I feel the need to exemplify for everyone what exactly bulimia--specifically binging--looks like. Compulsive overeating. Gorging. Whatever you'd like to call it.
You take a road trip with your roommate and the entire drive you sneak into gas stations to buy coffee alone. Caffeine, you say, you need caffeine. She thinks you're buying black coffee. No. You're putting the sickeningly sweet, thick creamy coffee imitation of French Vanilla and Pumpkin Spice into the same Styrofoam cups that all the people who really drink black coffee use. You're not sure if she can smell the difference, but you're praying to God she can't.
You notice how sloppily the white, stretch-mark-lined cauliflower fat around your thighs bounces all over the seat as you drive. You hate your body. You feel high off of all the sugar you've been ingesting. You hate, hate, hate yourself. You feel suffocating with how stuck you are.
You spend the week with friends constantly trying to slip in more food at each meal without people noticing. You have never felt so self-conscious in your entire life. You never realized just how much more you typically eat than the people around you. You can't relax. You just want to be alone so you can eat.
You repeatedly make excuses to slip upstairs to "email my mom," "reply to a text," or "grab a hair tie"; you actually just want to shove a hand into your box of Cheez-It's and chomp it down as quickly as possible. You need that hit of food. A lot of it. Now. Alone.
You wake up at 4:10 AM to sneak downstairs and grab food before everyone gets up to see you off for your return trip. You're in a spare bathroom, hoping your insomniac roommate it truly asleep, and blearily scarfing through each food item. Can people hear you chewing? You should have picked the snack without nuts.
You go grocery shopping with your roommate after this trip and are insanely protective over your cart. You "casually" pick a different checkout line and thank heaven that there are other, shorter 20 items or less lines for her to go through.
You avoid putting your groceries away until after she leaves. You don't want to give her a hint as to just what or how much food you bought. So you stall by unpacking your bags while she repacks hers for a weekend at home. You cheerily offer to help her bring stuff to her car. She asks, "Are you sure you're going to be okay here alone?" in reference to the last fall break when you were a little stir-crazy from being alone on a deserted campus for 5 days. I laugh at the insanity of the question. Hahaha. No, I want to say, no dear I will absolutely not be okay. I will be binging and purging on probably 10,000 calories worth of food all weekend (maybe more). I will be depressed. I will be in a haze. I will feel like shit. I will definitely not be okay. But I say "Yeah, of course; that's so sweet of you, but I'll be fine!"
You rip into the King Size Heath bar you bought as soon as the door's locked. You then unpack your groceries and ferociously dig into bags and boxes and gallons and cartons of good. You have to taste everything, now! You make odd combinations which taste surprisingly yummy. You use about 20,000 dishes. You eat and eat until you are literally shuffling, bent over like a humpback, to the bathroom. You bend at the waste and tickle the trigger. It's all water at first, the few sips you chugged desperately at the end once you realized how little you'd drank throughout. Then the food comes. And comes and comes and comes. You can feel the relief, so certain. As absolute as the fullness that told you to stop. You purge and purge until only small amounts are coming up. You try not to drip snot everywhere as you flush and move to the sink to wash the vomit off your hand and arm. You clean the toilet seat, feeling good. It's done. And everything you hated the taste of when you were full suddenly sounds so damn appealing. Maybe just a few more bites. What could be the harm? You won't get full enough to need to throw up again. Just a small snack.
10 minutes later you're back over the toilet. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Until the list of your transgressions looks like this:
-1 extra-large box of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal
-1 bag multigrain tortilla chips, a little bit of too-hot salsa
-2/3 gallon 1% milk
-1 box Mac 'n Cheese
-1 pizza crust, 3/4 cup tomato sauce, 2/3 cup cheese
-1 large bowl of rigatoni noodles, 3/4 cup tomato sauce, 1/3 cup cheese
-1 half-gallon toffee ice cream
-2 heath bars
-1 (entire) package coconut dream cookies
-6 Chips Ahoy cookies
-1 box brown sugar
-3/4 stick butter
-2 cups oatmeal
-1 banana
-5 buttery biscuits
-1/2 a sub bun with a little tomato sauce/salsa
You'd rather be dead, but the best option is going to sleep instead. It's 1AM and you're exhausted. So you purge one last time because it's painful to lie down when you're full and organize the endless dishes into a seemingly neat order for tomorrow's washing.
And when you wake up you're hungry. It begins again.
This is the hell of bulimia. It never stops.
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