I started my dieting by looking through all of the popular magazines for articles on weight loss. I tried every diet I could find, but nothing was fast enough for me. One night, after I had binged on a large dinner and several helpings of dessert, I sat in my room wishing there was a way I could undo the damage I thought I had caused. That was the first time I made myself throw up.

 I was soon in a pattern of fasting for several days and then bingeing and purging. I started buying diet pills and laxatives, using double and triple the recommended dosages. I also bought ipecac syrup to help myself get rid of food. My weight was all I thought about, and my school work suffered greatly. I had no energy; my throat was sore all the time and I developed stomach problems. I was trapped.

 One week before my senior year, when I was seventeen years old, I passed out at work and was transported by ambulance to the hospital. I was diagnosed with an eating disorder and soon started out-patient therapy. My last year of high school was spent doing homework, going to therapy appointments, and working. I had very little time for fun. After six months, I was discharged because I had reached a healthy weight. But it didn't end there.

I relapsed soon after my treatment ended. I could not imagine living without my eating disorder. This was about the time that I realized that my eating disorder was my way of slowly committing suicide. I re-entered treatment when I was nineteen. After several different therapists and doctors, I was put in an eating disorders group and saw a therapist that was wonderful. I worked hard with her for 2 years. She moved in January of 1999, and the group ended at the same time. I quit therapy, and thought "if I gain weight, maybe I will be cured". Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

By March of 2001, I weighed in at 240 pounds, the heaviest I had ever been. I had gotten married in September of 1999, and luckily my husband loves me no matter what I weigh. I finally realized that I had not recovered at all, but had just binged for 2 years. I knew that I needed to lose weight for my health, and I need to do it in a healthy manner. At the time of this update, September 3, 2001, I have managed to lose 41 pounds by exercising 3 days a week and eating healthy portions and not binging or restricting. I have re-entered therapy for eating disorders, and have started on new medications for my depression. Maybe this will be the time that I recover for good.

For information about eating disorders, please visit the following sites:

Something's Fishy Eating Disorder Site

Center for Eating Disorders

About Eating Disorders

Eating Disorders

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My Thoughts Page

The Thin People

 by Sylvia Plath

 They are always with us, the thin people Meager of dimension as the gray people

 On a movie-screen. They Are unreal, we say:

 It was only in a movie, it was only In a war making evil headlines when we

 Were small that they famished and Grew so lean and would not round

 Out their stalky limbs again though peace Plumped the bellies of the mice

 Under the meanest table. It was during the long hunger-battle

 They found their talent to persevere In thinness, to come, later,

 Into our bad dreams, their menace Not guns, not abuses,

 But a thin silence. Wrapped in flea-ridded donkey skins,

 Empty of complaint, forever Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

 The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn Scapegoat. But so thin,

 So weedy a race could not remain in dreams, Could not remain outlandish victims

 In the contracted country of the head Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

 Keep from cutting fat meat Out of the side of the generous moon when it

 Set foot nightly in her yard Until her knife had pared

 The moon to a rind of little light. Now the thin people do not obliterate

 Themselves as the dawn Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline

 Of the world comes clear and fills with color. They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

 Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales Under their thin-lipped smiles,

 Their withering kingship. How they prop each other up!

 We own no wilderness rich and deep enough For stronghold against their stiff

 Battalions. See, how the tree boles flatten And lose their good browns

 If the thin people simply stand in the forest, Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

 And grayer; not even moving their bones.