You ever watch Intervention? I’ve been watching episodes here and there on Netflix; I’m enjoying it! I heard about this show years ago and was mildly disgusted (if there is such a thing) by the idea of televising something like this – families banding together in misery and fragile hope to help someone, a loved one, who may not want help (which is a fatal mindset, let me tell you). But… well there really isn’t a “but.” I started watching it and I’m having a good time. TV wins, as usual.
I can watch the meth addicts, the alcoholics and the pain pill poppers, but there is one segment of The Afflicted that I cannot stand to watch – the bulimics. It’s not even the throwing up that gets to me. It’s the binge eating beforehand. I didn’t know that binge eating is a compulsion for many bulimics, before “purging.” There was this one woman who ordered 3 extra value meals from McDonald’s, a couple of milk shakes, cookies, cereal, and she stuffed it all inside of her body in the space of an hour! That made me want to throw up.
Last night I tried to tough it out with another bulimic, Jessie, whose family kicked her out of the house because she was literally eating them out of house and home (well I guess there is no “literal” meaning for that, but you know what I mean). She hunches over the toilet and wills herself to vomit having long since evolved passed the need to induce gagging.
Anyway, I’m no robot: they’re all painful to watch, but it’s compelling enough that I can watch 2-3 in a row before going to bed, to sleep as soundly as an infant that has cried itself to exhaustion.
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