Rather than Rehab: Quit Bulimia & Upgrade Your Life

By Lori Losch

“Lori brings the experience of bulimia out of isolation and shame, and into the heart, where we can find a path to healing, connection and freedom.” —Jaime Myers, founder of Shine Life Design, Scottsdale, AZ
 
Are you ready to break up with your bulimia, for real?
 
Has your long love affair with the binge/purge cycle finally run its course, but breaking up with it has proven impossible? Even scary? In this candid account, addiction recovery coach Lori Losch leads those struggling to break up with bulimia through ten strategies to help them gain freedom with food, while learning to love their body. Between a two-decade battle with bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder, along with her experience helping others overcome their disordered eating, Lori has created a process that works.
 
Part Wasted by Marya Hornbacher and part Recovery 2.0 by Tommy Rosen, Rather Than Rehab will help you break the binge/purge cycle, embrace your body, and create the life of your dreams.
 
“Lori’s courageous personal account of her struggles and ultimate triumph not only sheds light on the causes of bulimia, but she offers up useful tips on how to break the vicious cycle.” —Steve Ozanich, author of The Great Pain Deception
 
“For anyone struggling to overcome bulimia, to master their own recovery, and their own lives, I cannot recommend this wonderful book highly enough.” —Joel F. Wade, PhD, author of The Virtue of Happiness

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781683505501

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are all in harmony.

—Mahatma Gandhi

It was the spring of 1995, and I was certainly not happy. My thoughts, words, and actions were so out of alignment that I was either going to check out for good or I had to check in somewhere for treatment. Once an infrequent coping skill, bulimia had become a force that consumed my life.

As with most anorexics and bulimics, I was a high-achieving addict. I excelled in school, at sports, and loved my post-college career managing a busy, hip, vibey restaurant. A close circle of friends kept me smiling, and the path to success seemed obvious and effortless. I loved my apartment in the stunning seaside community of Ambleside in West Vancouver, and life was outwardly amazing. But it was also riddled with acute anxiety. Somewhere in early childhood and beyond, I developed a sense that I was fundamentally not okay. I felt uncelebrated, misunderstood, and like I never truly fit in or was fully welcomed anywhere. I’m not saying these things were true—they were simply feelings that surfaced after a variety of hurtful experiences. We’ve all had them.

Insecurity arose around both my worth on this planet and my physicality. When my grandma cooed about my spun gold hair or random people commented on my long, lanky legs or said I will be beautiful when I grow up, it was bittersweet and brought confusion. Am I just an ornament? Didn’t you see the picture I just drew or hear the song I just played on my guitar or how kind I was to my classmate who was being bullied? Looks seemed more important than character. And if my siblings overheard any praise, I felt guilty, ashamed, and wanted to disappear. I would think, Please praise them too! My sister’s long hair is gorgeous, and my brother’s blue eyes are to die for. They are both beautiful! And talented. And smart! I felt the extra attention became a wedge between my siblings and me that took decades to dissolve. Maybe they wanted their little sister to just bug off. Who knows? Bottom line, there wasn’t that big brother or older sister love and nurture and I felt alone much of the time as a kid. Maybe we all did.

Childhood reoccurring and petrifying nightmares, moving to five different cities before the age of six, many personal betrayals, and occasional bouts of familial violence also likely helped foster a sense of insecurity and a feeling that the world was fundamentally unsafe. Fear and anxiety plagued me, but the skills to voice my feelings were absent.

With no emotional outlet, feelings became deeper and darker. Many memories throughout my childhood, teens, and early adulthood endorsed those feelings, but humans can do that. We can see only things that confirm our hunch, and we miss the rest. We can also project our fears and insecurities onto others, which only amplifies them. Rejection and abandonment, for example, can be such acute fears that we wind up actually creating them. I believe it’s in the energy we emit—it attracts the same energy and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems I did just that.

Through childhood, teenhood, and into adulthood, my anxiety increased exponentially. In the end, I couldn’t cope and had to numb myself. After drugs, booze, risky behaviors, or relationships stopped working, I turned to food. As I consumed copious amounts, bulimia slowly consumed me. Binging and purging escalated from an occasional event to weekly to daily—even multiple times in a day if I had the time and enough angst to eradicate. I was also getting dangerously close to my worst nightmare: being caught. To avoid that, bulimia was a strictly private behavior. I was never one to duck into a bathroom post dinner with friends or family—that was way too risky. My acting out was always alone. Also, purging a normal-sized meal would have been too little food to produce the relief I needed. Only a major binge would do. A binge, by definition, is a period of excessive or uncontrolled indulgence, especially in food or drink.

One such binge included a family bucket of extra crispy chicken, home-cut fries, creamy coleslaw, carrot cake with cream cheese icing, and two large diet cokes from the neighborhood KFC—I needed cheap and voluminous food in those days. I can just smell it. After driving around in my truck, likely listening to something soothing like Cat Stevens and attempting to eat away my feelings of loneliness, not enough-ness, shame, anxiety, and an overall sense that something was the matter with me, I finally pulled over to puke up the massive volume of food and liquid. I found a short dirt service enclave about 20 feet into the woods near the Cypress Park off-ramp on the Upper Levels Highway in West Vancouver and proceeded to scope out the possibilities. There weren’t many.

It was dark and a bit dodgy, but I couldn’t go home—my roommate was likely there. And I wasn’t in the mood for yet another grimy gas station toilet. The dirt road would have to do. I opened the door, leaned out, and got rid of everything in my distended belly. Within a few minutes, I went from looking six months pregnant, to looking like a sad, starving twenty-something. But peace followed the purge. That was always the end game. Just peace.

After a short rest in the driver’s seat, I was jolted out of my post binge/purge numbness by a sudden floodlight burst followed by the old familiar red and blue flashers. S***. F***. S***. I shoved the wrappers strewn around into the KFC bag. But there was no missing the evidence. My shame sat in the seat next to me.

Reaching my window, the cop pointed the flashlight into my bloodshot eyes, then over to the passenger seat, then back to my eyes before asking if I was okay. This was perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my life. I was sitting in my truck just two feet above a massive pile of undigested barf. It was now an evening’s snack for coyotes, bears, or any other scavengers of the night—and a hazard for the police officer’s shiny black boots. He asked me to get out of the truck. It had large tires and a lift kit, so dealing with that, plus the mess below, created a less than elegant dismount.

He asked me what I was doing there.

I’m really upset. My boyfriend just broke up with me. I’m totally sick over it, I lied without skipping a beat. What the hell was I supposed to say? That I had been driving around in yet another attempt to numb my feelings by binging on a bucket of KFC? That my roommate was home so I couldn’t barf there? That this dirt enclave at the side of the highway was the only place I could find to get rid of the food I had just stuffed into my face? That sounded way too crazy. And sad.

My eyes were red. Purging multiple times will do that. So will drinking booze or smoking pot, but he didn’t ask me about either. I guess they have ways of assessing these things.

After he scanned my license and registration, we stood there for a minute of awkward silence until I finally asked if he would mind if I smoked, which he didn’t. I reached for my du Maurier reds and offered him one. Weird, looking back, but I guess it was just smoker’s code. To my surprise, he accepted. There we stood, leaned up against the bed of my black Toyota 4x4, about five feet away from the pile of undigested food, smoking our cigarettes. We chatted easily together until our cigarettes were just filters.

When another call came through on his police radio, he made sure I was okay and then left. Before I could see the last of his taillights, I was weeping.

Later that night, I’m sure he wrote up this story with a twinge of worry. His paperwork probably went something like this:

Approached suspect’s truck at Cypress Park exit.

Found large pile of vomit next to driver’s side door.

Evidence of a food binge riddled passenger seat.

Suspect appeared to be sober. Sad, but sober.

No illegal activity evidenced.

I share this story to give you a glimpse into my life with bulimia. I hope you will trust me—I’ve been in your shoes. They may have been a different brand or style, but they were the shoes only a bulimic could wear. I know your heart. I know your pain. I know your longings. I know what you’ve done with food. I know what you’ve done to avoid food. I know your fears, at least some of them. I have them, too.

After sobbing away the feelings I had desperately tried to stuff down with a KFC family bucket, I decided then and there I couldn’t live like that anymore. I just couldn’t do it. I had almost been caught many times, had found myself in the most pathetic and humiliating circumstances, but none had come close to being my rock bottom as another human being having to navigate my puke pile. And, as with every addict, rock bottom is usually the turning point. I was either going to drive my truck over a cliff and be done with the pain, or I was going to check in somewhere safe. I needed a treatment center.

That decision was the beginning of a long, hard, two decade healing journey I thought would never end. Not one to readily reach out for help, I hit the library—this was long before the Internet was in every household. At the library I secretly looked for resources, careful to choose a completely private cubbyhole and to erase the search history at the end of every session. This was so embarrassing. I scoured books on bulimia, eating disorders, recovery, and rehab. I read about various healing modalities. And I searched for local treatment centers, but came up with nothing. One interesting bit of information I discovered was that according to research done by James Prochaska, Ph. D. and Carlo DiClemente, Ph. D., there are five stages to recovering from an eating disorder:

•Precontemplation Stage —the idea of change has not even been considered

•Contemplative Stage —thoughts around change are evident, but no action is taken

•Preparation Stage —you become determined to change, you gather resources and psych yourself up to do the work, but no real action is taken

•Action Stage —you actually begin to use the strategies and suggestions you have compiled

•Maintenance Stage —you have normalized your eating and are on the road to a full