With some of the things that have happened to me in the past, a lot of people say I was a high risk young girl to have an eating disorder. These events are explanations, but not excuses, so I don’t want to list what has gone on to lead me where I am. As a thirteen year old girl, I was right on the brink of weighing 220 pounds. My whole childhood, after I moved towns when I was five, I was the heavy girl. I never had the mindset that food was fuel. I spent a lot of time alone and had a lot of emotions to ignore, so I started to binge eat at only five years old. I would eat until my stomach hurt and didn’t care because it was a distraction to me. And because of that I was the outsider, the girl with the low self esteem.

Navigating puberty as young teen with low self esteem is a disaster in itself. Thank God I had a lot of academic drive and fairly good social skills, so there was enough to keep my head above the water. Even as the morbidly obese girl in middle school, I was student council president, captain of the math team and got first place in our regional History Day Competition. Despite all these things, my self esteem was still wrapped up in my body and with food. But.. why wouldn’t it be? All the magazines, commercials, blogs online were about being thinner, fitter, and having more control over food. However, I had no self control with food.

It’s especially difficult having an addiction to food because you don’t need heroine, cocaine, cigarettes or porn to live. Ending most addictions requires getting away from that substance. But you can’t drive five minutes without having quick and easy access to food. Food that is chemically engineered with sugar and chemicals to make them hard to put down. They’re cheap to make and make us fat, and I was addicted like so many people today are. And we need food. So my addiction can’t be escaped, it has to be healed. On the deepest level of thought, I have to heal my views on food. On top of being so young and struggling with food, I couldn’t keep living with such a low self esteem.

I wanted to be able to keep up in P.E., go shopping with my friends in the juniors section and not panic about food during lunch. Clothes shopping became so stressful for me that I would cry in the store. I already hated my body, I didn’t want to start taking care of it; I only wanted to be skinny. So I stopped eating after my eighth grade graduation. I would eat less than 500 calories a day, then after a few days I would eat anything I could get my hands on because my body was starving. Then start the cycle again.

That Summer was my fourteenth birthday and my mom took me to Dairy Queen to celebrate. She made a comment after we ate our blizzards that was innocent to her, but life changing for me. She said, “I ate too much, I wish I could just throw up”. It made me think of the threads related to bulimia on myproana, a website I spent a lot of time on to learn how to starve myself. Please, take my warning on how horrible these ‘proana’ websites are. There are pages and pages of girls sharing foods that are easy to throw up, sharing objects that make you gag faster, and tricks to hide it all from your family. It’s a group of girls who are collectively killing themselves, and I found myself very wrapped up in it.

That night of my birthday I remember sitting on my bathroom floor with my head over the toilet, jabbing the back of my throat with my toothbrush to make myself throw up. It was revolutionary for me, being able to eat without the consequences so to say. And I’m trying to not be too vivid, but bulimia is both a physical and mental disease that a lot of young girls are suffering from and it is a terrible reality.

I got a lot of attention for the weight I was losing though. It made me feel so good and encouraged in my illness when people said “Wow! You’ve lost so much weight!”, “Wow! You look so good!”. But usually the questioned that followed was… “How did you do it?” Well.. how do I answer that? ‘I’ve been gagging myself with my toothbrush until I throw up’. Or maybe, ‘I’m bulimic! You should try it!’. No, I can’t say that. So I usually just shrug my shoulders, or say, ‘you know.. Eating right and exercise’. But that’s how I wish I had done it. I wish I was getting healthier like people thought I was.

I was down to 175 my freshman year, down to 145 my sophomore year and now weigh between 120-130 pounds because my weight fluctuates a lot depending on if I’m having a good or bad week. My BMI and weight are healthier, but my electrolytes were low, I had an irregular heartbeat and I was freezing all the time to the point I couldn’t feel my fingers. Yes, I’ve lost weight. Yes, I owe a lot of the things in my life to how my body has changed. But when I look in the mirror, I’m not  happier with myself. I have loose skin now as a constant reminder of how I used to look. I can feel my bones sticking out but only see fat when I look in the mirror. I wish I had some beautiful and inspiring tale of recovery to tell everyone. But in a matter of only 3.5 years, I have become sicker and somehow also recovered more than I ever imagined myself.

At a point, I was throwing up 4-7 times every single day. At other points I was going a week without purging because I so desperately wanted my own love. The way I perceive myself is an illusion to me every single day. Some mornings I wake up and love myself and am thankful for this body and then after some breakfast with my family the guilt of eating takes over and I see the grossest version of myself in the mirror and feel like I have will power. Put stepping away from obsessing over my weight has helped.

I sometimes try to measure myself in smiles, or compliments I give to others, or how many genuine laughs I have in a day. And sometimes I hope I can just get my throat to stop hurting from how many times I’ve attacked it to get rid of the food in my stomach. My inability to accept myself hurts the people that love me too. I have watched and, hopefully not for much longer, continue to watch them suffer with me through this. So I try not to focus anymore on how sick I am, I try to focus on the wellness that’s coming into my life and that I am becoming.

I think I am so HAPPY and GRATEFUL that I’ve been healed. I’m so happy and grateful that I am strong and fit and nourishing my body. And my actions are following to manifest those things into my life. Between quitting my job in fast food, participating in more yoga, learning about healthy, plant based and natural cooking, and just trying to make good decisions for myself.. I do notice I am happier more of the time. This makes my falls and stumbles and relapses feel lower and darker, but it’s just because I’ve tasted that happiness and peace for the first time in a long time. My struggle may not ever truly end.

Every day, every hour, every social encounter centered around food is a struggle for me. The voice in my head attacks me about how fat, how ugly, pathetic, weak willed and gross I am. But I just breathe when those voices settle back in. Maybe I just count how many times I chew my food or breathe in between every bite to try and make eating a bearable experience. Because with food and body image at the center of our culture, it’ll always be a major part of my life.  I don’t think society’s relationship with food and body image is changing as fast as it needs to, but I’m trying to defy the lies of our culture.

Those lies have become my subconscious guide. When a wagon goes over the same area enough times, the tracks become so deep that the wagon will always fall back in its previous tracks. That’s how my bulimia is. I try hard to steer in another direction but I always fall back in those ruts viciously carved into my mind by lies. In Ishmael, these lies are called ‘Mother Culture’. The lies we are brought up with become so real and so true in our eyes that we can’t reason outside of them. It’s the law of our minds and I want to find freedom from those lies now so that I can help my daughters and nieces and granddaughters live free of those lies as well.

God, the universe, my higher self… whatever you call it.. The creator has brought me through a lot of things and saved me from so many people and situations. I know that I can be saved from myself and this disorder. And no matter how dark, how painful some parts are, I have a beautiful life. A very influential and strong woman in my life taught me, a lotus can’t bloom until it grows through the mud.