Backstory

My parents were divorced by the time I was eight, my dad remarried when I was ten to a woman who I know consider a mother but then resented for taking my dad and bringing in another kid. Me and mom lived at grandma's house mainly because grandma would raise me while mom went out and had a good time. I guess now would be the time to insert that my mom was an alcoholic and it would be the cause of her death years later. Now, did this cause my eating disorder...not exactly. I survived for years still chubby playing softball and getting awards. My mom was anorexic or at least had tendencies often offerring to buy me new clothes if I lost ten pounds teaching me weight loss tips. My mom also pushed me to be the best I could be...in my house anything below an A meant you weren't trying and an award for fine arts was pointless and an embarrassment. It was around this time I started throwing myself into music and isolating from everything...stopped visiting my dad and spent most of my free time take care of my new baby sister. I saw my mom start drinking more and more and she would say and do some awful things and it seemed the more she drank the more my diet became an obsession and soon a full blown eating disorder. By my summer band camp I was drinking one slimfast shake a day, downing diet dr pepper, and doing crunches in my rm. She would be drunk every night while my stepdad worked and I would pick fights to protect her from lashing out at my oone year old sister after an hour of getting pushed around and torndown to feel like nothing I would retreat to my room and cut myself all so I could go to school and put on a happy face...I couldn't tell anyone including my dad and stepmom the hell I was living at home. At this point I realized my behaviors weren't normal but it was too late I was stuck with that voice in my head screaming for me not to eat or purge if I did, telling me that I had to go to the bathroom five times a day and strip just to weigh myself. I thought I had control...I thought I could hide this forever I could keep losing wt and make my mom proud, I could cut at night and bleed out all the bad feelings and then go to school smiling pretending like everything was fine...no one had to know my secrets...it was my business...the fact I came home to get beat on and torn down every night by my alcoholic mother was something I could deal with now. I wanted everyone to think I had it together...I wanted to control a home life that wasn't ever going to happen and I thought that maybe if I threw myself into school and kept losing wt my mom could be happy and stop drinking so I kept slicing myself up, starving, and purging hoping no one would notice I was falling a part...they did.

Fwd: Weighing in on eating disorders

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Andrea Schneider" <butterflyblue85@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 28, 2012 10:23 PM
Subject: Weighing in on eating disorders
To: <go@blogger.com>

One of the biggest misunderstandings people have is that a person's weight dictates how sick they are. When I was first diagnosed with anorexia I wasn't emaciated but had lost so much weight that it took the doc two mins to diagnosis. Eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes and media usually only portrays the extremely emaciated anorexic to society. Docs came up with a bogus diagnosis of EDNOS which basically means a person doesn't meet the dsm criteria for anorexia or bulimia...we have been petitioning to have the guidelines changed. A person can purge what she eats and not binge so she isn't bulimic or an anorexic is still getting a period can get the EDNOS diagnosis. What people don't understand is that using that diagnosis makes insurance companies think the person isn't sick enough for treatment. I've been in the hospital with girls suffering from anorexia and bulimia some were underweight, some were normal weight, and some were overweight but all still struggled. I don't believe in putting a number on the disease. I've been hospitalized at many different wts and ended up spending time in ICU when my wt was what most would say normal. Its not about the number...so many women and men die before they are considered underweight or sick enough for treatment...the outside does not always reflect the inside. Same goes for people thinking that once you put on weight its over and you are cured...when infact you are only nourished they battle can still be blazing in your head. In closing this entry people must remember its not about the number...weight is just one aspect of these disorders. Sufferers come in all sizes stop believing the only for someone to be anorexic or bulimic is for them to look like the half dead people that dr. Phil and oprah show you on television. This disease is a monster and it'd doesn't discriminate and just because insurance wants to base everything on numbers doesn't mean a person isn't going to go to bed and go into cardiac arrest one night and their life is ended prematurally because they didn't fit into a perfect little box some book provides.

Changing up my blog

when i started this blog it was mainly to vent out my frustrations but ive realized now it can be used for so much more. my punctuation is crap because im blogging from my phone but here goes. at fifteen when i started my diet to lose weight i didnt know i would fall down the hole to anorexia and bulimia but it happened so quickly. by my senior year i wasnt eating hardly anything and cutting myself up to deal with life. instead of college i was shipped off to a treatment center where i spent months and didnt really want to recoverit took years for me to beat this monster...years of being strapped down to tables and fed trhonugh a tube down my nose. now my mission is to share my journey not only anout my many trials with my eating disorder but living now with a disease that is killing me and will most like require me to have a very risky transplant at some point and im only twenty six. this is just the first of many blogs to come some will be my stories and some will be more education to raise awareness. i hope i can make a difference.