Gosh– it is really hard to say when my eating disorder started and why it started. I think the biggest reason it is so hard to know when it started is because I think for so long I didn’t even consider myself as having an eating disorder. How could I? I was never the smallest of my friends, I never wore below an 8, I always have had hips and a butt, I can’t remember a time I weighed less than 150lbs and I never had enough “self control” to stick with it long enough for it to really make me skinny! I have so many reasons why what I had wasn’t an eating disorder.
I remember being in 6th grade and having to weigh ourselves and take height measurements. I remember so many girls being concerned about what they weighed and being guarding that number. I remember my guy friends asking us all and I happily shared my weight and height. Why not! It seemed so silly– it is just a number. I clearly remember 8th grade doing the same thing. I know I stated sixth grade at 4’11” and wearing clothes from the juniors dept. By 8th grade I was 5’8″ and wearing a women’s 10. I clearly remember being so ashamed of that number on the scale. It was no longer just a number that I could speak freely about. It was a number that defined me. It was a number that caused me to think less of myself. It was a number that represented every negative thought I had.
I continued through high school as the shy cheerleader who always wanted a longer skirt to hide herself. I strived to be as thin as others. I longed for the days of my chicken legs and prayed to not have hips and would have given anything to have a chest bigger than the A cup that I had.
I never did anything other than workout with cheerleading and occasionally workout alone. I never once thought of not eating, taking diet pills or throwing up. I knew this was wrong and never would I do that. I had a dear friend at the time struggle with an eating disorder and I watched her. Not a single part of me could comprehend how someone could do that to themselves. I didn’t like what I looked like and I had zero self confidence but never me!
Enter freshman year second semester extreme depression. My self hatred had reached a new low. I was extremely unhappy, drank constantly, began taking diet pills to help me lose some of the beer weight which didn’t work. Sometime during this timeframe something changed in me. I gave up on myself and threw up my food for the first time. I have no concept of when it was, what caused it or why I did it. All I know is how it made me feel. In my crazy depressed state I felt like for the first time in a long time I had control over something in my life. I felt amazing after, but this was followed by extreme guilt! The high in the moment that I took control of my life and made the decision to stick my fingers down my throat and watch everything come up gave me a feeling that I can’t explain. But the immediate low right after of sitting there with tears coming down my cheeks, food all over my fingers and hands and staring into a toilet bowl of my half digested lunch was a new low I hadn’t experienced.
This trend continued throughout the semester. It wasn’t every day or even every week I don’t think but more in phases. I learned what foods to eat and throw up. What hurt and what was easy. TMI- I know, but that’s where I was. I no longer thought about food that tasted good. I thought about my food in terms of how it would feel coming back up.
This continued on and for the duration of my college experience. Sometimes for months at a time then other times I wouldn’t have a single episode in what seemed like forever. I was treated during this time for depression but never once did I admit to anyone what I was doing. Control continued to drive the majority of the spontaneous binges while the continuous months in a row were brought on by the hopes that this would allow me to lose weight and finally be skinny.
I think the biggest I was in college was a size 12-14 and the smallest was a size 6-8. I still hated my body. I had hips, I had a butt and no chest. Why couldn’t I just be a stick like the rest of my friends? I still do not think I classified myself as having an eating disorder. I never stuck with it for longer than 4-5 months at a time and I never ever got to the place that other people expressed concern. If i wasn’t super skinny then it wasn’t an eating disorder right?
After college not much changed I still phased in and out of good and bad times. The only thing that did change was my lifestyle and metabolism. I gradually began gaining weight. I had a series of bad relationships and I found comfort in the control that I gained from purging after fighting or purging when I felt like I was unloveable. It is amazing how self hatred in the form of purging could make a person feel better from the self hatred and dysfunctional relationship but it did just that for me. During this time my purging became just as much if not more about having control over myself than it was about weight loss.
Then the turning point! I was finally in a better spot. I didn’t feel the need to control every little thing. I met a guy that I thought was a good one. I was happy and didn’t need the control anymore. I let a guy define my happiness and place in life which was a huge mistake. Because when this one crashed and burned it went down with a bigger blaze of fire than any other relationship. It tested me to my core and back and changed the corse of my life. I shut down after.
I turned myself off. I gave up. I unconsciously decided that I was unloveable and what better way to ensure that this was true but to completely destroy my body. I no longer sought control in the form of throwing up but now I just kept it all down. I ate when I was happy. I ate when I was sad. I ate when I was mad, when I was stressed and depressed. Any feeling I had I ate it and I ate a shit ton of it all! I want to stress this was not a conscious decision. It wasn’t until years later that I even connected the two.
I shifted my eating disorder (although I still hadn’t admitted to myself that I had one) to a new and just as destructive one. I gained over 100 lbs! I finally got that chest I wanted but I also got a giant ass, thunder thighs, arms that should have never seen daylight and a gut that I still can’t get rid of.
I did this to myself without even realizing it! There were occasional times when I still felt like throwing up but they were so few and far between I knew I had finally done it. I had shaken my nonexistent eating disorder. I cured myself (of something I never had) without help. I succeeded! I did it on my own!
I don’t know why or how but Something clicked in my brain sometime at the end of 2013. I woke up one morning and thought I am done with this… enough is enough! I think for the first time I actually recognized that I had a problem. What I had was an eating disorder that morphed into another eating disorder. Just because it wasn’t defined by societies version of an eating disorder it was mine. I owned it. I accepted it and I finally was ready to do something about it.
Over the corse if the next three years I decided to fix me for me. I decided that yes I wanted to lose weight but more than anything I wanted to be healthy and let go of the demons that I had been fighting my whole adult life. I wanted to love me for me. I wanted confidence. I wanted muscle. I wanted to be strong and and be a fighter and shine like I knew that i could. I fought like hell. I found people in my life to help me along the way. I struggled and cried and celebrated and cried some more. I found out exercise can be fun and the best stress release there was for me. I discovered Whole30 and learned to look at food in a whole new way. And I began to have confidence and like who I was becoming.
It took a really long, but I finally reached a point in May of 2016 that I could look in the mirror and say to myself with confidence that I liked the woman looking back at me. This was HUGE success. But it also came with a giant weight on my shoulders. Since I reached that place in May I have struggled with not sharing my story. Finally liking the woman I am and not being honest about how I got there began to eat away at me. I felt like I was being dishonest and the eating disorder was still defining me in a sense. My eating disorder is a part of who I am. It doesn’t define me and I am sick of letting it! So I share this not for sympathy, not for a reaction, not for attention but because without sharing it I am still hiding… And my eating disorder still has control over me. When I push post on this blog… I finally will tell the world (my family included, because I have never shared this with them) that I am strong and confident and flawed all at the same time. I still struggle, sometimes daily, with urges and control issues but luckily through the help of an amazing trainer I have learned to trust again. And with the help of a recently added therapist I am tackling the deep rooted control issues. And oddly enough during my first meeting with my therapist in January as I was telling her my story I still had to ask her, so is this an eating disorder or not? Well I officially got my diagnosis… yes Kathryn, your eating history is quite disordered!
betty Gets Fit 