep me going. 
I even had to go on a diet now and then in an effort to GAIN weight.
So this state of affairs was incomprehensible to me!

Eating became more frenzied as I lost ground.  I would resist with all my strength, but my will
seemed to be disabled.  This was not like me...but there was little I could do about it.
In one terrifying moment, I remember my tongue writhing uncontrollably in my mouth as I tried
to resist the compulsion.

I felt possessed.  But no one believed in such things anymore. 

There was no place to turn for help.   No books, no people, no support groups. 
It was a solitary and bitterly cruel and confusing experience.

Years were ‘lost’ to eating.  Thousands of dollars spent on binges. 
No amount of chiding myself helped. 

I wracked my brain for years wondering what could have triggered this. 
There were many possibilities…going hungry for a time as a child, molestation attempts growing up, extreme anxiety in an unhappy, stressed family...many of the markers that affect all of us who struggle with such things.

They all made sense…but none of them felt like a ‘fit’. 

More importantly, none of that information and reasoning effected any change in my behavior.
Even though those things might have been contributing factors, the information just seemed to tangle things up further. It seemed to dig the hole deeper until it became a pit from which I would never emerge.

My life was soon to become completely organized around eating, dieting and exercise….

Sound familiar?

Now this is not to say that you are 'possessed'  or troubled in the sense that I was, but DO read on... 

There are many reasons for interference and many degrees of struggle. 
This is one piece of the puzzle....
  
People can be interfered with on a family level, a cultural level (work, church, the culture at large), emotional levels and others.  Each story is unique. 

But the clues are what is important here...