Recovery Stories: The dangers of diabulimia

In this podcast Tabitha talks to a person in recovery about her struggles with diabulimia.    link to the BBC diabulimia documentary mentioned:   https://youtu.be/tSLjM6cZaTo    The Eating Disorder Recovery Podcast Recovery Stories: The Dangers of Diabulimia Tabitha: Hello there, welcome to this weeks podcast. This week I'm going to be talking to somebody who would like to remain anonymous. We are talking about her experience with diabulimia. Diabulimia is a type of eating disorder, that happens when a person has type one diabetes and then they start to use eating disorder behaviours or insulin control to control their weight. We start this conversation by my anonymous friend telling us a little bit about herself. Anon: I was diagnosed as type 1 diabetic when I was 9. A week before my 10th birthday. Then due to some treatment I received for the eating disorder when I was 12, I had quite a few other medical tests and things done because my diabetic control was so good because the lack of food, I didn't need a lot of insulin, I wasn't having very low or very high blood sugar levels and as a result of those tests they found out I had actually had quite an unusual form of diabetes called MODY which is, I think it's categorised more akin to type 2 diabetes but it's treated in the same way as type 1 and it's quite unusual. So for all intents and purposes I'm treated in the same way as a type 1 diabetic and I guess my eating disorder history is that I developed plain vanilla classic anorexia when I was 12 and then the anorexia really spiralled when I was going on 13 at which point in about 6 months I'd lost about a third of my body weight and I was towards the lower end of the healthy BMI scale as it was. I became very very unwell and was on the verge of being sectioned by CAMS, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service in the UK. I remember sitting in my bed at home on the evening after my parents had taken me home from the outpatient hospital and brought me this bowl of cereal, bran flakes or something, but they brought me this bowl of cereal and they said, my mum was there saying you have to eat this you have to eat this. I don't know what it was but I was so distressed and so upset that I just ate it. And that started a three month period of what you refer to as feast eating. So I ate and I ate and I ate for 3 months and I ate no diabetic friendly foods at all. All cakes and chocolate and all of the things I'd been restricting and one of the things that the medical team had tried to get me to drink when I was underweight and I'd feigned drinking and poured away and done all the usual anorexic guise getting out of eating were these things called Scandishakes. They are basically like these meal replacement shakes. But they are actually really nice ones in terms of they are just full of sugar basically. So they just taste like McDonald's milkshakes so they are really quite enjoyable but when I started having those initially my blood sugar just went absolutely off the scale because I hadn't been having them before and so the medical team just assumed well those are fine for people with diabetes. But when I actually started drinking them, the sugars went off the scale and I didn't put on any weight. So I was eating a huge volume of food, a lot of calories, really a lot of food and I wasn't putting on an ounce. And at one point I was actually losing weight despite being extremely underweight. I suppose that was the first experience I'd have of what's referred to as Diabulimia which for any listeners who aren't aware, Diabulimia refers to when predominantly type 1 diabetic patients do not take insulin which is something they need to take to break down carbohydrates and sugars. They don't take their insulin because they know if they don't take it they can eat whatever they like, which if they are restricting is probably high fat, high carb, high sugar food and not put on any weight at all and in some cases lose weight