I'm 17 and addicted to food.

For the past four years of my life I’ve been obsessing over food. It started with purging, then went to anorexia, then to binging, then to restricting, and then back to binging and purging. I count calories religiously and I’m so sick of this taking over my life.

I think about food all the time. I dream about it. I eat and eat and I can no longer feel full. It’s sick and it makes me hate myself. Even if the scale number goes down I look at myself and don’t feel satisfied. I know all this is destroying my body and it’s scary.

Here’s my question: how much harm would it do to my body if I went on the cabbage diet? I read about it online and it seems like a good start for me to conquer this addiction. I’m not doing this to lose weight. I just want to get over food and stop counting my calories. It seems like a good idea to me because I already don’t eat a variety of foods and I will be eating this only when I’m hungry. It’ll also help me clean out all the nasties (I believe) and I’ll drop drinking soda completely. I know I can do this and follow through with it, and I know it will be hard.

But I’m worried. How much damage might this do to my body metabolism and growth wise? I know I’ve already messed those up, but there’s no reason to do anymore harm. I’m also EXTREMELY worried about the mood effects. After the binging/purging period my mood has plunged so far to the point I couldn’t see a future. I’ve finally pulled up considerably and I’ve been getting happy about things, but I’m not fully there yet (I think the whole addiction thing is straining my mood now). I’m afraid I’ll go back to that and lose all my energy.

If this diet doesn’t seem like a good one, please give me more ideas. Suggestions like “don’t do anything else while your eating”, “sitting down at the table”, and “concentrating on what you’re eating” won’t work since I already do those. I’m not mindlessly eating.

I’m sorry this was so messy. ):