How I Battled Two Eating Disorders and Won

"Please let me live through the night! I promise that this time I'll change!"

Those words became my personal chant one night, gasped out between bouts of searing pain and wild heart palpitations.

Earlier in the evening I'd told my husband that I wasn't feeling well and was going to sleep in the guest room. "It might be the flu," I lied. But of course it wasn't the flu. Truthfully, I didn't want him to see me writhing in pain, perspiring and making repeated trips to the bathroom. He knew by now that I had an eating problem of some sort but he never guessed it was this bad and if I could help it, he'd never know.

But I knew that my years of suffering from two eating disorders, bulimia and anorexia, had caught up with me. I had binged, purged and starved until my body could take no more. I realized it would take drastic measures to save my sanity and possibly my life.

I'd tried changing before. I'd promised my husband, my mother, my father and even God that I'd stop my destructive pattern of "dieting." I realized that this time I'd have to try some other method to break the vicious cycle.

As I lay on the bed, I thought of what I had done during the day: I'd eaten a few bites of food for breakfast, managed to pretend I'd had lunch as I went out to run errands, then eaten perhaps half of my dinner because my husband and I went to a nice restaurant and I didn't want to disappoint him. In between mealtimes, throughout the day and evening, I'd taken several pills -- a total of three diuretics and seven laxatives.

This had been one of my worst days but I had abused myself in some way every day, with a combination of pills, starving or temporarily overeating.