Research shows that fading vision is part
of the anorexia experience.

Anorexia deteriorates the body like a fast-forward of the aging process. We now know that 17-year-old girls with severe anorexia can have the fragile bones of what used to be considered a symptom of old age: osteoporosis. What my physiology professor at UCLA called "over forty eyes" when he reached for his reading glasses is becoming noticeable in women of all ages who starve. How is your vision lately?

Anorexia Eye Damage Study

A small study of 33 women, with an average age of 28, compared 13 women who were anorexic for an average of 10 years with 20 healthy women, measuring electrical activity and thickness of the macula. (Isn't the ophthalmogram lovely? It shows the macula as a spot to the left. The optic disc is the area on the right where blood vessels converge.)

This story is my attempt to bring understanding to this painful, desperate and all too common experience in the life of a bulimic woman. It could be triggering. I wrote this because articulating the extent of a bulimic episode in detail can help a woman know she can be understood and accepted. If she can feel known in her darkest hours, she may experience a new sense of hope and reach for her recovery.

Home

Day 8 continued: You quietly let yourself into your apartment. You run water in the bathroom to hide sound. You throw up the doughnuts. Exhausted, you collapse on the bed, fully clothed, on top of the covers and pass out.

An OMG panic attack experience gives you more information about what's happening to you than the numbness an eating disorder provides.

 "The Panic Attack Symptoms Nobody Talks About" by Rachel Gearinger is a short, well-written and candid article that may have powerful significance if you have or had an eating disorder. Eating disorders can create a psychological numbness that dulls your senses and, for a short time, relieves panic.

But you don't feel relief. You feel nothing. That dullness or numbness could be a form of depersonalization and/or derealization, a little-discussed aspect of panic.

Light and clarity are near. Hold on. Storms pass.

During this pandemic, women write they fear they are having an eating disorder relapse. They report that they are binge eating. They report that they are worthless and doomed to failure. They do not recognize recovery in action.

If you are feeling eating disorder storms and believe you are in the midst of an eating disorder relapse, you can learn to respond with recovery thinking.