After two years of eating disorder hell, I’m deciding to recover.
Tags: Teenage Mental Health, Eating Disorder Therapy, Teens, Eating Disorders, Eating Disorder Recovery

Hi. I’m Kristiana. I am 17 (18 in March) and I’ve had an eating disorder since I was 15 years old.

I have always had a disordered headspace. When I was a kid, I remember noticing that my stomach stuck out but my sister’s didn’t. I remember not wanting to eat chicken nuggets, and feeling proud and worthy when my stomach growled. It was like music to my ears. It never actually stopped me from eating, but it was there. Disordered eating was a monster in my closet, crouched down in the back of my brain.

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

In the summer of 2018, my family went on a two-week road trip. We live in the midwest, so we drove through Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Northern California, and then back though Nevada and others going home. We stopped at Yellowstone and the Lava Beds and met family in Seattle. It was amazing, the most freeing trip I’ve ever taken. America is truly beautiful, at least in some places. But I also remember eating out all the time. I always got the choice of whether or not to eat, or how much or little to eat. I found myself unconsciously deciding to just eat less. We went to pizza ranch and I started with a salad. At hotel breakfasts, I was just drawn to the fruit. In pictures where I wore shorts, the first thing I could see was how big my legs looked. The monster was growing restless.

Two weeks after we got home, we flew to LA to celebrate my nephew’s birthday. For some reason, I started really counting calories. I’d been exploring r/proana on Reddit, reading up on tips for counting, on people’s struggles, and on their mindsets. Eating disorders are a culture that I’d never realized, and it was sucking me in. For once, I related.

I started looking at numbers the week we got to LA. First, I decided not to have any of those amazing Biscott cookies on the plane, and opted for diet coke instead of apple juice. When I got to California, it got really bad. I Googled the calories for everything. I knew nothing about nutrition except for what r/proana and, later, myproana.com were teaching me. Those lessons were:

Calories are bad. Fewer calories = better. Deficits matter. Burn more than you eat and you will lose weight. Beautiful = BMI 17 or lower. I could not be beautiful unless I was 96 pounds.

The day of my nephew’s birthday, I nibbled on cake and then set it down, saying later that, no, that’s not my piece, I ate mine and I have no idea whose that is. I was forced to eat family meals, but I would only have one serving and I would eat it s l o w l y. It was the first time in my life that I’d only had one piece of pizza, and it wouldn’t be the last. I wrote every calorie down in my notebook, rejoicing over 400–500 calorie days and beating myself up for eating more than 900. I downloaded workouts from Pinterest, doing so many jumping jacks in the guest room that they complained downstairs.

By the time we flew back, it was hard for me to walk off the plane, and I was so cracked I had no idea why I was so tired. Come to think of it, I was also sad, and apathetic, and and hopeless, too. I’d been depressed before, but I didn’t have any reason to. It made no sense. (Dummy.)

Cue the next five months of HELL. I was trapped in a cycle I’d started because I wanted to just lose a little weight. All I wanted was a thigh gap, a flat stomach, sharp hipbones, bony arms. All I wanted was to lose a little. I started around 120 pounds. By November, I was 100, and my parents were forcefully spoon-feeding me. It was, to say the least, sucky.

I started the relapse-recovery cycle in February of 2019. We got buried in snow, and one snow day turned into two snow weeks. My body had taken over and I ate everything. In two weeks, I gained seven pounds of real weight, not just food and crap. Once I’d started the cycle, there was no stopping. I would start my days right by skipping breakfast, spooning my yogurt into a plastic baggie that got shoved in my backpack and disposed of at school. Lunch would be fine. In the afternoon, I would have a “snack” that would turn into Dinner numero uno. Family dinners came next, followed by the “welp, I ruined this today. Might as well eat now and fix it tomorrow” mentality. I gained all the weight back and more.

It would go like this:

Recover. Hate myself. Relapse (for a month, or maybe a week, or maybe a day). Find meaning in life. Recover. yada yada yada……

At first, the cycles lasted a couple months of each. A couple months of recovering, a couple months of relapse, flip flop flip flop. Then they lasted weeks. Then days. Soon, I was binging every other day and starving the days in between. Through it all, I kept just gaining. I would lose three and gain five, lose ten and gain twelve. For someone whose entire world had become numbers, it was psychological torture.

In October, I became a part of the Pfizer vaccine trial. I didn’t realize how big my contribution was because I didn’t realize what Pfizer was. It’s been hitting me how much good I am doing, and it’s inspiring me to do more. I want to help people and I want to suck every joy and every good thing out of this crazy world. Translated: I finally have a will to live. I want to recover. I want to live my life. I found meaning in God and in His love for me, and I realize that I am a chosen and anointed creation. I realize that I need to find my joy in Him rather than in my own control of my situation.

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

I want to get better, and I will. This is my resolve. 2020 may have been a dumpster fire, but it taught me what, and who, truly matters. 2021 will be better because it has to. And now, you get to come along for the roller coaster.

Buckle up, kids. This is going to be a doozy.