My Most Destructive Misbehaviour - Part One

Dear readers,

My most destructive misbehaviour is an eating disorder. I’ve been anorexic/bulimic since I was 15 years old, but have had an eating disorder since I was a very young child.

Before my transformational spanking, I wavered about whether I should confess my eating disorder on the blog. However, since my very severe spanking and in a very short space of time, my confidence has grown. I now realise that to share my difficulties with you, will help me place everything into context. Opening out, will help me realise that I’m not alone with my struggles…

In order to show how beneficial Loving Domestic Discipline has been in helping to eradicate my eating disorder, I will first have to move away from Loving Domestic Discipline and outline some of the early triggers, which have moulded my life so far. Therefore, the past will need to be clarified first, before I can talk about the merits of LDD. To understand some of the depth surrounding my eating disorder I have decided to write three posts. Part One will talk about the history of how my anorexia/bulimia began. Part Two will discuss early childhood problems around food and psychological triggers leading to anorexia/bulimia. Part Three will look at the present and will marvel at how Loving Domestic discipline has made a huge difference in solving what I always believed to be unsolvable.

How My Anorexia Began:

I was anorexic before I became bulimic. I believe that everyone has a purpose to become something in life. My purpose, obsession and driving passion was to be a ballet dancer. I loved all kinds of dancing and took Scottish Country, Latin-American, Ballroom and Tap, but Ballet was my one true love. By the time I was 12 years of age Madame (my ballet teacher) wanted me to audition for the Royal Ballet. She wrote countless letters to my grandmother, telling her that a talent like mine was hard to come by. But my grandmother wanted me to take up a more academic pursuit and declared that she wasn’t wasting all her money on expensive boarding school fees, for me to end up as a pauper in the corps de ballet. I realised that in order to succeed I would have to work extra hard and at the age of fourteen I auditioned for the Royal Academy without my grandmother knowing. The Royal Academy was not as prestigious as the Royal Ballet, but it was a ballet school with a proper academic curriculum attached to it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to pass the audition! When they said they would take me on I had to explain that I would only be available to attend during the school vacation time since I went to boarding school in a different city. They agreed and so my life with the Royal Academy began.

Every vacation I danced with the Royal Academy and soon we were paired into practice partners to dance pas de duex. At first everything was fine, but one vacation my partner jokingly said that I must have put on weight since the last time we met, because he’s finding it hard to lift me on the higher lifts. Such an innocent off the cuff remark triggered my anorexia. I stopped eating overnight and became obsessed with my weight, weighing myself 4 or 5 times a day.



Anorexia hurt my tummy; I drank copious amounts of water and would eat raw carrots or a cucumber a day with some Ryvita, trying to stick to between 200 - 300 cals a day. Going to boarding school helped, no one seemed to pay that much attention to what was/wasn’t eaten. Although the initial stages of anorexia hurt, there came a turning point where I felt elated, deeply happy and could dance with such force, gust and energy. This feeling of elation didn’t last long; pretty soon I would start feeling really tired and moody. I was very lethargic and lacked energy just to walk around. At the point of starvation, I would binge eat and then use laxatives to purge myself. I was always trying to get back to the original buzz of adrenalin, I had previously felt. This adrenalin was really great, even now 24 years later I remember that feeling of tremendous elation. If I ever hear anorexics speak about this feeling, I know exactly what they are talking about!

I became very weak and Madame was always shouting at me to work harder. In the end, I lost my temper with her and she threw me out of her class. My concentration plummeted and I started misbehaving, missing preps and did scarcely any work at all. The final straw came, when I climbed onto the school roof in the middle of the night as a dare, to practise my Grand Jeté en arabesque in the moonlight (which I thought was extremely romantic!) I was caught by the Head Mistress who expelled me from school.

How My Bulimia Began:

In my new school I made friend’s with this girl who was just as obsessed with her weight as I was. She and I began to compete with each other about who could eat the least. Again, being at a boarding school no one really monitored how much was or wasn’t eaten. The prefects at the head of the table knew, but they were just kids themselves and it certainly wasn’t their position to tell tales on anyone.

I started my first serious relationship with ‘I’ who was one of the most influential guys at the school and I wanted to look super skinny for him. It was during this time that I discovered bulimia. I only engaged in this kind of behaviour once or twice (being scared of discovery) and started doing it regularly a few years later, after I had married and had my first child.

My relationship with ‘I’ ran hot and cold and I found myself going out with ‘R.’ The turmoil between ‘I’ and ‘R’ made me feel very insecure which increased the pressure of trying to be the most perfect and flawless looking girl.

I moved to Florida and found that the heat and the wearing of skimpy shorts and bikinis made me even more conscious of what I ate. My father and I ate out a lot at restaurants where I would spend ages cutting up the food on my plate and then hide the little pieces under the french fries etc, only eating the vegetables. My father never suspected anything and thought I was just a picky eater.

Once married to ‘R’ and back in the UK, I continued with anorexia. The first job R did was to join the Army as a trainee officer. R left me at home with a small toddler. I was about 20 years of age, completely on my own and isolated in a small village, I started engaging in bulimia as frequently as four times a day…

Being a bulimic became my great secret. I remember congratulating myself on its discovery thinking, “Now I really can have my cake and eat it!” My bulimia became an obsession. I always knew it was harmful and always thought I could stop whenever I chose. The trouble was, I couldn’t stop and each time I engaged in bulimia, I found myself saying that it would be for the last time – but it never was. I was actually really disgusted and deeply ashamed of myself!

Reading back through our earliest blog posts, is quite interesting. R didn’t know anything about my eating disorder at that time; the only visible symptom he could see was that I was frequently tired and sleeping a lot, my body being starved of all the essential minerals and nutrients. Our first posts make many references to my frequent sleeping habits. Although I knew a lot about nutrition and took all the essential vitamins my body needed, it didn’t stop me being tired after long periods of bulimic activity. R now knows that signs such as being excessively over tired, or keeping my finger nail short on my right index finger (whilst all my other finger nails are long) are clear indications of bulimia.

This is just a very brief out line into what triggered the onset of my eating disorder. In my next post I will explore my early childhood difficulties around food.


~C~