1 - I THINK I HAVE BULIMIA

You’d think that, having a major degree in clinic psychology, you’d be able to recognize an eating disorder. 

It isn’t so. 

I realize there is something wrong with food when a colleague of mine - she knows me from barely two months - chitchatting by the vending machine with another colleague (I was by the vending machine too, I may not eat junk food on good days but I still need my daily dose of coffee) stated “Don’t bother ask her, she won’t grab anything, she is anorexic.”

It hurt. Badly.

It isn’t the first time she calls me anorexic but she is a few cm shorter than I am and objectively obese, she weighs twice my size (to say the least); coming from her, I’ve always dismissed it as a figure of speech. 

I’m struck dumb: I’m not anorexic.

How do I know it? I’ve been anorexic. 

I spent almost three years of my life in and out from clinics, luckily they didn’t have to force-feeding me but when I was 16 I became sick.

My ICD-9 Code was 313.3 and in addiction to all the medical tests, I had to take a 2 hours in-group-therapy session every Wednesdays for almost 3 years. 

Therefore, if I were anorexic I think I knew.

Provided that anorexia is a freaking gyp, and it is not because it kind of starts a loop in your brain, it is because if you are not willing to kick the bucket in 4 to 6 years they eventually make you eat again and the way your body will respond to food will be freaky. 

It will get back at you for all the time you starved it and it will cherish each and every calorie you’ll give him, even water will suite it.

It takes years - while I take into account everything that goes in (or out) - for things to get easier but food will always be an alien thing to me.

Anyway, I end the therapy sessions, attend University and inevitably put weight on but I take it into account: it’s either fat or dead. 

My body has always been a swindler. I had amenorrhea, a nightmare medical chart, a very hard time concentrating, eyesight problems but the bastard never fell below 57 kg (which means obese in the anorexic dictionary, so you know). 

When I started eating again I gained pounds. At one point, after 4 years, I reached an impossible weight (67 kg). The way I ate was disarrayed, erratic and messy. I usually had just one meal per day and it meant eating (alone and standing) from a plate stuffed with a few random things (sometimes not even cooked or defrosted). 

In the end I made up my mind and went to see a nutritionist. Knowing from a doctor when, how and what to eat helped. 

See? Supposedly you know how to eat but when something like this happens to you it screw up your brain. 

I reached 61 kg and it’s been so for the past years. 

A crappy number if you ask me.