How I Overcame Bulimia Forever
The battle for food freedom
I lost three long years to bulimia. I told the story of what that looked like here. I told my story with bulimia for the same reason that Victor Frankl told his story in concentration camps in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”1
Victor Frankl told his story to show that regardless of the inhumane conditions you can live in, you can still find meaning and hope. Although Eating Disorders do not lie on the same spectrum, I told my story because I want you to understand that regardless of the severity of your ED, recovery is always possible.
The path to recovery is not a straightforward one. After I tell you my recovery story, I will write a blog post on each element I thought played a part in helping me recover. Some of these elements, brought together, may help you too. Let’s go.
I realized I was sick and needed help after three years of severe Bulimia. Before that, I was just lying to myself. When I finally admitted my condition to a doctor, I knew I needed to take the matter into hands.
The first thing my doctor told me is to look into a medicine called Baclofen. Baclofen is a drug used to cure muscle stiffness, but it also proved to work well on addictions. It was starting to be widely used to cure Alcoholism and proved extremely effective in this case.
The story of how this drug came to be used for addiction is very touching. Olivier Ameisen, a renowned French doctor suffered from alcoholism his whole life. His whole life, he looked for a cure without finding any. After years of searching, he tried Baclofen, and it completely, fully cured him of a lifelong addiction. The need to drink simply disappeared. A few years after his recovery, he sadly passed away.
Olivier recounts his life story and his discovery of baclofen in a book called “The End Of My Addiction: How one man cured himself of Alcoholism”. If you ever consider taking Baclofen, please read this book first.
Baclofen is a curious drug. It works differently for different people, and at different doses. How it works is that you start taking 10mg a day, then augment the quantity you take every week until you reach a threshold where your addiction disappears.
For me, it did not work. I just had the side effects. It made me feel drowsy and tired all the time, but I was still binging and purging. After 6 months of augmenting the doses. I stopped completely.
Reading Olivier’s Ameisen book is the part that helped me the most in this adventure. It helped me realize how addiction works. I discovered that Bulimia is extremely similar to Alcoholism, in a way and it let me understand how the addition neural pathways worked. This book also took away the guilt and the shame I was feeling. No, I wasn’t an uncontrollable food monster; I was just sick. This realization took a weight off my shoulder. And just for that matter, the book is worth a read.
After my little Baclofen adventure, I felt as if I did not make a single step forward. I was still just as bad. On top of that, I was depressed and frustrated. Before, I would always tell myself:
“If you ever want to stop it, you can. You’re doing that because you want to, but you can stop anytime.
This is the big lie all addicts tell themselves. Just ask a smoker, and they’ll tell you the same. I was now actively trying to stop, but couldn’t. What a misery. Every day I would swear to myself in the mirror that it would be my last time purging. But it would start again at the next meal. It was all very discouraging. But I decided to continue.
My next adventure was going to see a hypnotherapist. I thought that through hypnosis, I could finally get rid of my binging and purging habit.
On my first meeting with the Doctor, I was ready for her to do her thing, talk to my subconscious and then let me walk out, pure and free from any Bulimia worry. It did not go this way. She refused to hypnotize me. Looking back, she was just right.
She told me hypnosis worked on addictions that were just habits, like smoking. Bulimia was the symptom of something else, that I had to understand a work on. If she just cured the symptom with hypnosis, it would come back for sure. She said that we needed to work on the root cause because it would then solve the symptom, which was bingeing and purging.
I worked with her for a few sessions. Talked a lot, and cried a lot. I realized I did need to work on a few things. After three sessions or so, she finally ended with a hypnosis session, to help me start my new life, far away from Bulimia.
This work was a huge step in my recovery. It was a big turn for me. I went from purging three times a day to perhaps three times a week. I know three times a week is still a lot, but for me, it was a whole new world.
After a few months into my new life, I decided three times a week was still too much. I was still thinking about food way too much, so I needed another resource.
I was a student, and seeing a psychologist was too expensive. Started looking through Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify, for resources that could help me. I also started reading a lot about the matter.
This is when I found the Spotify podcast that changed my life: “Binge Breakers” By Jacqueline Davis.
I found this podcast had the right moment in my life. I had tackled my root cause for Bulimia, but I was still suffering from the addiction that had developed from the root cause. I had to tackle the habit, the addiction mechanism to reach full recovery.
And Jacqueline’s podcast was just about this. It was about all the things you can do to get rid of a habit. My following blog posts will be about some of these actions you can take to get rid of your purging habit.
After listening to the podcast, that was it. I wasn’t purging anymore. It simply stopped. That was around April.
I was Bulimia free for the whole summer, but my dad abruptly passed away just after the summer. When that happened, I started falling back into my old patterns.
For the first time ever, I decided to speak about it to my mum. She recommended a psychologist. I went. I still had some thought patterns that needed to be fixed, it seemed. Some beliefs I had about food that needed to disappear from my mind. After a few sessions, I was completely cured. I never purged afterward. Not even once. It’s now been almost two years without purging.
I never thought this could ever happen. Recovery is damn hard, but it’s worth it. I remember reading stories of women who had been bulimic for 30 years. I was dead scared this would be me because I could not see a way out.
Today, the thought of purging never even passes through my mind. Even when I gain weight. Even after a big meal. Even at a buffet. It simply does not occur. Recovery is possible. It’s awaiting. It does require work and dedication, but it is possible still.
A great book everyone should read