My Story: Part 1

Hi everyone! Thanks for all the well wishes for my foot! Unfortunately, I went to urgent care on Friday night and the doctor there told me I have plantar fasciitis. I’m so so glad it’s not fractured, but there isn’t much that can be done for PF. I did buy some gel inserts for my shoes and am planning on icing it and trying a new pain reliever, but the pain might become a chronic thing that only gets better with steroid injections. I hope it starts to feel a little bit better soon, though! I’ll be recapping my weekend on Wednesday (WIAW time!!!!!!) so be sure to check back for some amazing recipes!

Today I wanted to share my eating disorder story with you. This is a hard post for me to write, but it feels right and I know that much of the blogging community is so incredibly supportive, not to mention a lot of bloggers have also dealt with EDs/disordered eating and can relate.

My anorexia really began in the fall of 2008, but it’s safe to say that I started engaging in disordered eating a couple of years earlier, when I was a freshman in high school. I was in a required health class at school, and of course, we learned all about nutrition. I learned that fats are “bad” and you shouldn’t eat too much, or anything deemed unhealthy. Well, I took that information and ran with it. I was never a  junk food eater but I started actively seeking out fat-free products at the grocery store. I wasn’t really restricting or anything, so my parents didn’t notice the small change in my eating habits.

9th grade. Before my ED, but I still felt insecure in my body.

In the fall of my junior year, I started looking at Yahoo Answers, which is basically just an online community where you can ask questions and get answers from other users. It started out innocently enough–I was just asking for school and fashion advice and answering others’ questions. But for whatever reason, I really became dissatisfied with my body during this time. I’ve always been a small girl, one of the shortest and most petite of girls my age. I’ve also been teased a lot for my size, and I’ve never had much self-esteem because of it, plus I’m fairly shy. Not to mention, my best friend since third grade and I were slowly drifting apart and I found myself distant from the close-knit group of friends I’d had since elementary school. I started feeling like if I could improve my body somehow, my life and relationships would be so much better. So I started asking questions about if I was skinny enough, how to lose weight, etc. At that time, I was 85 pounds at a height of 5’1. So definitely not fat at all; in fact, that’s pretty thin. And honestly, my ED didn’t start out with a desire to lose weight. I just wanted to improve myself, so I started trying to eat super-healthy.

But it wasn’t that healthy. I started out being focused on cutting out fats. I was eating mostly fat-free products, which aren’t too nutritious. I really liked this one Lean Cuisine meal with shrimp and noodles because it was really low in fat and pretty low in calories too. I also would eat plain black beans and plain rice for dinner…that was it, and it wasn’t even a serving size. Around that time, I’d discovered almond butter, and I loved it, but I was so scared of fats that I would only eat maybe a teaspoon a day, if that. In February 2009 or so, I started cutting back on carbs too after reading about people’s weight loss success on low-carb diets. At this point, my eating had definitely become restricted, not only in variety, but also amount. I would have a slice of light toast with half a teaspoon of almond butter and “hot chocolate” made with Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa powder and water for breakfast, a sugar-free Jell-O and a jelly sandwich made on one slice (cut in half) of light bread for lunch, a sugar-free pudding or a small handful of pretzel twists for a snack and then a miniscule amount of the dinner my family was having. I thought I was being so healthy, and I thought I’d be satisfied with my shrinking body, but I wasn’t. I saw myself as fat and ugly every single day. I was freezing cold all the time, my feet were constantly purple, I was losing hair, my skin was dried out and it hurt to sit down for any amount of time. I used a tape measure every day to measure my arms, legs and waist to see if they’d gotten any smaller, since we didn’t have a scale I could use. I tried to convince myself I was happy this way, but I wasn’t.

February of my junior year. Almost at my worst point, but I couldn't see how sick and skinny I was.

My parents started really catching on in March. I was continuing to eat a tiny amount, while also working out in P.E. class every day for 45 minutes. Almost every day after school, I’d come home and sleep because I was so weak and exhausted. My mom showed me an article from Seventeen about a girl who had anorexia and she said it sounded like me. Of course, I denied it, but I knew deep down I had a problem–I just couldn’t stop. Slowly starving myself gave me a high, it made me feel good…at least for the short term.

Then came the day that I had to go to the doctor. I don’t think I was scared at all, because I honestly didn’t think I’d lost any weight. Then I stepped on the scale…76 pounds. I’d lost 9 pounds in the matter of a few months. I know that sounds like such a small number, but keep in mind, I was already pretty underweight to begin with. I’d lost 12 percent of my body weight, which is a lot.

The next day, I woke up thinking everything would be normal. But it wasn’t. My parents sat me down and had a long talk about my anorexia. They knew I’d been asking for advice on Yahoo Answers and they knew a lot of other stuff I thought I’d been hiding well. After the talk, I cried pretty much all day. My parents also started forcing me to eat–and it felt like a LOT! I felt so full, disgusting and fat that entire day and many more to come. That night, my dad made me eat an apple and I was so mad that I threw it at him and said I hated them so much. I really regret saying that now, but I know my mind was in such a sick place back then that I couldn’t see that they were trying to help. I just thought they were trying to make me fat…

April 2009. The beginning of my recovery.

 

Part 2 coming soon!