I was bulimic for more than four years, but I longed to be anorexic. That’s the cruel magic of an eating disorder that doesn’t drastically change your weight. With anorexia, everyone notices your tiny body. People can see your illness as clearly as your bones. When I had bulimia, I was falling to bits and no one noticed.

Bulimia took me by the shoulders and pushed me to the floor. I lost my confidence, my sense of self and everything that had ever made me ‘me.’ For years, I sat in therapy rooms faking food diaries, faking progress and faking smiles like a pro. I got so good at it that I almost fooled myself.

The National Eating Disorder Association website states that the combination of psychotherapy and diet management is the most effective form of treatment, but only 6 percent of bulimia sufferers get mental health treatment. It took me a long time to realize bulimia wasn’t killing me, but I wasn’t living, either.

When I was 16, I decided slim wasn’t good enough. Bulimia can affect anyone at any point, although the majority of new diagnoses happen between the ages of 15 and 17, said William Walters, helpline manager at NEDA.

‘People are starting to find their own identity,’ he said. ‘They want to fit in and stand out all at the same time.’

I decided to find my identity by counting my ribs, but I failed badly at weight loss. Within a year, I went from 120 pounds to 110 before creeping up to 145. I stayed that weight for the next three years. Those don’t seem like dramatic numbers, but my body was a wreck.

I don’t think anyone decides they are going to have bulimia. Bulimia takes you under her wing and makes you forget about life before her. I lost everything I knew about eating normally.

I would eat nothing all day. I would run and weigh myself compulsively. I would drink 10 liters of water. I would creep around the kitchen at night, trying not to make a sound. I ate food people wouldn’t notice was gone. Eating more than 5,000 calories in an hour became normal. I ate until I could feel food creeping up my throat, and my tummy looked like a massive tumor.

Then I would try to throw up. I’d stick a toothbrush down my throat and retch up nothing. I would get up the next day and do it all over again. I didn’t know how to stop.

There’s something very safe about an eating disorder.I had always been good at everything. I was top of my class. I was the best athlete at my school. I won art competitions. Everyone told me I could do anything. The pressure was unbearable, but bulimia took the rock off my chest. It gives you an excuse not to do things. If you can’t eat properly then what can you do? Armed with bulimia, I had no expectations of myself. In a f*cked up way, I had never felt so free.

It took me four years, four psychologists and moving from the United Kingdom to the United States to finally start fighting back. When I came to Syracuse in 2009, I wasn’t Iona; I was bulimia. And I’m not special. One quarter of college-aged women admit to vomiting and purging as a method of weight control, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders website. Think of you and your three closest friends.

Walters estimated between 75 percent and 80 percent of bulimia sufferers recover. But we’re wounded. Even now, more than a year into real recovery, I can’t sit with food around me and feel comfortable. Full kitchen cupboards make me nervous, extra money in my pockets is a potential binge and weighing scales pull at me like a magnet.

You learn to deal. Finding everything I lost to bulimia is a treasure hunt I’ll be on for years. I don’t know if I’ll ever look in a mirror and not see the stretch marks bulimia ripped all over my body. I don’t know if I will ever stop automatically calculating the calorie content of everything I pick up at the grocery store.

Every day, at some point, bulimia tells me I should starve, binge, vomit or excessively exercise. But the menacing voice of three years ago sounds pretty pathetic today. I’m getting pretty good at telling her to f*ck off.

IonaHolloway is a magazine journalism and psychology dual major. She would like to thank Amy Kee for being the best English roomie and Leonie Geyer for helping her count the good days. There are a lot of them now. She can be reached at ijhollow@syr.edu.

Published on February 28, 2012 at 12:00 pm