In life, there are good days and bad days. I’m at a place now where most are good, and that’s great.  I remember the last time I had a relapse, and I’m proud to say it was last year. I say “proud” because when you’re battling an eating disorder, every moment counts and you have to learn to celebrate every triumph. Anyway, for some reason, chocolate cake is my “trigger.” Every time I eat it, I have to fight the urge to throw up. I know a lot of times people want to attribute something like that to a childhood memory, but I honestly didn’t like chocolate cake then like I do now. It’s weird, but I accept it as just being the way it is. A lot about overcoming this disease is learning to accept things. If you can change it, good. But if you can’t, life will go on, and you will be OK ... if you choose to be OK. You have to make that decision on a daily basis.
    I remember the first time I questioned my physical worth, though. It was when I was a very little girl. I was around some white children, and it was time for prayer. They said they didn’t want to pray with me because I was too dark. To this day, that still gets to me. I’m sure it didn’t help matters that, because of what my parents did for a living (they were full-time musicians), I found myself growing up around a lot of people who “weren’t like me,” not just my complexion, but everything. When you grow up in the entertainment industry, it can be hard to think you are “enough” ... pretty enough, talented enough, but especially thin enough.
    My parents were always really supportive of me. With me and my brothers, they didn’t focus on looks so much as character, so my foundation was solid and in hindsight, I think that’s what saved my life. But when you’re a teenager, peer pressure seems to take over. The first time I remember trying to throw up, I was 14. I had a dream, actually more like a nightmare, the night before that I was shopping in a grocery store and all of the fatty foods I saw were jumping on to me and saturating into my skin; foods I didn’t even grow up eating like pork sausages and stuff. I woke up, panicking and thinking to myself, “God, I’ve got to get this out of me!” I went to the bathroom to try and throw it up.
    It didn’t work. I have a malfunctioning gag reflex. I can somewhat laugh about it now, but it wasn’t funny then. Now I see it as God’s grace and mercy, but at the time, all I knew was something was in me that I didn’t want there, and I was going to find any means necessary to eliminate it from my body and ultimately my life.
    By the time I was around 16, I was working out two times a day. Because I grew up in a household that made eating healthy and exercising a priority, I didn’t really think I had a problem. That’s the thing about a disorder: it will use your strengths and try and turn them into weaknesses. So, aside from consuming myself with exercise, I told myself that being label-obsessed (when it came to food) was all about caring about my health, although all I seemed to care about was fat content.
    That’s something else I’ve had to learn to accept about myself. I tend to obsess, not just about food, but at times, all areas are at risk: grades, people-pleasing and especially having a huge desire to not make mistakes. It really gets to me when I don’t do everything right. Life is teaching me that you will never get it all right all of the time. Being a good person is about doing your best. Really getting that revelation is one good thing I can say came out of this disease.
    I try not to live in the past (it’s a surefire way to stay in the cycle of relapse), but if there’s something I regret most about being bulimic it’s that it tried to compete with the first years of my marriage. I was a virgin when I got married, and so I remember obsessing about my weight even before my wedding because no one had ever seen me naked before and I wanted to look perfect. When you have an eating disorder, though, you don’t even know what your “perfect” is. You don’t have a good concept of what’s real or not when it comes to physical appearance.
    I also remember doing the Fat Flush in the first year of my marriage for 10 weeks straight, going out of town to celebrate my anniversary and having a big piece of (yep, you guessed it!) chocolate cake for dessert. For the next five days, I was totally out of control: eating whatever I saw, even when I wasn’t hungry or if it wasn’t good for me (I have a wheat allergy that my body really reacts to). Looking back, the cake didn’t even taste all that good, but because most times I see in extremes, either I wasn’t going to touch it at all, or I was going to demolish it.
    I came back home and had gained about three pounds in water weight. I was crushed. I got back on the Fat Flush immediately and went out walking. I was gone for so long that my husband was out searching for me. I remember coming home and being on the floor trembling and crying off and on for days. That’s when another layer of my eating disorder revealed itself, and I had to acknowledge that scales bothered me; they still do. That’s also when I faced the fact that I am a control freak, so when my body doesn’t do what I want it to do when I want it to, I get very frustrated. I have had to learn to surrender to the fact that you can’t always get what you want when you want it. That, on a lot of levels, has been very freeing.
    I didn’t come to all of these revelations on my own. My parents have been God-sends, and my husband has been amazing, mostly because he never treated me like I was my eating disorder. I also had to get into counseling and surround myself with an accountability circle. The thing about an eating disorder is that it tends to keep you surrounded by guilt and shame, which makes you want to keep it hidden. You can’t isolate yourself because you need to hear other voices than your own. I now know that when I’m having a bad hour, day or week, that it’s OK, ideal even, to call those people and say, “I’m tempted to do something.” There is strength in admitting a weakness.
    Now that I am a few years into my recovery, some people want to know when I will consider myself fully recovered. I take it day by day. Like all women, I still have days when I wake up, look in the mirror and don’t like what I see ... when I don’t think I’m as beautiful as I would like to be. Some people think I’m exaggerating, but what they don’t get is that self-image issues are about how you see yourself, not how others see you. A disorder is symptomatic of how you determine your self-worth, not the other way around.
    I know I’ve had a really good day, week, season, when bulimia doesn’t have the same power over me it once had; when I have a moment of not feeling my best, and I don’t do anything extreme about it: when I don’t throw up, when I don’t kill myself working out, when I am not obsessing over counting calories. I stay in prayer, I keep a journal, and I surround myself with scriptures and affirmations about my purpose and God’s plan for my life. I try and deviate from messages that focus solely on physical appearance because that’s not as important to me as who I am inside. I still go to the gym regularly, but when I leave it, I leave it. And, I spend more time celebrating what I do have instead of wishing for what I don’t. This face, this body, this complexion are what God gave me, and I have a husband, a family and a close-knit circle of friends who help me feel good about it; who don’t try and change who I am or what I look like.
    I think that’s the other good thing that has come from this: knowing that I am not alone in fighting it, and that I am now able to provide some real help to other women, especially within my community where eating disorders are not talked about as much as they should be, but are no less real.
Every day, I try and remind myself that the world is waiting for me to give them something that I have to offer, and what I have to offer is good. If there is any fight between me and bulimia now, it’s in making sure that I won’t let it take that revelation away from me. Not anymore.