My Eating Disorder Experience Revelation
Tags: Mental Illness, Eating Disorder, Mental Health, Eating Disorder Recovery

My Eating Disorder Experience Revelation

I guess there is no need to start from the beginning. Many eating disorders start in the same way. You were a happy kid, didn’t worry about food or your body, and then, BANG, you didn’t know what you were doing and you were suddenly out of control.

This is not what happened to me. My friends and I were standing in the cafeteria line for our weekly fish and chips on Friday. My best friend, we’ll call her Charlie, for now, told us she didn’t want lunch and she went to find us a table. My whole group of friends followed her and began asking her if she was okay, convincing her that not eating one meal was dangerous and was the beginning of an eating disorder. Until this point, I genuinely didn’t know what an eating disorder was. Growing up as an only child, there are a lot of things that you miss out on.

At this point, Charlie did not have an eating disorder, but I believe that she enjoyed the attention that all her friends gave her when she decided to skip a meal, and this became a regular thing for her, and for me. I began thinking in depth about how Charlie was losing weight while we were eating our lunch, and how we were gaining weight. However, I couldn’t just skip lunch as well, it would look as if I were copying her. So my lunchtimes changed drastically. Many days I would spend the ‘eating’ portion of lunch in the bathrooms, and then meet my friends afterward. Other days, I would join them in the cafeteria, grab a tray, and only put bread on my tray. Of course, I would barely eat anything and sometimes my friends would point this out.

You would think that with all this lost lunch, I would be losing weight rapidly and I would be gaining the reputation of being the Anorexic who was afraid of food. But no. I began supplementing my diet in other places, turning one bad habit of skipping lunch into a different kind of disordered eating. The one that nobody seems to notice. And I will point out that this developed gradually throughout the years and went through many phases: one burger patty for dinner, 2 bags of Mini Eggs on the way to school, Haribo Tangfastics at break time, no breakfast, 1 apple cut up into tiny slices so it feels like I am eating more, calorie-free drinks, and so many more that I cannot even list them. Throughout this experience, I will not say I was either anorexic or a binge-eater, I really hopped between the two. Until after a while, my mind was constantly forcing me to grab food and stuff it in my face. I feel completely out of control when I am eating. As soon as I finish a meal or snack, I immediately feel the urge to eat more, and although I am telling myself that I am not hungry and that I will become obese if I eat anymore, I continue to eat. My brain is on a high, and my stomach is trying to endure the pain of expansion. Every day I tell myself that I will change. But the problem keeps getting worse. Now, it is not ‘eat when you bored,’ it is: the only time you eat is when you’re watching TV or Youtube, so you end up wasting an entire day staring at a screen and stuffing food into your face.

I know, one day I will end up obese if this continues. There appears to be nothing I can do. I have asked loved ones to help me, but they have not even tried. Maybe I have not expressed to them the seriousness of the matter. It is tough to do so, especially because all my mum sees in me is the little girl who is afraid to eat any food. And that is true, but that fear is because I know that if I eat one bite of food, the eating will never stop and I will die in my grave at an extreme weight, alone.