I feel so ashamed and disappointed by the lows I've stooped to. I've had three major bulimia episodes each lasting years. The second time I was stealing food regularly from supermarkets so blatantly I can only assume there were either bigger thieves in the stores at the time or they just felt sorry for me (I was that thin I must have looked like a poverty stricken child) as I only ever got caught twice. I'm still banned from a certain store nearly 10 years later and although I don't do that anymore (I'm in my third bout or second relapse at the moment) I'm far too ashamed to ask for forgiveness and if I can please go back to the store.

I'm now in a position where I can't really afford to be bulimic, but that never seems to stop any of us...I will sit by the reduced food aisle where the freezing cold chillers sit and wait for hours for the foods to be reduced as it's only then I can afford them.

I have been known to go through the large industrial sized communal bins for the many flats in my block to look for my old bins because I remembered (when I had been in the right frame of mind) that there were foods I threw out because I wanted to stop myself binging that night/the next day. I've been really ill after having done that a few times.

I've walked past food or sandwich type shops who have left bins outside in the street to be collected and tried to see if there were food items inside the bins- once having taken food from their bins. I've scraped mould from the foods I have, tried ignore the taste when eating something obviously not good anymore, I've wasted my grandmothers inheritance. (That last one for me is the worst and overshadows just about everything else).

I could go on...I'm still trying to change and cut out the bulimia. I wont stop trying because the idea of just living with it would knock me over the edge and I don't think I'd be able to tolerate continuing to wake up every day if I knew I wasn't trying to change things. I have recovered twice before but it's not easy and my set up has been different each time. This time I'm living alone and struggling with so many other life-issues I didn't have before, and I'm a whole lot more wary about weight gain as I have had bad experiences with recovery and gaining weight I didn't anticipate...I'm just trying to take it one hour at a time most of the time but it's so exhausting!

You'd think the shame and disgust over the things I do would be enough to stop, crazily though it does the opposite- bulimia is the way I seem to deal with feelings I struggle to live with when I get to the point where those feelings have overshadowed just about everything else in my life and I've stopped caring about myself or my life because I feel like such a terrible person and nothing can be fixed and I've got nothing to offer anyone and I am a waste of space...no matter what CBT I've been taught or told, when you're alone in the dead of night and anxious and low and you've spent all your energy trying to drag yourself through the day, things just rise up and grasp at your neck and I lose my battle. I feel like a failure. Which then feeds further in to things....still trying to get through this but as I said; it's not easy. It's like a carefully constructed balancing act in a hurricane.