My Eating Disorder Story

I want to always be honest and authentic with you guys. I want my blog to be a safe zone for myself and anyone who stumbles onto it because if it isn’t honest and safe, why would anyone want to stay? And, why would I? Besides, I don’t know what it is about sharing, but it stirs healing in me even after I think all the healing is done.

Anyways, I wasn’t going to talk about this on here. I actually hadn’t even talked to anyone in “real-life” about this until 2 months ago. I did not set out as a “blogger” to talk about this. Ever. But something came over me while writing my “25 truths” post; perhaps the desire to construct an authentic place for myself or maybe the hope to relate with someone else who has also struggled, but whatever it was, it led me to write my 7th truth.

“7. I struggled my freshmen and sophomore years of college with an eating disorder.”

There’s a number of eating disorders, two of which I am sure you are all familiar with: Anorexia and Bulimia. Among those two are more obscure and rare ones such as Pica and Rumination Disorder. Binge-eating disorder, while not as well known as Anorexia and Bulimia, is just as prevalent within the population. Binge-eating disorder is a condition where one has episodes of consuming extremely large amounts of food, marked commonly by feeling out of control and eating past the point of satiation. The thing about binge-eating disorder is that you don’t usually lose any weight. Sometimes you gain weight or remain the same, but you don’t typically “look like you have an eating disorder” which causes many to suffer untreated and alone.

Bingeing was my disorder; and while I didn’t always look like I had an eating disorder, it was my struggle for two years. It was the manifestation of an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise. My eating disorder was not triggered by a single event. It was a culmination of years of misinformation, mistreatment, and misrepresentation. Years of being told how my body is supposed to look, of following incorrect weight loss tips, of treating my body poorly, of trying to turn my body into something it is not. Bingeing was a disaster of torn wrappers and thrown chip clips. Internally, it was a panic of needing more faster, of hurrying to fill the empty. Outward, it was a frenzy of wanting after depriving myself for so long.

As a child, I was always relatively thin and tall for my age. When I entered puberty in 4th and 5th grade, I began to gain weight in my stomach. I felt like I was “too big”. “Too big” to do gymnastics anymore or wear fitted tops. I even felt “too big” to wear bikinis at the pool like my little sisters were. I remember the summer after 4th grade, I insisted that my mom buy me a tankini instead. It was peach, lime green, and brown and perhaps the most hideous piece of clothing I have ever felt forced to buy. This was the first time I remember being self-conscious about my body and I carried this body insecurity with me from that point on. My weight fluctuated over the years as I grew from a child to a woman, but I was always comparing my body to the girls around me. Wishing mine was smaller.

The summer before my Sophomore year of high school I was in a volleyball camp for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week for 1 week and then a week after that I was at volleyball tryouts all day. As a teenager sleep was my second summer priority after tanning. Most days I’d sleep till 11, throw on my volleyball gear, and hop in the car to be dropped off at camp. I went to camp or tryouts without breakfast or lunch and worked out on an empty stomach. Dinner each night was usually my first meal that day. Looking back now, I know how ridiculously unhealthy and potentially dangerous this was. I’m honestly lucky to have never fainted during sprints or suicides, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it. I wasn’t trying to skip meals or lose weight I just overslept and had somewhere to be. That summer or maybe just during those two weeks of volleyball, I lost 15 pounds, which I only know because before I had been a steady 135 and at my yearly doctor’s appointment before school started they weighed me as 120. Finding out I had accidentally lost 15 pounds was exciting and when people started to notice something changed, something clicked on in my brain.  That’s how you lose weight. You eat less and you work out more.

I liked being this new skinny. I liked how my boobs looked bigger and my arms thinner and my stomach flatter. I liked looking smaller, being smaller. During the school year, I maintained this weight by playing volleyball in the fall, running track in the spring, having a young metabolism, and eating whatever I wanted when I was hungry. I was so active that maintaining that weight was easy. After sophomore year I decided to no longer participate in school sports and junior year found me still eating whatever I wanted and irregularly working out when I felt like I needed to “lose weight”. The summer before my junior year, I found the world of YouTube and fitness blogs. I found the world of endless tips and tricks but also found images of what I should look like and unfortunately some unhealthy ideas of how to get there. I never fully committed to any diet or work out routine, sticking with something for a week or so and then stopping. My weight steadily increased from 120 to 140 by the time I graduated, which was and still is a perfectly healthy weight for me to be. I am 5 ft 6 and 140 put me at a healthy BMI of 22.6. Perhaps that’s what marks my eating and dieting habits as a disorder. I did not ever need to be actively pursuing weight loss. The obsession with being smaller and my guilt-ladened relationship with food is what made my habits unhealthy.

My freshmen year of college, I was extremely unhappy at my university.  I was going home every weekend and my social activities mainly included class and any interactions that I had with my roommates. My freshmen dorm was “apartment styled” which meant I had my own room. My room served as a haven and a hiding place. When things with my roommate got tense or stressful, I would escape to my room. There I ate most of my meals. Towards the end of my time there, I was either in class, in the gym, or in my room.

Early that semester, amidst my solitude, I found a great interest in health & nutrition. I wouldn’t say that I wish I hadn’t discovered this interest, but finding it then and there in retrospect did more harm than good. I began to cling to health and fitness like a life raft. It consumed my every waking moment. I became determined to become thinner through the means of an edited diet and an increased workout regime. I was unintentionally neglecting my increased caloric needs that came with my revved up workouts. The first time I binged I was sitting on the floor of my dorm room between my mini fridge and “food trunk”. My food trunk was exactly what it sounds, a big black trunk. My parents had bought it for me to lock away my valuables when I wasn’t home, but my food supply had outgrown its original containers and I had moved my snacks into the trunk. I had eaten passed being full before, but never like this. While bingeing I wanted to stop, I didn’t want to continue eating, but couldn’t stop. In my head, I even thought “Stop, you’re full. You don’t need anymore.”  I felt like my mind and body were acting separately from each other. Like one was getting back at the other. My body getting even for my mind ignoring its hunger for so long and my mind sedating itself in retaliation to the exhausting practices of counting calories and charting exercises. Both parties overworked and exhausted from being so harshly treated.  The next day, I was wrecked with the guilt of ruining my diet and made up for it by running and minimizing the size of my meals. I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it, but that first binge sparked something and after that, I continuously cycled between starving, binging, and over-exercising.

My binges would vary in length and frequency, but would always be marked by my mind knowing that I was not hungry and my body refusing to accept it. I found myself at restaurants eating 4 or 5 pieces of pizza then going home and eating any leftovers and ice cream and cake and candy and cookies that I could find.  Anything that I could get my hands on. I hid behind excuses when I worried that friends or family members may catch on. I’d say things like “I just have a sweet tooth. I have to finish a meal with something sweet” or “I always eat a lot when I get migraines; it makes it feel better.” I would try to only binge in secret when my family members were in the other room or weren’t home. Always afraid that I would be caught and would have to explain myself. The day after a binge I would work out and more often than not would work out on an empty stomach.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I went on Accutane for acne that I had been suffering with since I was 10. The medicine came with many side effects, including fatigue and painful joints that made it really difficult to exercise. Also during this summer, I was living alone in a new (to me at least) house taking summer classes at school while my roommates and friends were home for the summer. With no one there to ever witness my binges, they became more frequent. That summer I gained 15 pounds, going from 140 to 155.  I finished summer school at the end of July and went home for 2 weeks before school started again for the fall semester. For one of those weeks, I went to the beach with one of my best friends and her family. I watched all week how my friend and her mother would stop eating when they were full. How they indulged in treats when they had cravings, but stopped when they were done. How they didn’t deprive themselves but didn’t stuff themselves senseless either. I thought about how when I wasn’t restricting myself, I had always finished what was put in front of me, regardless of how full I was. For two years I had either been restricting or bingeing. I laid on the beach that week and realized how completely disconnected I had become from my body. How I ignored it when it was hungry and ignored it when it was full, and ignored it when it was tired and mostly, how I hated it. How terribly I spoke to it, about it. How cruel I was to my one true home. I was chasing other people’s ideas of fit and healthy. Trying to be like someone else’s body. Convinced that there was something wrong with the way I was, the way I am. I got so caught up in reaching this unattainable goal that I had let it consume me.

I came home from that trip knowing I had to reclaim my body as my home, as my shelter. I was desperate to stop treating myself like this. I didn’t want to be out of control anymore. I wanted to find a balance with life, food, and exercise. I had to relearn how to listen to my body; to feed it when it was hungry, and rest it when it was fatigued. I had to center my worth on something steady and firm instead of my appearance and the admiration of others.

In recovery, the biggest gifts to me came in the form of roommates and the biggest tools came as knowledge. When I went back to school in the fall I had two roommates that I was living with and incidentally eating in front of. Having witnesses minimized opportunities to binge and being the “new roommate who was a Nutrition major” increased pressures to eat healthy. I was only able to binge when my roommates weren’t home. I also was in Nutrition classes, that gave me the information I needed to journey through recovery.

I stopped counting calories completely and started to learn what normal meals and days full of healthy amounts of food looked like. I learned that healthy is not synonymous to hungry.  I deleted the MyFitnessPal app from my phone and tried to stay away from foods that were triggering to my binges. That was one of the hardest things for me; saying no to “roomie milkshake runs”, cooking meals at home when my roommates and friends were eating out, buying only healthy foods while my roommates were buying themselves the occasional treat. After a while, I was able to reintroduce those “triggering foods” into my diet in moderation.

My last binge was in December of 2015. It has been 19 months since my last binge.

Recovery did not come hot and fast. It was slow and rough and came with many setbacks and pop-up binges.  In full transparency, I am terrified of falling back into the cycle. Recently I’ve been having some issues with my gut and hormones and have been putting off permanently removing things like gluten or dairy from my diet for the fear of feeling deprived and binging again.

I still have a lot of work to do. I still catch myself being ungrateful for my body and wishing it to be something it’s not, but I’m finally at a state where I feel comfortable saying that bingeing is behind me and I don’t think that I will allow myself to ever get back into the cycle. I still have to strive to change my self-talk; to speak to myself with kindness and to give my body grace and love. I have to be gentle with myself. Currently, I would describe my diet as “intuitive dieting” which simply put is eating when you are hungry and I’ve found real comfort in the freedom from rules and restrictions. If I do ever make any huge changes or eliminations to my diet I will do it for the better of my health or the planet and not for a decrease in size or an increase in attention.

I no longer workout in hopes of disappearing and I no longer eat in guilt. My workouts are no longer aimed at making myself smaller instead, I try to make myself stronger.  My meals are no longer restrictive and void of calories instead, they are filled with healthy calories that I know my body needs. I still eat the foods that I love and I remind myself constantly that food is fuel and that I am allowed to have it.

I really don’t know if reading this will be helpful to anyone, but that is my story.

I may have some tips to help you, but everyone’s path to recovery looks different. If you can’t get to recovery on your own, there is nothing wrong with seeking help. I chose to suffer silently, not even telling my family or friends and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Tell someone you trust and let them help you. Life is too precious to stay stuck in the cycle of deprivation and guilt.

Love always,