When I was 14, I developed eating disorders.
I remember sucking in my belly all the time or pressing it in a repetitive obsessive manner. I started eating my meals separate from my family. When they had roasted chicken and fries (which they had a lot), I would sit on a different table and eat dry bread. I starved myself until some of my classmates commented on how skinny I was during a school trip because they could see the bones in my rib cage. During that school trip I also had my first binge eating episode. Somebody had brought cake and I couldn't stop eating it. This continued for a long time afterwards. I would hunger and fast and then of course the binges would come. When I was 15 or 16 I saw a video in school about the mass animal industry and became a vegetarian. My family didn't understand it (my dad is a big meat and fish eater). I was a very unhealthy vegetarian though. I ate a lot of sweets (and back then didn't even know that gelatin is not vegetarian). The food in my family was generally not very healthy. Lots of bread, ready-to-go meals, take-away foods, fries, sweets. My mother would eat massive amounts of chocolates and other candy and always had a big stash in the house. My dad would mainly eat meat, fish (but not prepared in a healthy way) and salads, and drink alcohol. The older I got, the more the marriage of my parents fell apart. My mother sank into a deep depression and spent the days isolated at home, eating chocolate and watching television. My dad would work more and more long hours and when he came home he would hide in the cellar where he had set up his computer and lots of alcohol. So nobody really noticed how much I struggled myself (not only with eating disorders but mainly the effects of heavy metal toxicity which threw me into an almost autistic state), everybody was in their own world. And everybody was toxic themselves. So when I was eating, I was eating sugary cereals for breakfast, often followed by chocolate bars (yes, for breakfast. Yes, my mother bought them for me). I was just as addicted to sugar as my mother. When I came home from school, I would eat a ready-to-go meal that my mother had prepared (if I was lucky) and then chocolate. Massive amounts of chocolate. All while sitting on the couch watching the same television talk shows my mother was binge watching all day long. There were no conversations. At other times I remembered my grandparents (bless their hearts! They were more parents to me than my real parents) who lived next door would give me apples from the garden for school, and I just wouldn't eat them, I wouldn't eat anything before school, during school, and I was so hungry that I couldn't focus. Now some pages actually connect anorexic behavior with heavy metal toxicity. It makes sense, as the body is toxic and fasting is usually the answer to toxicity. Usually also your digestive system is so messed up that the body maybe instinctively doesn't want to eat. Anyway, I starved myself down, followed by phases of binging on sugary stuff. Then I fell unhappily in love and ate even more sweets and gained quite a few pounds. After high school I moved to another town and went to university. I had the big plan to finally start eating healthily. It is funny, when I was a kid and me and my family were in holidays in FRance and we would visit a market, I fantasized about how when I was grown up, I would go to the market and finally buy all the things I wanted: fruit and vegetables! It's ridiculous, how a small child instinctively is drawn to healthy foods. Anyway, I didn't know anything though how healthy nutrition looked, and I would soon fall back into unhealthy eating. The sugar addiction was strong. There were day when I would eat rice pudding for breakfast, chocolate for lunch and nothing for dinner. Then in my mid twenties I wanted to lose weight once again (I was never overweight but had a few pounds too many). I started eating a lot of fruit. Which made my super toxic body go into shock. I got real bad diarrhea. Detox. I didn't understand that back then though and instead googled all sort of food allergies and intolerances. In the end it was the start of my health journey. Step by step I changed my diet to a healthier one, learning more and more things. Eventually I stumbled upon veganism and then raw veganism and I tried both. I then found the 80/10/10 diet with lots of fruit and thought it was the perfect diet. I ate a 100 % raw vegan diet for 2,5 years. After those years I felt depleted, and I was. Sure those diets had more nutrition than my childhood diets but my body was starving for nutrients, and a low fat raw vegan diet was NOT the answer. Especially because I was restricting calories once more. I was eating around 1200 calories on a raw vegan low fat diet which consisted mainly of apples and zucchini noodles. My hair was dry and falling out, my muscles weak, I had zero libido, my teeth enamel had suffered a lot, and I broke the bone in my right little finger just by lightly falling onto it. I was in a bad shape. Starving yourself can be so addictive though. I knew I needed to eat more but it took a lot to finally do it. And I gained weight. A LOT of weight. After my re-feeding (which wasn't done in the proper way! Normally you slowly increase the calories so that the body adapts but I didn't know) I was at my heaviest ever weight and looked super puffy and swollen. Still I believed in the vegan diet, and low fat, and I was now more doing the starch solution way. I did not improve. I stayed puffy, short of breath (salt-free), and low in energy. Until I started eating animal products again. It was in IKEA from all places. There were free samples of smoked salmon on toast and I simply picked off the salmon pieces and ate them all. No, I inhaled them as quickly as possible! I continued eating fish a lot after that. I also experimented with pecorino cheeses although I had given up gluten and dairy in my mid twenties. Eggs would follow. And then. Meat. I didn't have meat for over 16 years at that point, and I inhaled the massive T-bone steak that even my partner at that time couldn't finish. I felt better, I lost weight, and continued like that. I did experiment with other diet styles of course, I did paleo a lot, and a more low carbish diet. As of today, I don't binge eat anymore. It is funny, I still had those binges from time to time, for example with nuts, when I just could not stop eating them, or a bag of crisp. But along my healing journey I had detoxed and also killed Candida and parasites quite a bit and the overeating got less and less. Some people never experience this but it is like you are seriously losing control over your body. Your hand automatically puts the food into your mouth, you don't even have time to think. But it had gotten better, and what really finished it off, was a meditation by Dr. Joe Dispenza. After doing that meditation ONE time, focusing only on the overeating, I stopped completely. These days I eat lots of veggies, some fruit, some gluten free grains (mainly buckwheat), I recently started eating chickpeas again and seem to do fine with them, lots of sweet potatoes, and some free range eggs, sardines and venison or organ meats here and there. I eat my plate and have no desire whatsoever to binge on unhealthy stuff afterwards. Eating disorders are a pain, and I feel for everybody dealing with it. Heal your gut, detox your body, work on trauma release, kill parasites!
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