I was diagnosed with Anorexia when I was 11 years. I would not eat and was 4' 8", weighing in at 40 lbs. When I was 15 or 16 years old I had a brief stint with ipecac, even though I never had the massive binges of a Bulimic, but the ipecac almost killed me because that stuff is actually a poison. I would eat half a quart of ice cream and panic, but I could not force myself to puke without something like ipecac. I also did the laxatives for years longer. At 20 I nearly killed myself with an overdose of diet pills. I took them so I would not eat. I spent years weighing myself several times a day, with no remission in symptoms or anorexic behaviours.
At 23, I was 4' 11" 90 lbs, married, and pregnant. BTW, my mother was 4' 11" too by the time she was grown, but has since shrunk and my father was 5' 3". So I didn't stunt my growth. I come from a short family. I'm also proud to say my son was born very healthy, made 9s on the Apgar. Both my sons did, even though there were times as they got older that my thinness scared them. I just would not eat more often than not, but I was off the diet pills, laxatives, etc. After my second time of almost dying, I just went with not eating, living on cappuccinos and alike.
Anyway, yes, I was sexually abused by my father, came from a controlling family background, bad marriage as an adult, divorce, etc etc. I also have the Dx of depression and PTSD. The usual stuff, but I've had a lot of therapy and changed a lot of things in my life, esp. after my first divorce. I took control of my life without relying on any crutches (like counting calories, weighing) or anything else. I put the numbers aside, basically taking everything I was taught in therapy and alike and putting it into practice. Doing it myself, instead of someone else doing it for me. I also successfully raised two sons by myself, without help from their father. So I had a lot to giving me the drive to live and survive too.
I am now 44 years old and I woke up, maybe three or four years ago (around 40 y.o.), one day and realized I had not weighed myself in ages, without panicking due to not knowing. I was tempted, but didn't weigh. I went in for a physical, weighed in at 100 lbs (still 4' 11"), my blood work was normal (something it had not been in years)- cholesterol normal, b.p. low normal, but normal, all the numbers were in normal range. My doctor said, "You look good. How are you doing it?" I just am. I really don't know how I did it, but it wasn't Holy Unction, prayer, divine intervention or anything like that. I did it myself.
I took control of my life, refusing to let anyone else do it for me. I have control over everything concerning my body and life, including what I eat or not eat. I eat chocolate. I still carry the Dx of depression and PTSD, but my eating disorder isn't as much of a concern to my physician. I still have moments where I look in the mirror and feel like I look fat, sometimes I even "feel fat", but it isn't a constant thing and I have control- not the eating disorder, the depression, or even another human. I eat almost everything except meat (lifelong [lactose] vegetarian). I drink milk, eat cheese, yogurt, nuts, beans, rice, the typical vegetarian diet, with sweets occasionally. I eat like a normal human being.
I'll be 45 y.o. in May with two grown sons and no, the pictures on your website did not trigger anything in me, except sadness and empathy for these women. They don't have to die though. They can live normal, fulfilling lives, but they have to work at getting better. It doesn't happen overnight, there are some ups and downs, but I really believe the key is taking control of your own life, every aspect of it, thinking for yourself, and making choices for yourself. Of course, the first step is overcoming the fear of food and getting fat, but it can be done. For the last few years, I've been between 95 and 105 lbs at every dr.'s visit.
So people can recover from Anorexia. It is possible, but I think it also depends on the type of eating disorder they have. I think mine was related to the depression, PTSD, etc and actually not the typical eating disorder. Once my depression was alleviated and the PTSD well on its way to being treated, I think my eating disorder naturally followed. However, it doesn't matter how long one has suffered with it, I truly believe once they gain the desire to overcome it and take charge, they can do it, but they have to get serious about therapy, medication, if necessary, treatment, and putting it into practice.
Anyway, that's my story, albeit condensed, and I want to thank you for making a website that shows the horrors, even deadly horrors of eating disorders. I only hope it helps someone and not causes more problems.
Mriana
Link to photo: http://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/eating-disorder-specialist-new-dawn.html
The late Karen Carpenter was an Ipecac abuser. She used it extensively to induce vomiting, and it was a primary factor in her death. The alkaloid emetine from the Ipecac syrup had caused severe damage to her heart, which eventually caused Karen to go into cardiac arrest, resulting in her death.
Karen Carpenter
Ipecac is made from the dried root of a plant called ipecacuanha, which is grown in Brazil. Syrup of ipecac is made from the dried roots and underground stems of the plant, and when ipecac is swallowed, a substance in it called cephaeline irritates the stomach and causes vomiting.
Syrup of Ipecac
Ipecac is toxic. It is intended to facilitate vomiting in an individual who has ingested poison or overdosed on medication. Ipecac is for a single use only and is never to be used on a regular basis.
Many bulimics use syrup of ipecac in order to purge the contents of their stomach after an eating binge. Bulimics often use it if they have difficulty inducing vomiting. Chronic abuse of ipecac occurs when their gag reflex becomes damaged, which makes self-induced vomiting difficult.
Repeated use of ipecac can cause very serious medical conditions:
Muscle weakness and wasting. The toxins in ipecac build in the muscles of the body, leading to muscle wasting. The heart, most dangerously, suffers this muscle wasting (which is irreversible), increasing the risk of complete heart failure
Fatigue and shortness of breath (common to most bulimics)
Tachycardia (an abnormal, and potentially dangerous, rapid heart rate)
Cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle can no longer pump sufficient blood. Ipecac-induced cardiomyopathy is a factor in many bulimia nervosa fatalities
Dehydration and electrolyte imbalances/abnormalities
Risk of kidney, liver and heart disease
Cardiac arrest
Cardiac arrhythmias
Seizures
Shock
Hemorrhaging
Blackouts
High blood pressure
Respiratory complications
Tears in the esophagus or stomach lining and vomiting blood
Death
Below is the case of a 17-year-old girl who died from ipecac abuse:
"PEDIATRICS Vol. 78 No. 3 September 1986, pp. 412-416
Death Due to Chronic Syrup of Ipecac Use in a Patient With Bulimia
Russell J. Schiff MD1, Carol L. Wurzel MD1, Sandra C. Brunson MD1, Ilene Kasloff MD1, Michael P. Nussbaum MD1, and Shawn D. Frank MSW1
1 From the Schneider Children's Hospital, Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, New York
A 17-year-old girl presented with malaise, weakness, palpitations, dysphagia, myalgias, and weight loss of 1 month's duration. Within 24 hours of admission to the hospital, she had hypotension unresponsive to medical management, intractable congestive heart failure, and arrhythmias; she died. Several empty bottles of syrup of ipecac were later found among her belongings. Syrup of ipecac is commonly used to induce emesis in patients who had ingested toxic substances. The chief pharmacologic property of this agent is due to its alkaloid component, emetine. There have been many previous reports of death due to emetine poisoning in patients receiving ipecac fluid extract and in those treated for amoebic dysentery. However, the literature cites only three case reports of fatalities secondary to chronic ipecac use as a means of losing weight. This is the first report of a death due to chronic ipecac use in an adolescent patient with bulimia. Emetine persists in the body for long periods, and in patients who have ingested it chronically, emitine is extremely toxic, specifically to cardiac smooth and skeletal muscles. With an increased awareness of the importance of weight control in the adolescent age group, the physician must carefully evaluate these patients for the use of emetics.
Twenty-five years have passed since Karen Carpenter's death at the age of 32. I saw Karen perform in Las Vegas with her brother in the late '70s and at that time she looked deathly ill.
Karen's autopsy revealed that she had suffered cardiac arrest due to complications from anorexia nervosa.
Two other findings of the autopsy were that she also suffered from cachexia and emetine cardiotoxicity, which is indicative of abuse by Karen of syrup of ipecac. Syrup of ipecac causes one to vomit if poison has been accidentally swallowed. Syrup of ipecac is dangerous and nothing to play with.
Karen's death brought the dangers of eating disorders onto the front pages of newspapers and magazine covers around the world.
From People magazine:
"Starved to a Tragic Death
A Sweet Surface Hid a Troubled Soul in the Late Karen Carpenter, a Victim of Anorexia Nervosa
by: Eric Levin February 21, 1983
Iced tea was the hardest drink she consumed, and the only needles she used were for needlepoint. Her weirdest stash was a collection of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. The flagrant comet tail of self-indulgence so familiar in plummeting stars like Elvis Presley and John Belushi did not mark Karen Carpenter's life--or her death of heart failure on February 4 at the age of 32. Yet for all the soothing middle-of-the-road appeal she and her composer-arranger brother, Richard, 37, brought to 41 Carpenters records--which have sold 80 million copies and won three Grammy Awards--she had led a long, lonely struggle against another form of self-destruction, anorexia nervosa.
She collapsed at about 9 a.m. in the wardrobe closet of the room her parents have always kept for her at the family home in suburban Downey, Ca., about 30 minutes from Los Angeles. Downey firemen entered the closet to find Karen slumped nude on the floor, her nightgown draping her body. She had apparently just begun to dress for the day. At the request of the rescue workers, Karen's grief-stricken mother, Agnes, was escorted from the room by husband, Harold.
The rescuers at first detected a faint pulse in Karen's neck that made them think, says paramedic Bob Gillis, that "she had a good chance to survive." But then she went into cardiac arrest. Racing over from his house a few minutes away, Richard Carpenter arrived just before the paramedics carried his sister out to the ambulance. Despite continuous efforts to resuscitate her, Karen was pronounced dead at Downey Community Hospital at 9:51 a.m.
Karen's Certificate of Death
A wave of grief spread among those who had known her. "She was a magical person with a magical voice," says Burt Bacharach, who in 1963 had written the song which became the Carpenters' first hit, Close to You. Adds Paul Williams, author of their second gold smash, We've Only Just Begun: "Karen and Richard's music brought the American family together during a period when there was very little else it could share." Williams' apparent reference to the turbulent Vietnam and Watergate eras was apt. The Carpenters were at their zenith in 1973, when then President RIchard Nixon introduced the duo to a glittering White House audience as "young America at its very best."
In the aftershock, friends wondered if Karen had tried too hard to live up to that description, had perhaps died trying. Hers was the "good girl's" disease--a compulsive urge to control weight, primarily among female hyperachievers, that leads to such extremes as self-induced vomiting and taking huge doses of laxatives. An autopsy revealed no immediate explanation for her heart failure. But after a long bout with anorexia, says Dr. Joel Yager of UCLA's Eating Disorders Clinic, "the most common cause of death is low serum potassium, which can cause an irregularity in the heartbeat." Karen had spent almost all of 1982 in New York undergoing treatment, and had lifted her weight from a gaunt 85 to 108 pounds--very near normal for her frame and height, 5'4". But, as anorexia expert Dr. Raymond Vath of Seattle points out, doctors learned only two months ago that the greatest strain is put on an anorectic's heart when lost weight is regained.
Paul Bloch, the Carpenter family's PR man, downplays the anorexia connection. "Karen was a vibrant and energetic person," he insists. Concurs Gil Friesen, president of A&M Records, the Carpenters' label, "Karen was the girl next door, always up even when she was down." typical signs of anorectics, says Dr. Yager. "It's common for them to be sweet," he says. "Many keep their emotions inside. They take care of other people, but they don't take care of themselves. "Karen's condition was alarmingly obvious. A co-worker who had seen her early last year said she resembled "a living skull." Added another, "She appeared to be a tormented and unhappy woman."
Indeed, as far back as 1971, when the Carpenters were soaring on their early hits, Karen was "psychotic about her weight," an acquaintance recalls. "She had a classic pear-shaped figure--she was chubby, and she was very self-conscious about it." Tom Burris, the real estate developer whom Karen married in 1980 and from whom she was separated last year, says she was suffering from anorexia "for about nine years." The term, though, was not widely known in 1975, when Karen slipped frighteningly from her performing weight of 110 to a shadowy 90 pounds. It took two months of bed rest at home to recuperate from physical and nervous exhaustion brought on by some 250 days a year of arduous touring. "It was sickening," she told PEOPLE after getting back on her feet the next year. "Suddenly it wasn't fun anymore."
Though much had changed in her life by 1981, Karen was still taking a vengeful attitude toward her weight. Distraught, she reached out to Pat Boone's daughter, Cherry Boone O'Neill, who was finishing a book about her own anorexia, Starving for Attention. They spoke once in person, then three times on the telephone.
"She didn't sound panicked, but she felt that she really needed some help," recalls Cherry, now 28. "Karen was having particular problems with laxatives. She could not believe she could ever get to a point where she was not dependent on them." O'Neill, who herself had often taken laxatives by the box to "drop 10-15 pounds overnight," urged her friend to "get away from the pressures of L.A. and show business and concentrate on her own life and survival." She told Cherry: "I'm going to do it. I'll get well--it's just so damn hard."
Like Cherry, Karen was raised in an unusually close-knit family. The children of a printer and a homemaker, Karen and Richard moved with their parents from New Haven, CT to Downey in 1963. "Karen grew up in a very tight, parentally dominated world," says a longtime friend. "Her parents are very nice people, but they controlled her early life and continued to try and do so over the years." One incident from early in Karen and Richard's career may be typical. Agnes Carpenter called her offspring at their Cincinnati motel to scold them for not having signed autographs backstage following a show in Hershey, Pa. after a fan wrote to complain. Dutifully, the youngsters called the fan and apologized.
Anorexics, notes Cherry, are usually the children of authoritative parents. "Such a person," she says, "does not rebel."
Richard was the first to take up music, inspired by his "Three B's--the Beatles, Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach." A sports fan, Karen was handed a glockenspiel in the high school marching band and figured it out. Wielding chopsticks on bar stools, she eventually taught herself percussion well enough to tap along with Dave Brubeck's rhythmically challenging album, Time Further Out. The duo won a Hollywood Bowl Battle of the Bands, and after three years of scrounging for work were signed by A&M co-sounder Herb Alpert.
"It was interesting the way they made records," a close colleague observes. "Richard laid out all the basic tracks, and then Karen would come in and sing. He was a tyrant in the studio. She would spend a lot of time on her vocals, and was always hard on herself." An ex-employee of A&M agrees: "It always seemed as if she were under Richard's thumb."
Barry Manilow observes that Karen clearly "adored" Richard. "She couldn't speak highly enough of him. To her he was a genius." Yet it was clearly Karen's voice that made the Carpenters click. "I'm sure she felt she had to measure up, that the whole act kind of hinged on her," Cherry O'Neill says. "That's an awful lot of pressure for one individual."
Karen's apparent solution, suggests Cherry, was classic: "When you start denying yourself food, and begin feeling you have control over a life that has been pretty much controlled for you, it's exhilarating. The anorectic feels that while she may not be able to control anything else, she will, by God, control every morsel that goes in her mouth."
Karen's anorectic episodes in the '70's seems to have waxed and waned, and in 1976, after her two-month recuperation at home, she made a stab at independence from her parents by moving into her own large apartment in a Century City condo. In 1980 her mother urged Karen to attend a dinner at the chic Ma Maison restaurant that Karen wanted to skip, and there she met Tom Burris, a 39-year-old divorce with an 18-year-old son. Two months later they were engaged.
Although Burris insists "We always got along, always cared about each other," they soon grew apart. "Karen was dealing with her anorexia and her career, I was dealing with my real estate problems," he explains. "I feel totally guilty, like I'd like to reverse everything. I tried to work with her. I got her in touch with a doctor, but she wouldn't admit she had an eating problem. We both tried, but we just couldn't work it out."
Later Karen reached out to the physician who treated Cherry O'Neill, Dr. Vath of Seattle. "She wanted a quick fix," he recalls. "She told me she had all these contracts and just had to get well. But I said, 'No, Karen, we don't know how to treat this rapidly. It would take a minimum of a year, probably three, to get you well. Finally she agreed to a course of treatment in a New York hospital, where she took two-hour treatments every day for nearly a year. But even there, as Dionne Warwick discovered, Karen's weight rose faster than her spirits. "She had gone through a lot of depression and sadness," said Warwick. "When a marriage breaks up, it's a devastating thing."
Last December Karen returned to L.A. O'Neill was concerned: "Putting yourself in the same environment where the problems first developed without totally recovering can cause setbacks." But by most accounts Karen was suffused with new energy. She was planning to record an album this spring. "Karen was getting along great," insists her longtime hairdresser, Arthur Johns, who gave her a perm before New Year's and says she intended to come back to have her hair streaked bronze. "She had started writing songs for the first time. She wasn't the type of person to mop the floor with her tears." Clearly, Karen Carpenter intended to conquer despair. "I have," she told Warwick just two weeks before her death, "a lot of living left to do." "
The following is an excellent video chronicling her life and struggle with eating disorders
This site deals with the stark reality and deadly consequences of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other eating disorders, pro ana, self-harm/injury, suicide, and depression
When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep...not screaming, like the passengers in his car......(from "Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey)
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