My girlfriend’s binge eating tore us apart.

Ever since I’ve started seeing Carla, I knew about her problems with food. I’m a dietitian and am familiar with abnormal eating habits. At first, she hid it carefully, but I could always sense the tension when a new food showed up on her plate or a Domino’s ad played on TV.

We had been dating for about a year when eventually, she started to open up about it.

“It’s a slippery slope for me. I can’t take any liberties with my diet or all hell will break loose,” she told me.

I chalked it up to typical food related anxiety, which most of my clients struggling with disordered eating experience.

“I can eat whatever I want, as long as I portion it out, record it in my food journal, and work it into my daily calorie limit,” she said with a shrug, as if that didn’t sound like a tiring way to exist.

Even so, I was fine with it. “Whatever she needed to do to get through the day without binging,” I thought.

“But, hypothetically, let’s say that one day, for whatever reason, you can’t stick to your diet. Are you saying you wouldn’t be able to cope with that change?” I asked, curious about what I’d need to know for our hopefully long future alongside one another. As the saying goes, we are yoked together.

“Trust me, I was a different person when I’d binge. The smallest things could send me into weeks of chaos. It would get really disgusting. I just refuse to let that happen again.”

From my point of view, I thought Carla’s rigid rules were unsustainable. I worried that if something bad happened in our lives that subsequently derailed her diet, she wouldn’t have the coping skills necessary to dust herself off.

Of course, I’m not a therapist, but hearing this concerned me, and I wanted to help my girlfriend in any way I could, which is why I started advising her.

Carla humored me since she could tell how serious I felt about it, and even though she was apprehensive of my ideas, she gave a half effort.

The first few days, we spent gently exposing her to foods she didn’t regularly eat. Still healthy, of course, and things I wouldn’t tell my clients to avoid.

She worried about the calories per gram, added sugars, and portioning without a scale. Though it seems counterintuitive for someone who binge eats, I was concerned that Carla’s restriction was getting obsessive. The point of her new habit exposure was to eat mindfully without pedantic monitoring and constant fear of losing control.

About two weeks had passed, and I already noticed some improvements. We were going out to restaurants for date night more often, or she’d come with me to the cafe I frequented before work. Two glasses of wine here, a croissant there, nothing excessive in the slightest. And at home, she mostly stuck with her usual meals, but once in a while she’d suggest baking cookies on a rainy day, things like that.

It made me really happy to see her treating food as less of an addictive drug she had to take every day and more like fuel that is required to function both physically and emotionally.

She seemed happy, proud, at least for a while. But not long after, something in her changed, hidden deep enough that I didn’t see the signs until it was consuming her entirely.

She acted like everything was normal. We ate our supper together after work and went to bed as usual, but when I took out the garbage one morning, I noticed something stashed in the very bottom of the bag. There were takeout containers, empty sleeves of cookies, and entire jars of frosting.

I realized that she wasn’t doing as perfectly as I thought, and worse, she had been hiding it from me.

I checked our joint bank account, which we used for our shared living expenses, and scrolled in horror to see transactions upon transactions of food that I never knew about.

I was not only disappointed in myself for not helping her like how I thought I was, but angry at Carla’s carelessness. Yes, being a dietitian, I make good money, but between our rent and my mother’s assisted living bills, we couldn’t afford Carla buying food in excess like that.

I knew it was going to be uncomfortable for us both, but I needed to confront her about it. So I waited for her to get home that night, my email open and ready in case Carla wanted to go back to therapy.

It started getting late, but I stayed up a bit longer, imagining her stopping to get some food before coming home. The apartment slowly got darker as the night went on, and I decided I’d rest my eyes for a while, waiting in our living room armchair for the sound of keys and the front door to open.

I didn’t mean to, but I drifted off. I don’t know how long for, but when the sound of chewing woke me up, it was completely black.

I tried to squint through the darkness to see if Carla had come home yet, but the only source of light was the green digital clock glowing from our microwave. I was too far away to make out the numbers, but while looking at it, the light flickered for a moment, like something had just moved in front of it.

“Carla?” I called into the void of our apartment. I didn’t get a response back, just the continuous sloppy wet noise like a mop in a bucket.

I got up to turn on a light and hopefully see wherever the noise was coming from, the shift from soft to cold on the soles of my feet signaling that I’d made it to the kitchen. The noise got louder with each step. Next to our sink was a touch-activated light, the dim kind that you stick under your cabinets, but as I reached for it, my shoulder bumped into something warm. Something that shouldn’t have been there.

The noise stopped.

I felt my heart skip hard inside my chest.

I could smell her perfume and something sour, metallic. Like rotten meat in the bottom of a dumpster.

In sheer confusion, I asked again, “Carla? Is that you?”

The silence was suffocating. I reached for the light again, and after my fingers brushed the plastic, casting a dim blue light and thick shadows over the kitchen, I saw her. She was standing at the kitchen counter, hunched stiffly over… something. She had been eating it, I could tell that much from the dark streaks covering her hands and mouth and the shiny looking chunks that remained clutched in her hands and stuck in her hair. The pulpy gunk was strewn all over the counter, and some had even dropped on the floor, splattered between her feet.

She didn’t look at me or move an inch since the light turned on. It was like she didn’t even know where she was or what she was doing.

“Carla… What is this?” I carefully reached for the meaty, clotted looking mass she was squeezing. Liquid oozed out of it, and pulp was being squished through the cracks of her fingers. It was making me start to gag. I just wanted her to get rid of it.

In a matter of seconds, she spun around to face me and shoved me hard. Before I had a chance to understand what was happening, I felt the back of my head crack sharply on the floor. I was on my back, trying to blink the pain away, but right away, she was on top of me.

I stared up at her face, concealed by the dark, her hair, wet with whatever that stuff was, tickling my face and dripping cold wet gobs of it onto me. I tried pushing her off, tried kicking and flailing my feet, but something was wrong. She had an animalistic strength, like a hungry bear trying to crush my bones.

“Carla, get the hell off me!” I yelled, but I don’t think she could even hear me anymore.

Her bony fingers were like handcuffs around my wrists, and I screamed as she sunk closer, digging her teeth into my shoulder, tearing through my shirt and ripping the skin off in one jagged bite. The burning pain made my vision flash white, and I could feel blood pouring over my bicep and pooling beneath my arm.

Carla’s mouth masticated, grinding up my flesh inside and swallowing hard. Tears started streaming from the corners of my eyes. I was terrified. This wasn’t my Carla; this was something evil.
I sstrained my muscles, constantly fighting to overpower her.

For a moment, she looked like she was going in for another bite, but stopped. Something came out of her mouth, a low rumbling growl, like a belch. She started twitching, her back arched upward, and her distended gut pulsated before a stream of hot bile and hair covered chunks gushed out of her mouth, slopping all over me. The smell burned my nose when I breathed in.

The vomit was a putrefied red. It was viscous and dark, like her innards had liquefied into a bloody slurry of rot.

She stalled for a second after the last bit dribbled over her lips, and I managed to free an arm, pushing her off of me and clamoring to my feet. I darted for the door but felt her grab at the back of my shirt, trying to drag me back down.

Panic pumped through every one of my veins.
I gripped the countertop, trying to keep myself from falling, and reached toward the stove. My fingers grappled for the handle of the cast iron as Carla threw herself onto my back, slicing my skin with her nails.

The gelatinous film coating the counter made my arm slip. I nearly lost my grip as we struggled.

I reached farther, straining to stay standing, and finally my hand fused with the skillet’s handle. I swung the cast iron over my shoulder as hard as I could muster. It met her head and she fell back, staggering.

I didn’t waste any time after that and ran to the door, twisted the lock, and threw it open. I heard her howling in pain behind me, but that didn’t stop me from running as fast as I could down the metal grate stairs and as far away from the apartment as I could.

I found myself at a gas station, only half present and still upright thanks to the adrenaline. The lady at the counter, startled by my black, bloodied shirt and the missing part of my shoulder, called 911.

An ambulance took me to the hospital, and after getting patched up, a cop was sent in to ask me some questions. I didn’t want them to go after Carla, so I lied, said it was from a freak animal attack while coming home from work. I knew it sounded stupid, but my brain couldn’t make anything else up on the spot.

I’ve been staying in a hotel since that night and haven’t gone back to see Carla. I’m still questioning what exactly happened.

And since I’m being completely honest, I still love her. She’s the best girlfriend I’ve ever had, and I feel like all of this was my fault. I think that by trying to fix her before she was ready, I pushed her over the edge.

Be honest, should I give “us” a second try?