After graduating from grade 12, at the healthy weight of 130 lbs I decided to loose ‘some' weight. I did. Quickly. I exercised and starved myself, consuming only diet cokes, nibbles of muffins and sandwich halves made of a wafer thin slice of deli meat and iceberg lettuce. My weight plummeted to 110 lbs in a little over six weeks. I stand at 5'6" with a fairly athletic build. This was not my ideal weight. Then in a moment of ‘weakness' I ate an alarming amount of food that my body no doubt was literally starving for.

I struggled to stop ‘pigging out' as I called it in my journal. On ‘good' food days I consumed 500 - 1000 calories (I still remember the numbers) and played tennis or ran for at least an hour every day. And of course, obsessed about how much I ate, what I ate, what I would like to eat and when I would eat it. On ‘bad' food days I ‘failed', succumbing to my animalistic nature of hunger and binged on outlaw foods. I ate until I felt sick, couldn't move and fell asleep.

After five years of these cycles, starving myself moved into the background. I binged and exercised to maintain my weight. When I could, I ate how I thought a ‘normal' person would eat. But the binging, shame, guilt and exercise always returned. I knew my eating was different from others, that my eating was ‘wonky'. I tried to stop the overeating, of which I was so ashamed. I had no idea why I did it, just that I did.

I enlisted the help of a counsellor at a family services clinic. With her help, I recognized I used food to stuff unwanted feelings into temporary submission. I discovered how unlovable, how abandoned, how utterly hopeless and unhappy I felt. I discovered Overeaters Anonymous. I went to meetings, to therapy, practiced assertiveness and set boundaries. I believed, as my therapist did, if I just ‘felt my feelings', learned to love myself, found better coping tools, came to terms with family of origin issues, I would no longer need to emotionally overeat.

But insights were no match for these deep cutting feelings of worthlessness, self-loathing and despair. Either I ‘white-knuckled' it (not compulsively eating or exercising, but wanting to with every atom of my being) or relented to those urges. With counselling, I had become an extremely insightful, compulsively overeating, depressed person.

For a further 4 years I fought the compulsion to overeat. I also fought guilt, all encompassing depression and wormy anxiety. Aren't those emotions what everybody experiences when doing psychotherapy? Perhaps - but the severity and the persistence of these emotions should have been a red flag for my counsellor. They weren't. For some reason, my therapist never suggested I might be clinically depressed. My G.P. didn't twig either when I went for my yearly physical and told her what was going on. It should have given her pause. On both sides of my family there is depression and bipolar disorder. I can't exactly say I would have jumped for joy if I had been given a psychiatric diagnosis. It's not something you run and put on your resume under achievements. But it might have answered some questions about what I struggled with. If only I had known depression could be an illness not just a group of feelings; that the behaviours I exhibited were classic signs of depression, perhaps something could have been done sooner.

I was now calling in sick, slept for 14- 16 hours a day, didn't shower, didn't call people. The binging got worse, so did my moods. And completely new to me, I began to swing into manias. Those oh-so seductive phases of increased energy, creativity and elation that, for me at least on most occasions, shot gunned into incoherent thinking, talking and eccentric and quite frankly, self-destructive behaviour. Eventually one of the manias catapulted into psychosis and I landed, via involuntary commitment, in Lion's Gate psychiatric ward. Now that's an eye-opener if there ever was one.

Still it took another 3 or 4 years, several suicidal depressions and destructive manias and psychoses to fully accept what I had been enduring along with disordered eating was actually bipolar disorder I.

I continued doing psychotherapy, and began trials of medication. The bingeing continued throughout the search for the right kind, combo and dosage. Many prescriptions later I began to feel like my self. I also noticed as my psychiatrist and I refined my medical cocktail, my bingeing and compulsive exercising began to diminish. And eventually the compulsive overeating and exercising stopped being a problem all together.

As I continue to do therapy, take medication and manage my emotions well, my eating and exercising patterns remain healthy. So do my moods. I still experience minor manias and mini depressions, but they're much less severe and shorter in duration.

I feel sad not because I grappled with disordered eating and depression, but that myself and those around me failed to target the true culprit sooner: the mood disorder. In my case, as the illness was properly treated, and feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and self-loathing began to lift (classic signs of depression), so did the compulsive overeating. This is not to say my time in therapy was wasted. It wasn't. But I was dealing with more than psychological issues. And bipolar disorder is the primary illness, disordered eating the secondary one. I have a psychiatric condition and I need more than therapy to stay healthy. Medication is an essential part (and only one part) of my holistic recovery plan. Medication isn't necessary for everybody, but it is for me. My psychiatrist says for some of us with a mood disorder, not taking medication is like boxing with our hands tied behind our back. With the right meds, our hands become untied, but we still have to fight the good fight. And I'll be damned if I go down without a good fight.

© 2011 Victoria Maxwell, BFA, BPP*

*BFA: Bachelor of Fine Arts / BPP: Bi-Polar Princess