What is it like to be bulimic?

It’s about speed. When alone, it’s about how fast I can shovel food into my mouth: handfuls of popcorn, spoons laden with heaping mounds of ice cream. Cram it down my throat until my jaw aches from fatigue and my stomach is stuffed to capacity. Don’t stop, don’t think, don’t feel. Just chew, chew, chew. But when with others, it’s about how slow I can eat my salad, leaf by leaf of lettuce; grape tomatoes cut in half, then quarters. It’s about cutting my chicken into the smallest of pieces, how long I can make each bite last. Eating is an illusion of self-control, of utmost refinement. Secretly, my insides are in vertigo. All I can do is chew, chew, chew.

It’s about opposites. Not left and right, but the opposition of body and mind, of logic and impulse, inside versus outside. I stare down a plate of cookies, a bowl of pasta, and internally scream, No! I don’t want this! While externally, my body acts out its own cry, I want this, I want this, and I am powerless to stop it. My teeth bite, my tongue tastes. I am not in control. This dysfunction spills into other areas of life – sex, drinking, shopping. I’m in bed with a man I don’t love or even like, frozen. Paralyzed. The voice insides screams NO a thousand times as my body defies me and moans yes, yes, oh baby, yes.

Then there is sometimes reversal. I stare down the same food and feel my stomach complain, hear the voice say I want it, I’m hungry, let me have it; but I am no more capable of lifting the fork than of moving mountains. I finally pick it up and it’s so heavy in my hand. It’s become a foreign object, this silver thing with its shiny prongs. What do I do with this? Looking around, I see my friends laughing and spearing bits of meat with their forks. As though it’s the most natural thing in the world. The realization crashes down upon me: I’ve forgotten how to eat.

It’s about numbers. Weight, sure, but also more important ones: how many trips to the store today for more food, how much money left in the checking account after those trips, how many minutes spent bent over the toilet, penance for the sin of gluttony. How many times I've failed today. How many calories I flush.

It’s about so many things that differ among individuals. It could be about death, a passive wish or hope of suicide. It could be about vengeance – force me to eat, this is what you’ll get. It could be vanity, masochism, loneliness, hedonism, boredom, emptiness, depression, and many more.

We are soldiers, and we have many battlegrounds. War is waged in grocery stores, in kitchens, at parties, in offices, in bathrooms, at baseball games, in banquet halls and fast food joints. It is guerrilla warfare. We are ambushed in the least likely places and at the most inopportune times. We find a scale in our lover’s bathroom and step on and off, on and off, on and off, til a knock on the door scares us away from it. A coworker buys breakfast for everyone one morning, disrupting our thoughts with food, calories, fat, what ifs and shoulds and maybes. We bargain with ourselves: a bagel for an extra hour at the gym, a Danish and coffee and cigarettes the rest of the day, six muffins when nobody's looking and run to the bathroom to get rid of it immediately. We are never safe, we are never free. The long shadow of this disease looms over us always. We few, we happy few. We band of bulimics.