My Story

This hasn’t been updated in a while so I’m possibly going to retype and bring it up to date, but here’s the one I typed a while ago.

I remember the first time I felt fat was in a Florida hotel room when I was around seven years old. I was sitting in a chair with my bathing suite on, my aunt was curling my hair. All of my family was there basically, I remember my mother walked by and stopped. “I hope you’re puffing out your stomach right now?” My face dropped into something ashamed, and surprised. I think my aunts face was the same, only she was ashamed at my mother I assumed. I sucked my stomach in as far is it would go. “Yeah mommy! I was just puffing it out! See? This is my normal tummy and this is me puffing it out!” I let out a nervous laugh, and she smiled. “Okay good.” The rest of our time there if I was in a bathing suite I’d suck my stomach in and keep it sucked in, only letting it out when no one was around.

From then on I think I’ve always had a bit of a problem with thinking I was fat. There has always been a part of me since that point in thinking that my mother thinks i’m fat, and the only way to please her is to be skinny. All of my friends were skinny, and I just wasn’t. I was always chubby compared to 90% of my friends. I don’t think I noticed any really worries about it though until my freshman year. Any time in middle school I wasn’t too obsessed with it, I’d call myself fat and compare myself to other girls but there is no real moment that stands out. Right before freshman year at a farm barbecue I was talking to my friend Marley, telling her that there were lots of vegetarians. Her reply was “yeah but you’re the only fat one.” I laughed it off, and walked away. My freshman year I found the power of Xanga and pro-thinspo/”pro-ana/mia” websites. My friend Katie was right there with me, we encouraged each other throughout the process. I did my first fast around October. I wanted to do a two day fast but could only complete one day, I was a bit shattered by this, but that would soon change. I didn’t lose much weight during this time, my friend Michelle scoffed at this diet world I was living in. I didn’t take it too seriously either. My sophomore year I began eating 800 calories, then 600, then 400-500 calories daily. Sometimes I’d fast for as long as I could, other times a simply 12 hour, or 1 day fast would suffice. I would throw out food, and go on binges. I looked up fad diets and found sites upon sites of minimum calorie diets, promising 10-20lbs of weightloss in a week. I went down from my high weight (at the time) of 159lbs, to my low weight of 127lbs in about a month and a half. I starved myself. I would eat 500 calories and exercise extensively, riding horseback almost every night for 45 minutes to an hour, running either alone or on top of that, and doing crunches. I was also enrolled in gym class, which meant abs every beginning of class for 5 minutes and then other physical activity.

Later on sophomore year I met a boy, we began dating and I ended up telling him about my “dieting” to I don’t know gain attention. I realized this was a terrible idea but I thrived off of his worrying. I started picking up books about eating disorders, this was when my family caught on. They never said anything, or genuinely worried about my eating habits, in fact one time when my sister asked my mother if she thought I starved myself she replied with “I think she tries to but she fails.” I took that as an insult and a personal challenge. Halfway through sophomore year I learned the love of purging. I could eat wonderful things like nachos without a care! I would purge in the shower, the blood vessels in and around my eyes started popping. I had read online that if you “choked” yourself while purging it would make the food come out easier. The food slid out, and in return I got bruises around my neck. In the late winter/early spring I started purging almost everything I would eat. Sometimes purging and then taking laxatives after I purged. This ended in sitting on a toilet for hours basically just shitting water. It wasn’t enough to just starve or throw up. A 100 calorie bowl of grapefruit I would purge. I had an awful incident with purging that spring. I went on a binge, rice cakes smothered with PB and Jelly. I inhaled the food, not leaving time to chew. I ate fruit, and bread with cheese along with it. In the middle of my binge my father came home early. I told him I was tired and wanted to shower. So like every other night, I went into my shower and began to purge, I had perfected the silent purge at this time. Large chucks of food came up, getting stuck in my throat halfway through. Trying to squeeze its way up my already swollen and inflamed throat from the night before. The peanut butter stuck to my throat, pieces of food that would have normally consisted of 5-6 bites were in whole pieces. I cried and cried and cried. I had to clean the bathtub out because it wouldn’t fit down the drain. I shook so much, and wanted to collapse, my heart beating fast and unsteady. I checked for popped blood vessles. There were so many, so I walked into my room with shaky hands and legs and applied makeup to conceal the ones not on my actual eye.

My junior year I settled down a bit, I was still eating minimal, but after my awful purging incident I decided I would never purge again. (Though I did a few times that year, I always got scared halfway through the purge and said I’ll just eat nothing and work out tomorrow.) I began taking laxatives as a way of purging my sophomore year and stuck to this idea most of my junior year. Then I had an epiphany, I wanted to get better, I didn’t want to be sick anymore. It wasn’t like I just turned off the switch in my head that said starve and purge every meal, but little by little I started to be able to eat healthy normal meals. I gained weight, cried, lost weight and repeated the cycle over until I genuinely couldn’t control my starving habits. I should have told my parents at this time that I needed help to start refeeding, but I thought I’d handle it on my own. Instead my body rebelled, it started not only eating “healthy” but everything in sight. Years of starvation turned me into a savage eating beast. I gained back all of the weight I had lost, and then some. So here I am today.

I was never underweight during this time, but you don’t need to be underweight to have an eating disorder. If I had been diagnosed with one, it would most likely have been ED-NOS. I was completely unhealthy and disturbed. I should have seeked professional help, but when you don’t want to get better there is simply no use. I thought that since I was not underweight that I would never be brought into treatment and I would be laughed at. I know now that this is not the case.