online conference transcript

Alexandra of the Peace, Love and Hope eating disorders site is our guest tonight. Find out what it's like living with an eating disorder and trying to get through the healing process.

David is the HealthyPlace.com moderator.

The people in blue are audience members.

David: Good Evening. I'm David Roberts, the moderator for tonight's conference. I want to welcome everyone to HealthyPlace.com. Our topic tonight is "Life with an Eating Disorder". Our guest is Alexandra, from the Peace, Love and Hope Eating Disorders Site here at HealthyPlace.com. Alexandra is 15 years old and will be a junior in high school this coming August. You can read more about Alexandra here.

Good evening, Alexandra, and thank you for being our guest tonight. On your site, you say signs of having an eating disorder began to appear when you were 8 years old. What were those signs of having an eating disorder and what was going on in your life at that time?

Alexandra: Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing well tonight. :) At that time, there was a lot of family stress and I resorted to eating to make what I was feeling inside of me go away. Purging (eating and throwing up) quickly followed, and looking back on it now, I realize that was the beginning of the battle.

David: When you say family stress, without going into too much detail, can you please describe it so we can better understand what drove you to disordered eating?

Alexandra: Sure. My parents never had a good relationship with one another, and it's a well-known fact in this house that they would have divorced by now had neither of my parents experienced financial troubles. There was constant fighting and bickering. There wasn't a night that went by that I didn't hear someone yelling at someone, or find my mother talking to me about how awful things were. Even being so young, I took it upon myself to relieve both of my parents of stress. I believed that their fighting was my fault, and that it was my job to "fix" them. My parents never expected that of me, though -- I just took it upon myself. The stress from that and constantly feeling "not good enough" is what, I believe, caused me to turn to food for comfort, and when I started purging, that added onto wanting to feel better.

David: That is a lot for an 8 year old to deal with. When you began the purging behavior, (eating and throwing up), how did that come about? Did you read about this, did a friend tell you about it?

Alexandra: Honestly, I still cannot figure that part out! I'm almost positive that I did not read about it or see it on TV, as the only books I read back then involved fairy tales and I almost never watched TV unless The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were on. :) I think, now, that I always knew that if food went in, it had to come out, and went after ways to get it out. When I discovered what to do for purging, it never stopped.

David: Then, by the age of 11, you had a full-blown case of anorexia and bulimia. What did that involve for you?

Alexandra: Progressively, over time, the bulimia did become worse, and so did the depression that I also experienced. Around the age of 11, I was in my first year of homeschooling, I believe, so I was more isolated than I was about a year before that. This gave me more time than ever to eat and purge, and then to go days "fasting." I would eat and purge anything that I could find, and that became worse. By the age of 13, I was staying up until 4 a.m. cooking and eating whatever I could. At that time, I was purging almost 15 times a day, and was constantly upset with my moods flying off the handle all the time. I was also always extremely tired and always felt run-down.

David: Did you understand what you were doing? Had it become clear to you that you had an eating disorder at that point?

Alexandra: Amazingly, I did not believe that my disordered eating behaviors were an actual medical problem. I always knew in the back of my head that what I was doing was not natural, even "wrong", but I had never heard of anorexia and bulimia or known of any specific facts about them. It wasn't until about age 12, that while sifting around in my mother's old nursing books (she went back to college to become a nurse), that I came about a chapter on eating disorders in a psychology book. I read over the whole thing and almost fell out of my chair when I saw that what the writers were describing was almost exactly what I was doing. It was then that I knew there was definitely a problem and that it had a name.

David: A lot of times we hear that eating disorders start with an individual's desire to have the "perfect body". But it doesn't sound like that's what was going through your mind at the time.

Alexandra: At age eight, I wasn't all that concerned with my body. I was naturally a little chubby due to genetics and my age, but when I reached elementary school I did want to lose weight. I was teased a lot, and by middle school the teasing was pretty horrendous. That's when I went into home-schooling and fell right into the dark world of an eating disorder. At that point, I remembered every mean comment that was made, weight-related or not, and believed that apart from not even deserving food because I was a failure, that if I just lost some weight and became thinner, I would have no problems and that I would never be teased again. Everything would be "perfect."

David: What has living with an eating disorder (anorexia and bulimia) been like for you?

Alexandra: A living hell. People on the "outside" that have not experienced an addiction like this, or those that have just started their battle, tend to not understand how much life an eating disorder, like anorexia and bulimia, can rip from you. I have lost friends because of this addiction; because instead of returning phone calls or going out with them, I am too worried about food being around or that I need to devote more time to exercising.

Because you go through chemical imbalances from purging and starving, I also have gone through long periods of dark depression, where it can be sometimes hard just to get out of bed. Living with an eating disorder stresses you out and breaks you down mentally and physically. And during those small periods of time, where you aren't being degraded by your own mind, you end up too tired and exhausted and stressed out to do much of anything. I've said it so many times to friends and I'll say it here: This is something that I would never wish upon my greatest enemy.