I spent the last three years of my life to understand what pushed me to develop an eating disorder and it has not been easy. Considering the fact that my perception of who I was and what my life was all about was confused to say the least, I found it difficult to find reason in anything, let alone find reason in the one thing which I feared most. My eating disorder controlled me and everything about me. It took over my whole life and I could not see sense in the situation at all, but I was obsessed and addicted and although it hurt me, I just could not let it go. It became me and everything about me.

To some extent this represents the irony which revolves around the subject of eating disorders; you hate it, but you love it, you feel euphoria in losing weight, yet you feel ugly and disgusting, you feel trapped, yet liberated by the illusion of being in control of something, anything in your life. There is so much contradiction and confused emotions involved that it seems impossible to find any kind of logic or reason as to why anyone could hurt and abuse themselves the way in which they do when an eating disorder is involved.

I dealt with anorexia and bulimia for over 6 years and if someone asked me to describe something characteristic of an eating disorder I would answer ?contradiction?. From my own experience I have come to learn that eating disorders are based on a foundation of contradiction. 

Reflecting upon my own experience of living years with an eating disorder, I can honestly say that the healing method I used was 100% successful. What I have come to learn and understand from my own experience has eventually made sense to me. You could say I eventually found sense in the non-sense! I have grown to accept that that my experience has never been a burden in my life; in fact it has been a blessing in disguise.

This probably sounds ridiculous to you and I completely understand, but please consider events from my perspective before making your judgment. I am grateful to have had such a profound opportunity to learn about the dynamics of healing, eating disorders and the way the human mind can function. Who I am, my sense of direction and my sense of life purpose have changed as a result of my experience with eating disorders and the healing process I went through. I feel like a new person and have chosen to devote my life to helping others with what I have learnt in my life. I do intend sharing every shred of what I have learnt from my own experience with others who are in need of help and guidance.

One thing I have learnt is that your worst experiences in life are always your best assets; however, the way in which you choose to respond to your experiences determines the outcome and the direction your life path will follow. You always have a choice and your power lies in the choices you make. Whether an experience is positive or negative depends on the perspective from which you choose to look at and handle them.  

I would like to take the opportunity to mention that many of my articles on the website which were written in the past were written during my process of healing. Many of these articles are charged with the emotions I was experiencing at the time I was writing them. I am very aware of that and these articles no longer reflect who I am. I was a very angry, frightened, judgmental and defensive person and was desperate for people to hear what I had to say. I am happy to say that I no longer feel the need to express rage and have started revising and rewriting my articles where necessary. As I said before, anger and fear no longer reflect who I am today and I offer sincere apologies to anyone who has ever been offended by any of my views.

I would like to share a few details about my experience with an eating disorder.

When I was a child, I always thought I was a chubby girl. I was tall and looking back now, I can see that I was far from being chubby, but I truly believed I was. This feeling carried on into my adolescence and I grew to become depressed and miserable as a teenager, especially when it seemed that all my friends were so much smaller and slimmer than I was. I was always the tallest by far; I even had the nickname ?Big Bird? in high school! I hated my nickname, I hated the way I looked and I grew to hate myself.

Moving forward in time to when I was 17, I remember how it was at the beginning of my eating disorder, when I first started developing symptoms of my anorexia. I remember how great it felt, look at myself in the mirror about a million times each day, acknowledging that my effort to lose weight was actually paying off for the first time ever! I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement, more than I had ever experienced in my life when my trousers eventually became so big that they fell to the floor when I attempted to fasten them.

At first I was thrilled with the amount of weight I?d lost and for about a month or two I actually felt fabulous. Losing so much weight so fast felt great in the beginning, but after that month or two, it seemed that no matter how much weight I lost, I always saw a fat Ashleigh staring back at me from the reflection in the mirror. 

My main focus in life at that time was to lose as much weight as possible, in as short a time period as possible, no matter how it affected me physically or mentally. I became dizzy, tired and bad-tempered. My relationships, social-life and job were affected but I did not care, all I cared about was being thin. My friends and boyfriend at the time told me I was becoming weird and that I was a paranoid freak! I was unable to make any sense of anything and I did not care either! Nothing else mattered to me except my physical appearance.

No matter how hungry and exhausted I felt, I still insisted upon starving myself. I even started abusing drugs and became addicted for a while because I took them everyday. Taking drugs helped me to lose weight because they suppressed my appetite, at the same time they replaced my feelings of depression, tiredness and misery with happiness, energy and euphoria. I was wasting away physically and mentally but was still unable to see the reality of my situation and what I was doing to myself. I was addicted to an eating disorder, I was addicted to drugs, but I did not see any problem because for the first time in my life I thought I had control of myself and who I was. I was seriously misleading myself but could not see it.

My experience with anorexia had nothing to do with resisting the foods we define as being ?bad?, for example, crisps, chocolate, cakes and burgers. My intention was to resist eating anything at all! I became an expert in the subjects of food, dieting and exercise. I was fanatical about counting calories in food, measuring fat content, carbohydrates, weighing things, weighing myself. I studied cookery books, diet books, exercise books and fashion magazines to inspire and motivate me to keep losing weight. All I thought about was food and dieting from the minute I woke in the morning until I went to sleep at night. 

I have a very strong will and when I am determined to do something, I will do it no matter what. It is frightening when I think back now, considering the things I was determined to do myself, things which were slowly killing me. The reality is that my experience with the eating disorder and drugs was like a prolonged way of trying to commit suicide. It sounds harsh I know, but that was my reality. I had no sense of self worth, self love or value for myself. It hurt and I tried so hard to be in control of something, just anything in my life which gave me a purpose for living. It sounds sick I know, but that is the reality and the eating disorder seemed like the only thing I had going for myself at the time.

I thrived on the sense of control I felt, so much so that I allowed it to take over my entire life and being. I really believed I was in control, it felt like I was in control, but the truth is, I was never in control. I gave up all sense of control when I gave myself up to the eating disorder. My eating disorder controlled me, my thoughts, my actions and my life.

I wanted to describe some details of my experience at the beginning when I fist developed anorexia because I believe it illustrates my point at the beginning of this article. I mentioned that contradiction is a major element underneath the experience of an eating disorder. One of the major influences which motivated my eating disorder was this tremendous unconscious longing to have control over of anything something, anything in my life. I realized this during my healing process when I evaluated my life experiences and the role they played in the development of my eating disorder. My obsession with dieting begun after certain events took place in my family. I am not blaming those events or the people involved, but this seemed to be the breaking point for me. I felt lost, abandoned and as if my entire world had completely fallen apart. My life has consisted of one disaster after another and I couldn?t take it anymore. I felt I had lost everyone and everything in my life which was important to me and all I had to hang onto in my life was my diet, losing weight, being thin and taking drugs. Nobody could take those things from me; those were my best kept secrets. Some people obviously knew I was losing weight and taking drugs, yet they did not know the extent of what I was doing.  

So weeks passed into months and months passed into years and I slowly became worse and worse. I went from being anorexic to bulimic and from being bulimic to abusing laxatives. Then, after almost 5 years, during the last stretch of my eating disorder, I became physically unable to make myself sick anymore, but couldn?t stop binging I started compulsive over eating. I am telling you, I have experienced every kind of eating disorder you could imagine and know all the weight loss tricks in the book. I reached a point where my body was literally worn out, my systems had practically all shut down, nothing seemed to be working anymore and I felt like I was the living dead!

I experienced pains in my back, my throat, my chest and stomach. My head ached, my skin was yellow, my knuckles were scratched and scabby because I constantly shoved my hand back my throat to make myself sick after eating. My face and neck was swollen and chubby. My teeth were decaying, the enamel was worn and my gums were infected. Eventually, after years of binging and purging, I eventually stopped losing weight and started gaining because my body seemed to reach a point where it was unable to bring the food back up. What was the point in this?

The truth is, I couldn?t see any point anymore. My original intention of losing weight and having a beautiful outward appearance as a result, was long gone. That is another element of contradiction and as you can probably see; my feeling of being in control did not last for such a long time after all and I can tell you now that I did not turn out to be the beauty I thought I would. I looked disgusting, my lifestyle was disgusting, my attitude was disgusting and the way I treated myself, or rather, abused myself was disgusting.

The main thing that stands prominently in my memory was my yearning to be in control of something, I believed I was in control of something, but I never was in reality. After years of living with a life threatening eating disorder and drug abuse problem, I can honestly say that I felt so out of control that I saw no way of escaping from my experiences.  I believed I was going to die, I wanted to die and I gave myself until the age of thirty to live.

I am happy to say now that that I was given the opportunity to deal with my issues, to understand who I was and why these things happened to me and be able to move forward in my life with a greater sense of self awareness. I did not waste one moment of the time or the help I was given to help me heal myself and I thankful to be alive today.

I am sure I was not the first and will not be the last to experience hardship in life, but that we learn how to understand and try to heal our problems. It is time to get to know who you are and the essence of all you have experienced in your life. If I recovered than so can you. There is always a way, but you have to want to change first and help will come when you are ready. Make the decision to change and the opportunity to change will present itself somehow. I said before your power in life lies in the choices you make. I was faced with the choice to either try living or to die slowly. I chose to live and I do not regret one minute of my experience. We always have a choice so don?t give up, it is never too late to change and start living!

Yours in light