If You Want to Quit Barfing by Jennifer Molica

If You Want to Quit Barfing
by Jennifer Molica

I’ve read and performed about this issue quite a bit in the past, then quit talking about it, largely because I found it embarrassing. I would rather prattle on about a myriad of other controversial, spine tingling, and repulsive subjects than detail my life as a bulimic. When I started thinking about writing a collection of essays to help people save their own lives, I realized this had to be part of them because I’m sick of hearing news stories about people dying because they can’t stop barfing. No more Terri Schiavo stories. No more gastric bypass surgeries. No more Karen Carpenter stories. Jonah Hill is now half his size. Con-grat-u-fucking-lations. My brother deliberately refused to see a doctor about an intestinal parasite because he was losing weight and looking better.

I’ve glossed over the statistics, and they’re depressing. Since these numbers only give one a swatch of what is really going on, many people with eating disorders are secretive about their behavior, and that other genders besides females are not accurately reported, I figure the number is much larger than any of us can imagine. Enough is enough. What I’m about to share isn’t anything new. You’ll recognize the story. My approach to recovery has strong roots in some common approaches; however, I do have a morsel or two to offer that would raise an eyebrow or two among practitioners. You’ll recognize those offerings right away because they are proposed in abrasive language and buck common approaches in ED therapy. I could give two shits in a bird bath what those shrinks think.

I first began barfing in 1986, and stopped in April of 2003. That is a lot of puke, probably enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. My motivation was vain in nature. I sought out beauty via thinness because I believed that was normal. Chances are you are motivated by vanity as well, but you’d like to believe it is because of other emotional issues.  I urge you to take the first step in being honest with yourself and just admit that you are afraid of fat.  I would gloss over my teen magazines, wishing that Kirk Cameron was my boyfriend and I could wear clothes like all of the cool girls at school. If I only knew what a cook Mr. Cameron was, I’d have made a better choice about my teen crushes! I distinctly remember pouring over the ads in the back of TigerBeat and Seventeen for fat camps and secret diet methods that were guaranteed to give you the love and life you desired. The “Get Him Method” was purchased with my hard-earned allowance for the price of $15.95 + shipping and handling. Back then there was no internet and I waited 8 fucking weeks for that piece of shit. The book was clearly written by someone who had limited knowledge of the English language and had a food chart that had horribly inaccurate nutrition information. An apple has 9-12 grams of fat? Who made that apple, McDonalds?

Truth be told, I was chubby at best. The diet rollercoaster began in 5th grade when my physician told my mother that I needed to lose 15 lbs. 95lbs was too much for an 11-year-old with a 4’10” frame. I now know that doctor should have been beaten with a reality stick. After yo-yo dieting, I packed on another 40 lbs by the time I was 13. Juxtapose that with acne and acquaintance rape, I was ready to explode. I overheard a kid on the school bus talk about how he made himself vomit so he could make weight for wrestling. My companionship with puke began.

Sorry, but that’s all you’re going to hear of my war story. Do you really want to hear about every time I puked? It’s puke, there is hardly any glamour to it– I want to save your life. If you follow these suggestions, you should be able to quit puking:

1. Stop puking- This is rather simplistic don’t you think? Listen up dipshit, quit puking. Tell someone who you love that you have a problem with this. Chances are they already know. The rank of vomit clings to you like smoke on a smoker. You don’t think you smell, but honey you do. You don’t think anyone knows your secret, but we do. You have the death breath that can only be explained by a heavy diet of puking, so quit it. The easiest way to not puke is to not puke. Time your meals if you have to and when the buzzer goes off, take a walk. Eat with other people—don’t eat alone. Put that OCD to good use by making a list of your day and follow it to the letter. Do whatever it takes to not puke one day at a time. Sometimes you’ll find yourself going in increments of minutes, but that’s okay. I found it important to keep myself busy.
2. Know that progress will be slow- Don’t confuse this with permission to barf. No matter the kind of barfing-(literal barfing, laxatives, starvation, and exercise) ED is an illness where one experiences gradual recovery.  The recovery isn’t complete abstinence like a recovering alcoholic, it is a weaning process. I went from 10x a day to 4x a day, to twice a week, to once a month, to three times a year, to zero. I’m a therapist’s wet dream. Very few people actually recover to zero episodes, but you should still aim for that goal.
3. Speaking of therapists, get one- Don’t just get one at random either. Really look for one that specializes in eating disorders. Stick with your own gender too.  If you have gender identity stuff—which is really life changing heavy stuff that deserves a loving listening ear, seek one out that knows about the ED world and queer issues. You will have to physically ask them what experience they have. If they give you the creeps, listen to that inner voice and find someone else. Many therapists have become therapists because they are sick fucks who glean their own self-worth from helping others instead of becoming practitioners to truly make the world a better place. It’s sad, but true. For every good MSW or PsyD, there are at least five that need to work somewhere else, preferably away from the general public. I should know, I’ve had my fair share of them. If money is a problem, there are many places that offer sliding fee scales. Chances are, you’re going to have more free cash by not barfing that you can spend on a quality therapist. Money is the least of your worries right now. Your life is on the line. If you don’t know where to find these pay-what-you-can places, schedule a meeting with a pastor, rabbi, or priest. Don’t worry if you don’t belong to that faith. Those people took an oath to help people in the name of a diety that may or may not exist, so hold ‘em to it. Tell them you’re a godless puker and you need help. You’re not going to shock them. Now that we live in the worldwide web, finding resources is a google search away. Again, use your obsessive tendencies to save your ass.
4. Once you’ve found Mr.Ms.Zz Right start getting honest- I’m talking therapist, not a relationship. You have no business being in a romantic relationship because you’re fucking crazy. Unless you’re in a committed relationship, get the fuck out and be single for a while. This will challenge you severely, but you have nothing to offer another human being until you can recognize your own self-worth. If you’re a barfer, you don’t know anything except for bullshitting and puking. You’ll need to spend time with a quality therapist and talk about what makes you barf and be VERY HONEST ABOUT IT. Once you find your Rosetta Stone to puking, 90% of the work is done. The rest of it is vigilant maintenance. Everyone has different keystones: vanity, abuse, gender identity, chemical dependency, or a mental illness other than ED. Whatever it is, find it and don’t stop talking about it. Mine was a frothy mixture of all of the aforementioned problems. I don’t personally believe in triggers per se—I believe in these keystones. Hiding parts of me from the world and not sharing it with anyone is what kept me sick for so long. The more I hid, the more I puked.
5. You will have to eat and NO DIETING- Some people with ED swear by OA, and that’s great for them. The twelve steps can be applied to many facets of one’s life, but I don’t think it is an appropriate application to eating because one cannot live without food. OA did not work for me because many people followed food plans that avoided certain foods. I couldn’t do that because it created desire. Incessant yearning is one of the building blocks to the temple of barf. I learned to not crave by eating whatever I wanted and that meant NO DIETING. No diet sodas, no South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers, cleanses, or any of that bullshit that takes money from you and uses it to create generations of people with body image problems. I found two things outside of therapy to help me with my relationship with food: veganism-(NOT A DIET) and the book “Overcoming Overeating” by Hirschman and Munter. In the book, they propose ‘demand feeding’ which means you eat whatever and whenever you please—something very scary for the person with an ED. They also suggest you stocking your shelves with all of your favorite foods as a way to rid yourself of the desire of craving, if that makes any sense. Just get the fucking book and read it.
6. You will gain weight- Duh. You ate before and barfed via laxatives, throwing up, exercise, and starving. Now you’re not doing that and you’re gaining weight. It makes sense. Now get over it. You have no idea what your weight is because you’ve been treating your body like a slave and depriving it of things you should have been giving it, so the answer to “What does my real body look like?” will probably be a bigger version of yourself. There is nothing wrong with this. You just have a problem with it because you have bought into some idiot’s design of what a real person should look like. Real people are in many different sizes from teeny tiny to huge. Where will you be? Keep eating and find out. It’s not as bad as you think. In the mean time, please get Marilyn Wann’s book “Fat?So!” This is a must. You’ll learn all about the lovely history (and I really mean his-story) of weight prejudice, charts, etc.
7. You have a vision problem- Us folk with ED have a literal vision disorder fueled by a mental problem. We see things through a distorted lens. We either think we’re much hotter than we are, or we think that we’re ugly. It’s usually the latter, and don’t I wish that I had a problem with the former! No amount of compliments from other people have ever been enough for us. We see a side-show freak. You are going to have to accept that what you see in the mirror doesn’t exist. This will take some time to work. I still have to practice this. When I look at myself in the mirror, I state the facts, not feelings: “I have red hair, fair skin, green eyes, awesome skin, large sagging breasts, tattoos, a paunchy belly, and short legs.”  You have a shit lens. Believe the positive things that others say about you. You’re going to have to HONESTLY deconstruct what makes a body “hot.” You’ll learn that you have a vanity issue-that you measure your self-worth by someone else’s standards. Does it ever bother you when you see someone bullied? Well, you’ve successfully been bullied by an unrealistic standard.
8. Learn about the history of your food- Not only do you need to develop a relationship with yourself, you also need to learn about food. Not just the calorie content of it, but the entire nutritional value of the food. Fiber? Good fats? Omega 3 or 6? Is it a plant or an animal? Where did it come from? What was it originally used for?  For example, let’s look at the banana: it’s technically a berry, in the same family as vanilla, and most bananas are imported into the USA. The more I learn about my food and how it gets here, the more informed decision I can make about whether I’m going to put it into my body. Learning about the biological process of eating, drinking, and barfing is helpful as well. Jae Steele has some interesting things to discuss about nutrition in her book “Get It Ripe”. NOTE: she does encourage “cleanses” and I don’t agree with these, because these types of fasts deprive the recovering person with an ED, and gives them ammunition to relapse. Attend a biology class at your local community center, get a book from a library, and meet with a nutritionist if you have insurance that covers that. If insurance is an issue, many universities have programs where students need internship hours to graduate. You can meet with a student majoring in nutrition for FREE.  Do you follow a vegan diet or have a food allergy? All the better—those students need the experience of working with someone so they can be decent practitioners. Same goes with a therapist: you could utilize a student earning his or her master’s degree, give them solid real-life barfing experience, and see them pro bono. It’s a win-win situation if you’re game for it.
9. If the idea of sharing with a stranger bothers you, get over it- Much like the gaining weight thing, if you REALLY want to quit barfing, you’ll need to get over your fear of working with people. There are two types of barfers- the kind that never shuts up and will tell you their life story at the drop of a hat, and then there’s the barfer who you never know about until it’s too late. I’ve lived in both worlds. Either place is a miserable experience. I’ve found a happy medium by learning that the planet isn’t my one stop shopping center for my emotional needs—there are specific people I need to talk to about certain issues. Being completely silent about everything in my life leads to illness as well. There’s definitely a learning curve involved.
10. Believe with your whole heart that you can truly quit barfing- If you don’t believe this, you’re fucked. Start with wrapping your mind around this idea. Visualize you have a completely new brain, free of all of the garbage you’ve been feeding it. This new brain doesn’t know about barfing. This new brain only knows love, pure unconditional love. It tells your eyes that you are beautiful, it tells your mouth that it’s okay to eat, and it tells your heart that it’s important to be around good people and to have boundaries with them. What’s so crazy about pretending to do this? You’ve pretended to be something you’re not for a long time. Underneath all the puke you really are a breathtaking specimen. Put that bullshitting to work for good.
11. BONUS MATERIAL: Someone loves you very much. If you were to die because you couldn’t stop puking, it would unravel someone else’s world. They would roam the Earth slightly less than human and never fully recover from your passing. Believe me when I say this, I’ve lost a few to the hobgoblin of suicide and it hurts in the most unexplainable way. I think of how old these people would be if they were still alive. I think of what they could have given this world if they had just gotten some help. I think of me not being here, and how that would impact my two children and spouse. I think of my dearest friends, my animal companions, and everything that is awesome about this world—gone. I am grateful that I finally humbled myself and decided to quit barfing.

Tagged as: happiness. found.