I was bulimic in the past. Didn’t really see what the big deal was.
Actually the first person I told responded with “Look, I know some girls who does that too…” Then he went on to try to persuade me to stop.
I’ve never been to a support group or anything, so I wouldn’t know what state of mind I was in or what sort of mental trap I was in, but I really didn’t think it was that big a deal. It wasn’t a chronic case, I can objectively say, because I didn’t lose any weight due to it. I didn’t do it because I wanted to lose weight; I did it because I had lost weight, celebrated, relaxed, and a year later found myself unable to control my eating.
Somewhere between 26 or 27, the link between action and result was lost on me. I wanted the outcome, did nothing for it, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting anything in return. This sounds horrible, but I would argue that it’s the norm. Most people – and I do mean most of us – don’t understand this link. Only some of us do, and those are the ones who succeeded. That’s why, whenever someone who lost a lot of weight was asked how they did it, they said “Oh just diet and exercise.” It’s not a big explanation and there’s no secret to it. But if you’re on the other end, someone who’s struggling to control their weight and wanted a fix, you would say “Oh, I see.” and after a day or two continued the search for a solution. It’s not that the answer “diet and exercise” was hard to understand. It’s just a missing link. In our heads, the desired outcome basically didn’t match the required action. There has to be another way.
Although facts are solid and objective, “sense” is not. How we “make sense” of anything is purely subjective and dependant on how we learned the lesson. For me, it “made sense” that if I had binged, and I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable weight gain, I need to find a way to *cancel* the binge. It’s so simple. I understood this simplicity the same way people who have lost weight understood diet and exercise as a simple solution. It’s so obvious. How do other people not get this?
Comprehension is not the same as sense-making. It may have been when we were children, but we’re adults now. Things get more complicated, and we struggle to understand things, and there are no more teachers in the classroom helping us, or take-home assignments to help us better understand life.
One day I just stopped being bulimic, for reasons that escape me. I may have not stopped because I recognize its danger. I may have stopped because I no longer felt it was necessary, or that I had given up on the overall pursuit for vanity. Or maybe I had accepted my body for what it was. In any case – absurd as it may be, this solution still, to some extent, made sense to me. And that seems to be something I’ll have to live with.
Tika Anindya 