chewing and spitting out food

[frances153]

is there a cure for chewing food but not sollowing it

[lucy1122]

So here's what I know about the chewing the food thing and spitting it out before you swallow.  Somehow, you think you get away with enjoying the food and at the same time, it doesn't get used in the body in the form of calories.  Eat the food...don't gain the weight.  In my opinion, you do not have an eating disorder, however, your behavior clearly says that you have disordered eating.  I can only assume that your body image is completely inacurate, you spend alot of time worrying about your caloric intake and you are almost obsessively concerned with your body.  Give this enough time without really looking at the problem (the problem isn't the fact that you chew the food and spit it out), and you will find other ways to eat the food and get rid of it before it has a chance to be used up as calories.  (Bulimia, Laxatives, Excercise)  Or perhaps you will convince yourself that you don't need food to live (or very little) and start to starve your body of what it needs.  Perhaps you already do.  Regardless, this behavior is the beginning of a full blown eating disorder and you need to tell someone...a doctor, a friend, your mom...that this is going on.  My heart goes out to you, and I wish you all the best in the getting to the bottom of it.  I could be way off here, and I hope that I am wrong...but I don't think so.  Get this looked at now, or you could be in for a really difficult future.

[lala0392]

Chewing and spitting is a real disorder. I started it myself a few years ago when i was in high school. I had never even heard of it before and I thought I must have been the smartest person in the world for thinking of it. It wasn't until about a year or so ago that I realized that I wasn't the only one that did it. I did some research and found out that it's actually a disorder often linked with anorexia. My reason for doing it was because I wanted my parents to think i was actually eating. I'd take the food into my room and then chew it and spit it out into empty water bottles so that when i put the lid on it, it didn't create a smell when I hid them somewhere. It wasn't necessarily because I wanted to taste the food... although i did find that to be a perk and continued to do it for both reasons. It was just an easier way to fill up the bottles quickly instead of trying to take something like spaghetti and poking it through a tiny hole individually by each noodle.
Anorexics are smart in the sense that they find ways to hide their disorder quite well. Chewing and spitting... even if it's not for the same reason i did it, is still a way of hiding that you don't want to eat it and are finding a way to get rid of it.
Once I lost about 30 pounds, teachers and friends at my high school started becoming concerned. As teachers and those who knew me became more and more concerned... and the holidays came about, I ended up just giving in and eating again. I gained even more back than what I started at. A couple months ago or so I just went back into a relapse. I've lost about 15 pounds but hit a plateau because I have a job where I work in an office and it's extremely stressful... not to mention 22 credit hours in college as well... I eat a little bit of chocolate and drink mountain dew just to get me through the day without collapsing. I'm not sure why I can't just give it up.... perhaps because it's a disorder? I don't want help though, because I don't want to gain again... I'm not exactly skinny even tho I have this disorder... which often helps me hide it.
When you tell people to get checked out... they aren't going to. I mean, would you walk into a doctors office and say "I think i have an eating disorder..."? You'd feel like a complete idiot. If you have a disorder, usually you don't want to admit it even if you know it's true. That's why people get on these sites... because no one knows who they are.
I'm not trying to completely bash you after you tried to help, but i'm just saying... more than likely someone with this type of disorder isn't going to take the advice of "you need to go get checked out." It's simply not as simple as going in to get checked out for an ear infection or something...

[alagirl]

Pretty funny, I noticed you have 22 semester hours in college.  Aggh!  The entire syndrome.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but YES, I WOULD go into a doctor's office and announce that I had an issue if I had an issue.  Doctors don't see you when you're well, they see you when you're sick.  And the type of doctor you go to when you have an eating disorder is a psychiatrist.  Because you need a few things:

1) Counseling
2) A nutritionist
3) Possibly Medication - There are some meds that can help you not to binge in the first place so that you won't be tempted to purge.  Because I worked with girls in a treatment center for a long time and I'd say that you started out as anorexic but you are quickly tapping into the other side - bulimia.  Because binging purging among young women is not just binging and vomiting or binging and using laxatives.  Its also eating too much sugar and then going for a period where you don't eat appropriately in order to try to lose the weight, or over-exercising for the same reason.

Now how healthy is THAT for a young lady trying to take 22 hours in college?  And while we're at it, lets talk about that for a moment?  Young girls and women who BECOME anorexic and bulimic both tend to have a need to be perfect and to be seen as perfect by their parents, their friends, everyone.  And that 22 hours really jumped out at me.  WHY on EARTH would you KILL yourself trying to take almost twice as many hours as a normal student should be and then trying to work on top of that!  

Think about this for a moment.  The most fun and exciting people you know personally and in entertainment, are they perfect?  REALLY think about it... Usually, they're not.  Perfect people tend to be very boring.  And they never have any time for fun.  A lot of times they're bitchy because they're so busy trying to run around making everything perfect.  You don't want to try to be perfect.  You want to have fun and enjoy your life.  And if you need help and you go to a professional then you need to have the self esteem to expect that you can tell them in confidence what's wrong and expect them to help you.  

Good luck to you - and your life is WORTH something to YOU.  Don't live it for anyone else.