Dear Anonymous

I received a comment on one of my earlier posts. The commenter gave a question, but since he/she was anonymous, I don't have any way to reply. So I will answer it here.

"how are you still kind of fat if you spend so much time starving yourself? You're not huge, but you have a lot of fat on your stomach area..."

Thank you for that wonderful boost to my self esteem. [/sarcasm]

I gained weight during my eating disorder. Quite a large number of bulimics do. During the periods of starvation/eating only vegetables/strenuous exercise, there are parts of the brain that are tricked into believing there's a famine. The body starts to crave fatty and sugary foods as a survival instinct. The metabolism slows down because the body is getting less food and so outputs less energy as a response.

Then I would binge. I would eat a huge amount of junk, most of which was full of sugar and fat. My body would then store all of this as fat. Even bulimics who throw up never manage to completely empty their stomachs. The body still digests part of the binge as stores it entirely as fat. This is why the majority of bulimics are a healthy weight or even overweight. Those bulimics who are underweight tend (this is a generalisation and not always true) to be bulimic with strong anorexic tendencies. Some may even qualify as anorexic with binging when their body mass drops enough.

I would starve myself and use diet pills and exercises and every trick I could think of to lose weight. But I would put it all back on when I binged.

Being eating disordered doesn't mean being skeletal thin. With most bulimics, you'd never know by looking at them that there was anything wrong.