From Ruin to Recovery – Part Two

Part One | Part Two

By: Jean Johnson for Body1

Part Two

Alice Clark picks up her account of her struggle with bulimia, a nightmare that over the course of 20 years gradually became a bizarre lifestyle. In particular, her teen years were difficult and many of her memories surround strained times with her mother.

“I have a lot of memories of being forced to eat foods because of starving people around the world. Also of having to sit and eat until you were done,” said Clark. Between the family’s insistence on cleaning every last bite of food from the plate and the quality of the meals common to households in the 1950s and 1960s, the deck was stacked fairly high against Clark.

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Important Facts about Bulimia Kansas State University Counseling Services has an excellent Web page devoted to the eating disorder, bulimia:click here Tips from KSU include: There is very often a relationship between binging and non-assertiveness or unexpressed anger. People with bulimia often “swallow” their anger and bottle it up inside. Later they get rid of the bottled up feelings by binging and “throwing up.” Bulimics often skip meals so when they do eat they are starving and end up eating more than they would have had they had their three meals. Try not to skip meals. The easiest foods to binge on are soft, high-calorie foods like cereal, ice cream or candy. Avoid these at all costs at times when you are feeling down or tempted to overeat. The long-term effects (usually two to four hours) of processed sugar and caffeine are feeling blue and depressed (conditions the predispose people to binge). Hunger is increased when people eat or drink food containing sugar substitutes (such as diet soda).

“My mom used to have frozen spinach in a box. She’d pour in a pan, heat it up, and plop it on your plate. Limas the same way. Every time I felt them going down, I felt them coming back up later. I was so repulsed by them.”

What Clark lacked in access to quality cuisine, she made up for in quantity. “I ate cans of Chef Boyardee, too… I’d eat one whole pan and want more. Have them right after school and then at dinner I’d just sit there. I’d usually purge right after dinner when I was young.”

Along with sweet cereals, pasta and salty snack foods, Clark also used sweet desserts for her binges. “When I used to baby sit, I’d get into things like a Pepperidge Farm cake. First I’d take the periphery off, and then I’d go back for more and more slices until all that was left probably was a tiny square in this huge container. What did they possibly think I wonder? Usually I tried to spread it out so nobody would know, but somehow when I babysat there was the illusion that I could get by with it.”

While she’s on the subject of cake, Clark leaps forward in time to an especially humiliating experience as a young adult. “I was married to my husband by then, and we were over at some new friends we just met. We made a huge cake for the munchies, and the four of us ate this huge sheet cake. They might have had a polite one or two pieces, but I just kept going. Then I went out to their backyard and dug a hole and threw up! Can you imagine doing that in someone’s yard you just met?”

The incredulity in her voice almost makes it seem like Clark is talking about someone else. She shakes her head, and only the recovery of 16 solid years softens her face. Instead of the self-hatred that used to dog her every step, she has learned to forgive herself. “The thing is I know now that this is a disease. I have a disease, and I was just doing the best I could do at the time. If anything I feel really, really sorry for that person I was.”

The benefit of hindsight and a willingness to forgive, though, doesn’t make Clark forget the pain of two decades of bulimia. Indeed, by the time she was in high school she was purging daily.

“My mom and I had a horrible three years between her in menopause and me in adolescence,” Clark said. “I remember getting so mad at her, and when I’d throw up, I’d stick my finger down my throat and rage at her ‘I’ll show you! I show you!’ Rage! Raging at her!”

Clark takes a sip of decaf and shifts some in her chair. “This is really hard for me, you know. Going back and dredging all this up.”

We take a little break until Clark feels able to continue with an even more disturbing aspect of her experiences.

“I even threw up when I was driving once. That must have been later on when it was really getting horribly worse. I would be so angry and would have just binged and purged. But while I was driving I’d think that maybe I didn’t do it enough – get everything out of my stomach, you know. So I’d drink some more water and then put my window down and throw up a couple more times. Do it right there on the street! It was insane!”

Clark says the overwhelming rage she experienced was almost always directed at her mother. “Yeah. It was mostly my mom. But it was the feeling of the anger that I didn’t know how to deal with. Just like everyone else that I’ve talked to in Overeaters Anonymous, I’d isolate – close the shades and go through the cabinets. Open up the cabinets and then slamming then. ‘What else? What else?’ I’d say to myself. I knew I was trying to squelch anger. Maybe I wasn’t aware of my feelings entirely, but there was a feeling of being frantic. Slamming because I was mad! Slamming and eating and in a big rage in the kitchen!”

The stormiest days between the two generations subsided some, though, after Clark’s mother tried to tend to her daughter’s body image needs.

“When I was a senior in high school I was struggling with my weight again, and she took me to Weight Watchers. She took me to meetings, and we didn’t tell any of my friends. That bonded me to her. My dad – he was a big guy. Fat. Large. He died the following year so it was really providence. Of course, you know, it didn’t cure my bulimia. I still kept doing that, and it was my worst, most humiliating secret.”

Continued in Part Three

Last updated: 27-Mar-06