I want you to know it’s possible to get over this — and it’s worth it. Your life will be richer and freer once you’re no longer chained to this cycle. Have you had professional help? Even if you have and it hasn’t helped, not all professional help is good, and even if it’s good, it’s not all cut out for the same people. It’s a matter of finding the right help for you. There are also drugs now, that address binge-eating and bulimia. Most doctors don’t know about them, but they are very effective at stopping this cycle.

If you feel that writing about this might help you, I feel certain it probably would. Because part of what keeps this cycle going is the isolation — doing it makes you isolated, which makes you feel bad, so you do it more because you feel bad and isolated, which isolates you more. I think writing a blog about it might be the perfect way for you to cut that cycle. And you can do it anonymously, if that makes it easier. If you don’t know where to start, just go to http://www.wordpress.com and start playing around with all the options. It’s very very easy.

If you need resources for how to find professional help, let me know. And I urge you to get professional help — this is too complex and overwhelming a disease to overcome on your own.

Please know that you are not alone — there are many many people who empathize with you and who want to see you get free of this, including me.

Thank you so much for sharing with me.

Julie

You see, I have been struggling with bulimia for 34 years….and I have NEVER, EVER read or heard someone else describe it so 100% completely accurately. The feelings leading up to the binge, the bingeing and how it feels after vomiting…..

Thank you so much for writing this….

I have never even read blogs….I just typed into Google tonight the words “bulimia blog”….and started reading some things..

I was thinking that maybe I could start to write about this and maybe it would help. I have no idea how to start a blog.

I am in so much pain….it’s such an addiction at this point in my life.

Again, I can’t tell you what it meant to me to read this…I could have written this….that’s how much your description is like me.

–Linda

What we do as writers is important because we have the power to speak and spread information in ways that many others can’t — we have the tools and the know-how and the access to help our audience feel empathy. So what we choose to focus on matters very much — it really does change minds and widens hearts.

A twitter friend just posted last night that her former assistant died yesterday of anorexia, after a prolonged struggle. These are very serious diseases, but just being female doesn’t make you vulnerable. It’s a combination of genetics and environment. You sound like a wonderful man and a wonderful father–that’s how you protect her. Model love for her, for yourself, and your family. Don’t make food mean anything other than nourishment. Seems to me like just the fact that you’re this engaged and aware and empathic now, before she’s even arrived, will make all the difference.

I also want to make the point, for anyone who may be reading this, that 10% of eating disorder sufferers are male. It develops for a variety of reasons, but its affects are the same.

David, thank you so much for encouraging me with this. I felt self-conscious about my response to your comment above — like it was a little too self-congratulatory, patting-my-own-back … but I think that was a response to how conflicted I felt about it just being out there to begin with. So I was trying to encourage myself. Like, I’m trying to stay in that fierce, truth-telling place, instead of dart out in front from time to time.

Happy writing today. And thank you again.

Julie

I do this all day while other people are saving lives, teaching kids, making concrete impact.

Which is what this post did. Made a concrete impact on me. And it reminded me that writing does. That writing is vital, saves lives, teaches kids.

My wife and I have four sons and we are expecting a daughter any day. I have fears about raising a daughter.

I make bad jokes about my sons and I terrorizing suitors, I macho through other fears about pedophiles and abductors… She’ll be a black belt, I have a shotgun, etc.

But bulimia / anorexia is a fear I don’t share with others, I don’t joke it away.

I remember girls, friends of mine in junior high and high school, who were anorexic and bulimic. I felt that powerlessness as a young man then. Unlike drugs or some shitty boyfriend, there was no dealer to threaten, no dude to beat up. And as they would go away, physically disappear, I would too… farther away from them.

Your post told me what they didn’t. And as raw, vulnerable, and at times disturbing as the piece was — the bravery in it, the honesty of it — spoke to and understood and confronted my fear.

Which is what stories do. Bring the monsters out of the cave. Let us confront and battle them and see ourselves in them.

Years from now, after hundreds of TV shows and movies come and go, I’ll have my daughter read this piece of writing, your story, so she can see herself in it, so we can talk about it.

And as her father, I’ll feel that by doing so, I was able to help protect her from something I didn’t know how to protect her from.

I mean, not that there’s not huge analogies there, with vomiting – literally expressing yourself – … but I didn’t want to deflate it by shining a spotlight on it.

So that was my thinking on it. I thank you so much for reading this. This one feels deeply personal, so I feel conflicted, vulnerable about it — more even than the anorexia post, which I abstracted a little in the way I wrote it. This one I bold-faced more, pushed more right to the front. I think it shows how I’m changing as a writer, as a result of this blog, just in those intervening months.

This post was the first thing I thought of when I woke today — did I really do that last night? Was that okay? Sometimes it’s not, or my feelings change, but continuing to do things that provoke questions like that let me know that I’m alive and that I continue to test my place in the world, rewrite my present and future.

Thank you again. Your contribution here means a lot to me.