Eating disorders, part 2

Note: this is a graphic piece of writing about bulimia and eating disorders; you might find some of the language disturbing and triggering.

I get a lot of letters from people who ask me how I stopped eating all the food and throwing it up.  Most of the time I say "I just did" and leave it at that because it's true.

As I worked my recovery from addiction to alcohol, pot, and cigarettes, I didn't have the intention to quit bulimia. I don't know why exactly. Maybe because it had been around so long I thought it was a lost cause; probably because it felt secondary to the things that were so obviously killing me.

But bulimia was the most loathsome of the addictions, at least from where I sit today and how it feels in my body, and whether I consciously knew it at the time, it was one of the reasons I had to stop drinking. It was one thing to clean up the evidence of an alcohol binge, and quite another to clean up an alcohol-fueled food binge. There are few things more shameful than going to …