Sid: And Laura Schultz, and Laura is now a graduate and now and instructress at Mercy Ministry in Nashville, Tennessee. All this week we’ve been featuring a book by the Founder of Mercy Ministries, Nancy Alcorn, it’s called “Mercy for Eating Disorders.” Subtitled “True Stories of Real Hope and Real Answers for Healing and Freedom.” And we found out these eating disorders are literally epidemic. Things like anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. And I thought you’d find it interesting if I spoke with Laura. Laura we’re just getting to know each other but I understand in high school you gained an enormous amount of weight. You were successful in school but there was sort of like a void in your life, tell me about it.
Laura: Yes, even in childhood I began eating just to cope with pain, to cope with hurts and wounds, gained a lot of weight. And in high school very successful academically in fact very driven, very performance oriented, wanted to be successful and yet I knew that there was something in me that I was not able to fill and I tried to fill that with food. And all that it left me with was, you know, more emptiness, I’d gained a whole lot of weight, was very over weight and was very unhappy, very depressed. Fell, into a very deep depression at about age 16 was when that depression just full blown.
Sid: Now your father put a lot of pressure on you.
Laura: He did and you know I love my dad and we have reconciliation because of the way that he was raised he felt like “Well I need to encourage these daughters of mine to be successful.” And I think that encouragement went maybe beyond just encouragement and into what I perceived as demands. And if I was not perfect, if I was not…
Sid: Getting all A’s.
Laura: Right, right. Needing to be this straight “A” student involved in all of these activities to get this perfect college resume so that I could get a scholarship. I knew that he loved me but I also felt very driven to perform.
Sid: Now in high school you decided to get a little control over this so you went once a week to an organization called “Over Eaters Anonymous.” Most people have heard of AA, Alcoholic Anonymous and this was similar called “Over Eaters Anonymous.” But you actually got even worse.
Laura: Yes, it was like a young adult’s group and it was in a psychiatric hospital and I’d already been seeing a counselor and a psychiatrist and they were trying to help me deal with this. I learned tricks of the trade as you call them in eating disorder from some of these other girls that were in this group.
Sid: Just like sometimes people go to prison to be rehabilitated but they get equipped for even more serious crime by being in prison.
Laura: Exactly, we were teaching each other this is how you can hide your food, and how you can make yourself throw-up. We were really encouraging each other into destruction rather than any kind of healing or future.
Sid: By the way does this particular program and others like it do they get you healed or they teach you just how to control your addiction?
Laura: Well I think you know it’s different for every person. For me that program if it’s grounded in Jesus then I think that there’s true healing. But I do not believe that you know some people believe… “Some people believe once an alcoholic always an alcoholic.” I do not believe that, I think that there’s true freedom in Christ. And some of those programs they do tell you…
Sid: So the Bible doesn’t say that Jesus came to arrest your problem or control your problem, He came to set the captive free.
Laura: Exactly, I mean Jesus didn’t tell the lame man “Here put this brace on and limp for the rest of your life, He healed him completely and he walked away.
Sid: (Laughing) Hey I like that analogy. What were some of things were you at that point doing things like vomiting to get rid of your food?
Laura: I began in high school I really reach a point “You know what I’m miserable.” And I believed the cause of this was because of my weight. And so initially just stopped eating, ate very very little for about 8 to 9 months and very quickly lost about 100 pounds. And at that point couldn’t starve any more so I began binging and purging, throwing up to try to maintain that weight. Of course is just another destructive cycle, I was switching from one thing to another.
Sid: So why were you getting suicidal?
Laura: I had this depression, I hated who I was, I hated everything about myself. I had some hurts and wounds and things that had happened to me and never really dealt with those things. I had a very good family but still you know everybody makes mistakes, everybody has things that they need to work through. I hated everything about me and that eating disorder was part of that attempt to like myself better. I figured if I could change that outward appearance then maybe I’d like myself better. But you know that didn’t change anything on the inside.
Sid: But you actually became suicidal.
Laura: I did I tried to commit suicide several times. I really… my life…
Sid: Did you have any thought if what would happen or just so… in such turmoil that you didn’t think about what’s the repercussion of committing suicide?
Laura: Well no my thinking at that point at gotten to so… I don’t want to say psychotic because I wasn’t psychotic but your thoughts get so jumbled in that depression. And really my life was so miserable I mean unless you’ve been there I don’t know that you can understand. Just the depths of just despair in a depression like not wanting to get out of bed, not wanting to see the light of day. And you really get to a point your like “If this is what life is, if the rest of my life is going to feel like this I don’t want it, I want out.” And so you’re not thinking past, okay what’s going to happen if I kill myself, you think “This is a way out, I want out.”
Sid: So you when you were say cutting yourself with your arms with knives or razors, was that to commit suicide or was that just to infect pain?
Laura: It was a way to deal with that emotion pain, it was a relief. And I didn’t do that very much, once I got into the eating disorder that kind of replaced that. Because eating disorder was also a way to attempt to cope with that pain, that inner pain that I had.
Sid: So they did admit you to a psychiatric hospital and what did they do there?
Laura: I was admitted several times, the first few times I was actually on an eating disorders unit. I was very rebellious. I was not really open to changing my life at that point. You know that medicated, put me on medicine. I learned some more tricks from these other girls on the eating disorder unit. And pretty much it was get you medicated and get you stable and then send you home. And that was pretty much the main focus of the psychiatric hospitalization.
Sid: Okay, when you started your junior year it says here that you were a size 26.
Laura: Um, hm.
Sid: And you went down to what?
Laura: That was the beginning of my junior year, by the end of that junior year I was probably down to like a 14.
Sid: Now that junior year was this high school or college?
Laura: High school, this is in high school.
Sid: Okay, so were you happy with the way you looked?
Laura: Well no, I mean I still didn’t like the way that I looked.
Sid: How was it affecting your health though with losing so much weight so quickly?
Laura: I would blackout, my hair was falling out, I would bruise because I just had no nutrition. You know by that point when I was making myself throw-up you have chronic just heart burn and those sorts of things. A few years later as I got into college my health deteriorated even more. And at that point I started abusing laxatives as well. And that messes with your electrolyte system. And eventually was very close to having a heart attack.
Sid: What about your parents, weren’t they concerned?
Laura: Oh, they were very concerned, you know in the beginning I don’t think they realized fully what was going on?
Sid: How could they not? I mean how did they think that you were losing so much weight?
Laura: You know I hid things pretty well, part of having an eating disorder is lying, I mean I lied I flat out lied to my parents.
Sid: So it’s equivalent to almost a drug addict will lie to get their drugs and they’ll do things that are unbelievable. So you’re saying that people in eating disorder would actually slip into that mode?
Laura: Well you become very manipulative, I loved my parents and didn’t want to hurt them but on the other hand I didn’t want them to know what was going on. And obviously once I began to lose drastic amounts of weight they knew, and they intervened. I was seeing counselors, I was seeing…
Sid: Well they sent you to a nutritionist, did this person help you?
Laura: I mean I really hoped that the person would, they gave me a meal plan and I figured “Well that will help me have some structure. But at that point I was so out of control. No amount of external structure was going to solve my problems.
Sid: And the amazing thing to me as I look in her story as one of the wonderful stories, one of the many wonderful stories…. The thing that’s so amazing is that you were maintaining in college then a 4.0 grade average, you were teaching Sunday School, and working a part-time job. And if someone looked at you you’d just say “Oh, that woman really has her life together.”
Laura: That’s exactly what most people thought. And that’s what I’m saying, I was able to hide things very well. I mean I would spend my Sunday I would teach Sunday School, go to church, go out with all my friends and come back to my dorm-room and my roommate would be gone and I’d spend the afternoon binging and purging and no one knew.
Sid: Did you pray to be free of this?
Laura: I did, but you know what I never really learned a lot about God and I was teaching Sunday School but it was somewhat legalistic and I really did not know how to develop that personal relationship.
Sid: Laura, we’re out of time.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth