Team Food:1 point Team Laura:0 points

That's what it felt like. A game. One that I had no idea how to play and it was gaining on me big time. I had seen my family including cousins and aunts and uncles lose the game so many times with food that it seemed a hopeless fight. If food thought it was going to win against me, it didn't know who it was messin' with! I had a sexy boyfriend now and I wasn't going down without a fight. I was going to control my cravings and my weight. I just had to figure out what the heck I was doing wrong before I could fix it. I figured I could ask around and see what my friends knew. I mean c'mon not everyone's parents and children were heavy or seem to have an issue with food so let's ask around and see what other people have going on. I decided to ask "Hot Stuff" my friend from the gym how she had started to lose weight but then keep it off more importantly!!!? She had quite the interesting answer. She threw it up. Whatever she ate, she threw up. Isn't that "Bulimia"? I had been under the impression that girls were born with that problem not chose to have that problem. I looked at her like she had 3 ridiculous sized heads and said how the heck do you even do that??? She told me to stick my finger way back til I hit that small dangly thing in the back of my throat and my body would do the rest. I was mortified. I thought how could she even do such a thing? Why did she let food go in, if all she was going to do was have it come right back out???? Who was I kidding??? Did I have AAANNNNNYYYYY OTHER CHOICES STARING ME IN THE FACE????? Well, I could choose not to eat, but then again if I could manage the not eating side of things we wouldn't be having this conversation!!! I was so confused at the time how girls like me ended up having one of the 2 issues with food. All the while being hungry each day you wake up and your body needs you to care for it. My job was and is still sooooo demanding that how was I going to stop eating????? I had a big problem on my hands and I was going to have to think things through. I started to think everybody is hiding something. If my friend could hide from me that she was throwing up her food and her family didn't know, then maybe just maybe more people were doing things that I just needed to find out about. It comes right down to making a decision NOT to harm yourself and to get help where the help is truly needed. I was on that journey, but for the full stories sake we need to walk down memory lane to understand how my mind was working back then and how desperate I was to be liked by this boy so I was willing to undermine my normal body treatment. I want you young girls to understand it didn't matter what everyone else thought. It only mattered to me how I looked and I wanted something different to stare back at me. I wanted all the roundness and bumpiness to go away. No one on my life path seemed to want to offer up a solution to being overweight. My whole family struggled with the weight issue except for my one sister and brother. Which life has come to turn those tables as well. Food wins when you don't take the time to monitor yourself. It always wins in the end if you choose to be ignorant to it. I, like everyone else, didn't have a buddy system where someone looked out for me. It seemed that food was the new swear word and people had given that up for lent. You might think I'm over stating the horrible trenches that were our routine in the morning to figure out how to get through the day without over stepping your boundaries with food. I can try to tell you how wonderful life is, but the reality is it's only as good as the team you're born into. Or the team you find yourself playing with or living life out with, but in all realities we're all given a beginning team and if they are not of the mindset to eat healthly and mindfully, you're bound to find yourself on the same road I was trying to figure out for yourself. I don't want you to be there alone. I had so much to be thankful for and I was, but that didn't stop the cravings. I had so much I wanted to learn yet, and I was trying, but that didn't stop the cravings. I had many many things that I was accomplishing and I was proud of myself, but that didn't stop the cravings. I went to church every Sunday and I went to the gym 7 days a week and I kept my apartment clean and my bills paid, but that didn't stop the cravings. WHAT WAS I MISSING??????????? The real answer. The answer that didn't have anything to do with food. STRESS. What in the world does that mean????? It means my real problem wasn't with food at all. It was what to do with all the stress I was facing while trying to put my body back together that my parents had plumped up during my damaging childhood. I was not only trying to slough off the old me I had no control over, but trying to control the new stress of having NO IDEA what to do with every meal I had because my childhood taught me nothing. It taught me very little other than how to survive the up and coming apocalypse. I want you to get a hold of how important this is. Our childhoods teach us so many things we don't even want to learn let alone UNLEARN. I had one outlet for stress and dissatisfaction with anything going wrong in my life and it happened to be the same thing that I needed to get a handle on to live a long healthy life. DO YOU SEE MY PREDICAMENT? I had to put up a boundary with food yet eat it to survive. It haunted me night and day and I was just unable to handle it anymore. I faced every second hungrier than the last second and I needed to eat something. I decided the best thing to do was to eat something I liked that way I could be okay with it coming back up if I ever needed to purge it. I went with pizza. My all time favorite. Still is to this day. I wanted to be sure I was doing what I wanted and not what I thought I had to do. Like I said this has been a life long journey and at the time I hadn't mastered learning about the nutritional breakdown of foods and what to eat to nourish my body holistically. So here goes the first thing I decided to purge. My pizza. The whole thing. I mean of course, if your going to purge a pizza it isn't going to be one slice. Oh no. THE WHOLE DAMN THING. How could I have gone through with it?? You don't know a desperate girl until you've met my past. She would have done anything to figure food out. I never felt so much pain in my life. It hurt like you could not believe to force the body to purge something it so dearly wanted to hold onto. I can remember it like yesterday the good 6-8 months I purged everything I ate. I got so good I didn't even tear up anymore. Oh yeah your whole body reacts to throwing things back up. It isn't a pretty sight. I had a heart to heart talk with myself after that treacherous couple of months. The issue of food didn't go away. The decisions didn't get easier. I hadn't learned anything of value to pass on to another human being. I had more questions than ever. I wasn't losing weight. I hated food more than ever because I had more responsibility than ever to get rid of it. I was hiding and we know that isn't good. I was worried someone was going to find out. I was taking my life and wasting it trying to find the right answers on this quest to figure out food. WELL WE KNOW THIS ONE ISN'T WORKING SO KNOCK IT OFF. AND I DID. One thing I can be thankful for is my brain. I tried it and, with no results whatsoever other than realizing I was a Pro Purger, I hadn't mastered food at all. It still had the handle on me and I needed to take the responsibility to accept what I did to my body. I stopped it. It wasn't easy, I cried alot when it came time to eating and I wasn't sure really what to do. But I decided this couldn't possibly be what the Lord had in mind for our lives. I knew he didn't want me hurting all the time and hurting my very own body. I'm not stopping till I figure out what he wants from me and this isn't it........