Lately I've been noticing more and more online how many people are actively striving for an eating disorder, and it frigging baffles me. My whole universe for almost ten years revolved around food, weight, and running away from hospital admissions. I can't even remember how my diet turned into anorexia, nor what point the scale started to dip lower and lower. The only thing I can tell you at that time was I was determined, the more weight I lost the more my mom would be proud of me, the better I would look, and the list goes on. I hid everything and when it got to the point that people started to question me I found anyway and everyway to lie about what was going on because in my mind I did not have an eating disorder. By the time I realized something was wrong it was already too late, I wasn't me anymore I was a walking eating disorder. When you spoke to me the only thing I could talk about was weight and food, I constantly moved even when forced to sit down, I would have bruises on my hips from "checking" how my bones were sticking out, every trip to the bathroom meant stripping down to nothing to weigh and being prepared to punish myself for the slightest gain, and that is just a short list of my rules.
I don't understand why you would want to strive for this. You don't get to live while you are in an eating disorder, rather you exist. Your smiles and responses are all programmed, "smile, laugh, and they won't know", you spend the weekends in your room doing sit ups while your friends are at parties, and, in my case, when everyone got to go to college I got put in a hospital. Do you know what happens when they put you in the hospital? You go from being able to make decisions for yourself to having everything taken from you. When you are admitted you get to watch while they dig through all of your stuff looking for contraband. After they take some of your stuff away they send you to a room where you wait for some admission counselor to come in and explain the rules, all of which will go completely against the "rules" you had been following. You will weigh everyday BACKWARDS and not be told the number. You will eat all of your food in a certain amount of time or you will drink a supplement. If you refuse your supplement long enough you will have a tube shoved down your nose and it isn't pleasant and doesn't make you the coveted "sickest". Now the food rules...no cutting or tearing into small pieces, you must eat a sandwich whole, 1 packet of each appropriate condiment, no mixing foods, no avoiding fat, no hoodies or jackets at meals, your pockets can be searched, and those are just the most basic. Does this sound fun yet because it gets better? How long have you been using the bathroom and showering without a babysitter? Guess what that is a thing of the past, enjoy peeing with someone standing in the door. Enjoy having to stumble to the nurse's station in the middle of the night for them to let you in your locked bathroom. They come in and check on you while you are asleep to make sure you aren't working out. EVERYTHING you do is watched and there are consequences for rules broken.
I know you are probably thinking that is horrible, and it isn't fun if you are the one being treated, but there is no other way. I rebelled against my treatment team for so long thinking they just hated me and wanted to take away the only thing I'd ever done right. The thing is I wasn't in my right mind, I was literally starving myself to death...I couldn't even see what I was losing. All my friends were in school getting to have fun and do all those crazy things kids do while I was being held down on a hospital bed while they put a tube down my nose. And, I know if you are suffering from and eating disorder your brain is say, "Tubed means hardcore, if I get tubed I must be doing something right"....NOT!!!! Let me just tell you they hurt and not just when they are placed. You lay there tethered to a pole watching something drip into you that is completely out of your control, and if you pull it out there are consequences. Once the tube is in the only way to get it out is to start eating, not saying you will eat, but eating on top of the tube feed. Believe me I know we would joke about being tubies, but I want to make it clear that it is not the way to go and if you are sick and don't have a tube don't question the severity of your problem. Anytime you are intentionally starving, purging, or doing anything that harms your body like that you are very sick and in a lot of danger.
Does any of what I've said so far sound fun? You think the obsession with weight and all that makes your life easier, but it puts you in a place where you are completely and utterly alone. The disease requires that you isolate from the rest of the world because you have one task to focus on...losing weight. You cry as you watch your hair fall out, as you deal with the pain of muscle wasting, and that feeling like you are in a black hole you can't escape. There is no happiness, the scale that you coveted is now your ruler, despite hating it you have to kneel to it. If your weight is up there is punishment and if it is down it is never down enough. I was looking through some of my recovery stuff and I found something I had written down that said, "If only I were perfect the punishment could finally stop". The thing is as long as you are in your eating disorder the punishment will never stop because you will never be perfect. The more you realize how much you are consumed the more desperate you become, and before long life doesn't seem worth it anymore and you try to hurt yourself...I was blessed to survive my attempt, but unfortunately I know many who were not and it is completely heartbreaking.
Eating disorders are not a goal they are illnesses that kill so many young and old people everyday. It is an obsession that you will do anything to protect because the idea of having anything in your body to nourish it just seems to horrible to fathom. This is NOT something you can make a choice to have, and it has nothing to do with weight or food. The starving, purging, over exercising, laxative abuse, and all the other destructive behaviors are symptoms of a much deeper problem. For me it was so much more than control, it was a way to control my own pain. When I was starving or hurting myself I could decide how much pain I would feel and no one else could hurt me, no one else could get through, and I could keep it together. The thing is that I never had it together and the second they would feed me all those things that were starved deep down inside of me or that I bled away would hit me like a truck, and that would cause panic. My brain would go into crisis mode and I would immediately start acting like I was crazy. I would cry and scratch at my stomach screaming that I could feel I was fatter, I would obsessively pace around my hospital room until I had to physically be sat down, and I would be completely engrossed with the lies screaming in my head, "You fat, worthless failure...get up, you don't deserve rest, purge, run, cut...do anything to punish your weakness". I literally believed what I heard in my head as fact, I believed that everyone else was lying to me when they told me they loved me, that I wasn't fat, or that I didn't have to live like this. I was living in my own nightmare, and couldn't find my way out.
If you are attempting to glorify eating disorders, please understand that they are very serious mental illnesses that have a super high mortality...that means a lot of people dying. Just the fact that you want an eating disorder in itself shows that you have some serious body image issues because no one should want to be sick or have the ability to starve themselves and throw up on command. Please understand this will take everything from you...I could be a musician today, but anorexia took over and I lost it. I also lost everyone's trust because every word that came out of my mouth was generally a lie, and pretty soon all those lies you've spun out there get really hard to keep track of. You are beautiful the way you are and a number on the scale does not have anything to do with your self worth. I know that I might have seemed attacking earlier, it is because I know the pain that an eating disorder puts a person and their loved ones through and from the depths of my heart want to protect you from it. Once you start there is no stopping without help. You are worth more than that.
To my beautiful people who are fighting an eating disorder right now, and you feel like the claws are in tight and there is no way to free yourself from it. Keep fighting because you can beat this. I was labeled chronic, all but one doc told me I would never recover, and everyone was worn out dealing with it...I found recovery. I am far from recovered, but I no longer live by the scale and die by the scale. I can smile for real and even laugh sometimes, and I have one heck of a cute lil man who loves me. I am thankful everyday that I survived my eating disorder, thankful a friend found me on the night I tried to kill myself. Believe me I know that having an eating disorder is far from a choice, but the only way to get better is to fight back, to show that voice in your head screaming the lies that you aren't gone, and you will fight back. Help is available, but a lot of the time you have to reach your hand out to grab it. Eating disorders are deadly and we've all thought at some point or another that it just couldn't happen to us, but then someone dies. When you see a young person laying I in a coffin having never had a chance to live her life, and you realize everything she lost...everything you are currently losing. There is hope for a future without the rigid rules you set for yourself, without being a certain number on the scale, and without faking your emotions. It is okay to feel and okay to cry. This all sucks, but with determination and support you can get through it. We have to stand together and stop competing for the "who's the sickest" title...WE ARE ALL VERY, VERY SICK! I don't care if you are sixty pounds or two hundred and sixty pounds and if you are struggling you are sick. There is no magic number that pops up on the scale that will convince you that you are finally sick enough to maybe try help. Guess what...a fairly good majority of people who die from eating disorders are not underweight. You deserve to live a life not just exist to hurt yourself because I promise you it is impossible to be a functioning human being with an eating disorder. Imagine having a lunch meeting and the panic that will ensue as you try to find something "safe" to order, then you have to try and control your food rituals, and afterwards try to sneak to the bathroom without people wondering why. That is far from a life. Please keep fighting.
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