Hi - there's no jumble here at all. Well done for admitting that there are some unusual behaviours around food.
The first thing to realise are that eating disorders are not diets gone wrong. A person can go on a diet, struggle to keep up their dieting/extreme dieting, but go back to eating "normally" without any serious psychological consequences.
Lots of people don't like their bodies and that also doesn't make them have an eating disorder.
That said, there are some important things to factor in, such as how much of an impact on your daily life are your behaviours having; are there any physiological implications? What would you feel like if you were to stop and start eating 3 meals a day?
I'm not a medical professional, but I've had a lot of therapy, been both an outpatient and inpatient for my eating disorder, and as I've suffered with this atrocity for 15 years I firmly hold the belief that I am an expert in my own field.
I'm coming to the end of outpatient treatment, and I'm hoping this will be the last.
It's great that you're not vomiting or taking laxatives.
1) Neither make you lose weight. You just lose fluid, so when you weigh yourself you will see the scales go down. It's actually water, not mass.
2) Eating breakfast makes you lose weight. (Accordingly to my dietician and all major cereal research).
3) Eating 3 meals a day, reflecting balanced nutrients (carbs, protein, fat, vitamins) keeps your weight low and also helps to moderate your moods. When you skip meals you probably experience terrible mood swings, which also feeds into the anxiety. Regular meals actually help to stabilise this.
Since I've been on a 3 meal a day diet my weight has gone down actually (probably a result of the lack of bingeing I had before), and has now stabilised...although I'm still under what I should be.
4) The reason you binge is because your body is starved of an essential ingredient for living. Carbohydrates.
What happens when you hold your breath ? You can't. Eventually you systems kick in and recover to try and get oxygen pumping quickly and you become out of breath.
It's the same with carbs. You starve your body from energy and it will find the quickest and fastest way to get its energy. This means high energy foods, such as chips, chocolate, bread, crisps and so on.
There is a common misconception that bingeing in anorexia is a weakness and that anorexics don't binge. That's complete rubbish. Bingeing happens all the time, and learning to control the bingeing helps in your recovery, but you have to introduce regular meals. It took me ages to trust my dietician, but as soon as I increased the number of meals, I ended up stopping the binges.
It has taken me years, but then I only confronted the binge eating aspect last year...maybe I'd have caught on quicker if I'd tackled this sooner.
5) BMIs are a load of rubbish. I always measured my BMI as a way of success, and the 17.5 became an achievement, and then I set a new hurdle and so on.
BMIs do not factor in bone mass, muscle mass and so on.
I was recently told that healthy for me would be 20 + not 18.5 + because I am a white Westerner. The introduction of 18.5 as the lower range was there to reflect the growing Asian population, but for my ethnicity, healthy for my body type was a BMI of 20.
Judging your own illness on BMI is also an error, because eating disorders are psychological with physiological symptoms (which can become life threatening...eating disorders have the highest mortality rates of all mental illnesses).
Therefore your BMI could be "healthy" but psychologically you could be on the verge of suicide.
You mentioned you were worried about losing control; I would definitely see if eating little and often mitigates against that, and spot whether you are craving salt or sugar as well.
A good meal plan can really help you out. I really need to plan everything including potential challenges (like if I'm going out, I know I'm more liable to binge after getting drunk; how will I manage this).
A food and mood diary can help you spot what's going wrong and work through the issues to resolve them. You might start to recognise patterns along the way!
I'd start with that. You may already be having treatment for anxiety and depression so it's worth discussing some of these thoughts with your therapist, but if not I would suggest getting a referral to a therapist especially with the additional concerns.
The Big White Wall is a service which is 24/7 and free in a lot of areas and is a great source of support.
Remember there is a lot of information and help available on the b-eat website (eating disorder charity).
Hope that helps. Feel free to PM if you have any other queries.