Life With an Eating Disorder

“As a child ‘fat’ was the first thing people used to describe me; which didn’t offend me.. Until I found out it was supposed to”

Growing up I had the worst relationship with food. I also had the worst relationship with the body I live in. I still struggle with this and coming to terms with saying this.. I have an eating disorder and am in constant recovery.

I want to start this off by saying that it is no one’s fault but mine. While some people have influence over the way that I feel at times due to things that they say, this is a ‘me’ problem, not a ‘them’ problem. No one is to blame when they don’t have access to my brain and have no idea what runs through my mind at any moment in time. Now that that is said, we can move forward.

Growing up in a home that was heavily influenced by things that were said to each other, the things that mom would say about her body often stung. Calling herself fat when she was far from it. This weighed on my mind heavily very frequently. “If she thought that she was fat, what did she think about me?” was all that ever raced through my mind at those moments.

It wasn’t just mom. Many of the people that I called my friends did the same thing around me fairly frequently. They had absolutely no idea - and meant no harm to me by saying these things - that they were slowly killing what little confidence I had when it came to how I looked.

Being the butt end of jokes for my peers, feeling embarrassed when the scales came out in gym class, and having people think that I skipped school just to avoid the mile were all tipping points for me. Bullying turned into binge eating..They aided in the ultimate development of what is now classified as an eating disorder. Doubled with the fact that our pediatrician called me a fat hypochondriac, you could say that this started early for me.

Things became so bad that I refused to eat in public. All through high school I sat in the library during lunch. Making friends with the books and the librarian that was far nicer than the dirty looks I would get while walking to a lunch table. Everyone just assumed I wasn’t hungry.. I was. Ultimately I didn’t starve myself, in fact I did quite the opposite (isn’t that obvious).. When I would get home from school until the time I went to bed, I would binge. I would sneak food that my mom was unaware of (though thinking about it now, she MUST have known) and eating it in my bed. Having no portion control when it came to the things I did eat in front of her.

It developed into something awful.

Throughout my time at college, nothing has really changed. There are days that I will go without eating in punishment for eating too much the night before because I was eating my feelings. I have better portion control, but that is still pretty sad. And now on top of all of this, I have a thyroid issue that was probably the result of me torturing my body for a majority of my life. My skinny friends still complain to me about how much they weigh without realizing that the way they criticize themselves stings me as well.

Not too long ago someone very close to me made a comment about MY body that made me feel like throwing up and caused me to cry for literal hours.. Now I’m scared to even wear the clothes that used to make me feel amazing around him. Things rarely change. But one thing that has changed is that things used to be so simple when I was younger. I could wake up and be happy without having to worry about what others thought of the way that I looked or the things that I was eating. I loved myself for who I was and all that I could do, and I wish a lot of times that I could go back to the ease of that.

You never know what someone is suffering through in silence. Let me make this very clear: never, EVER make a comment about someone else’s body. You never know what can cause them to spiral and you definitely don’t know the demons that they are dealing with.

My hope for anyone that is suffering through similar things is that they know that they are not alone and are worthy of loving their bodies for all that they are - even if that means you can only love it for holding you in the times of struggle right now. You WILL get there, we all will one day.

I can’t wait for the day that we all accept and love the bodies that we are in. But that will take time. Take all the time that you need.