First, I wanted to say thank you for the warm welcome from everyone here. It means a lot to me!
Managing my diabetes is hard, like it is for most of you. I guess its a bit harder on me because I also have an eating disorder. I dont usually tell anyone, but I figure, Why not? there might be other diabetics trying to cope with eating disorders too!
I always was a bigger kid, taller than EVERYONE my age, and considerably bigger. My mother and grandmother taught me how to eat less when I was only 9-10 years old by downing water before eating (I assume that they wanted to make me more petite to be like he rest of the other girls, when i was a full foot taller than them?) Since then I was obsessive about my weight. The spring of my 7th grade, I started losing weight considerably and eating and drinking a lot more...I thought it was the greatest thing ever because I was now smaller than all the other girls! At 5'4 (yeah I was a tall kid and I'm 5'9 1/2 now!) and 145lbs, I dropped down to 74lbs by the begining of August...Thats a little over 70lbs in 3 months! My mother thought I was bulimic because I kept running to the bathroom...she threatened to take me to the doctors if i didnt stop, even though I kept trying to convice her I was "just taking a leak"....Well, she took me to the doctors alright...they took blood, blood sugars in the 1000s. My mom rushed me to the hospital because the doc told her I had about 1 hour to go seek help before I would die (i think the doc was being overdramatic...)...so 5 minutes later we get to the hospital and I lost 3lbs between the docs office and the hospital. I get hooked up to ivs and hospitaized for a week and was labeled the most extreme case that they had seen. During this week, I obviously learned a lot. My parents didnt. They wanted nothing to do with it because they were afraid to hurt me or give me too much insulin...so all the injections and testing I was held accountable for. They pretty much just sat back and let me do my thing and I would tell them what I needed, like types of food, when i needed my prescriptions filled, etc.....learning about the food labels only fueled my eating disorder further.....
the worse part? i dont have strictly one eating disorder...its a weird cycle with me...anorexia, then compulsive overeating, then bulimia...then back to anorexia...all the while working out intensely. People dont know this because I'll lose weight, then gain it back, then lose it, but its never more than a 20lb difference at one time. Although I did have a really long cycle where I got up to 265 and then dropped down to 185lbs in 4 months...I do not condone that though!
So there is my story. Its a tale of drastic lows and chasing highs and everything in between. I am an extremist, there is no doing things slow and steady :)
and for those who wanted to know, I am on the cozmo pump and I love, the control has never been this good.
I know how hard it is to have that love/hate relationship with food. I wish you all the best–you have hundreds of supporters here!