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My battle with bulimia

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Finding Sarah by Joanne Jowell (Pan Macmillan)
About the book:
For more than nine years, Sarah has been purging her food in any place she can find: public toilets, plastic bags, coffee mugs. When she couldn’t satisfy her bulimic addiction, she restricted her diet to the point that she weighed only 41 kilograms, a weight better suited to a girl less than half her age. She has lost teeth and her gag reflex. She has lost her energy and her friends. She has come close to losing her life.

But then she decided to do something about it.

Sarah reveals her story in brutally honest detail to author Joanne Jowell, setting herself on a path of enlightenment for herself, her family and anyone who might hear her story.


Here's a sneak peak of Sarah's story…

"There’s definitely a link between eating disorders and depression. Actually, there’s a link between eating disorders and so many other mental illnesses.
Is it a symptom of another illness or an illness in its own right? I don’t know; I jump around on that. There’s quite a big difference between someone who’s got anorexia as a disease or an addiction and someone who ends up becoming anorexic from depression or stress.

Maybe the seed is planted early on in life, the seed of the disease. But the way your life turns out, how you are treated, how you perceive people and experiences … that determines whether the seed will grow.

People often blow off an eating disorder as the clichéd ‘cry for help’. The scary thing is that it becomes a potential death. They say ‘cry for help’ like that’s a bad thing, like it’s a silly excuse – don’t worry about it, it’s just a cry for help.

Well, that is one seriously dangerous cry. It makes me mad when people say that because it’s like you’ve just been playing a game. Like stop acting, sort yourself out, snap out of it.

I DON’T WANT THIS ILLNESS!

You have no idea how hard this is and what it’s like to spend every single minute hating how you look, looking at reflections and hating what you see. I am constantly fighting the urge to eat. Constantly. Which means I don’t focus on anything else. Can’t focus on anything else. It’s so hard to be this way. And the fact that it’s hard almost drives you.

You think, ‘If I can accomplish this, then I’m great.’ If it were easy, I wouldn’t do it. It’s the challenge of it; the triumph of knowing that you can do something that a lot of people can’t. So many people have told me that they tried to lose weight and couldn’t.

So when you are one of those who can do it, you hate yourself a little less. I really didn’t like who I was. Not at all. And I’m still not entirely sure where that came from. Maybe it was from school, with the way people treated me, constantly drilling me about causing trouble, being a bad influence, being bad, bad, bad.

I’m sure that soaked my mind. The weird thing is that, even if my early school days were the time when the seed was planted, it only started really sprouting when my life was quite good, at least from the outside.

At the end of Matric my life was great: I’d been clean the whole year, I’d done well in my exams, I was headed overseas, I had a great boyfriend. And then, it just happened.

Why then and not before? Maybe I was just curious enough then to take it to another level … The tendency was placed long before, but it was curiosity that killed the cat…"

Extract provided courtesy of Pan Macmillan publishers.

Keen on reading this book? Click here to either review the book or purchase your own copy.

Have you read any books about dealing with eating disorders? Which reads would you recommend?

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