Hi, today is gonna be a bit of a heavy topic but an important one that I want to start addressing in detail. I'm very open and I talk a lot about my eating disorder. My past struggles, my present struggles, my foreseen future struggles, my recovery, relapse, all that stuff. But I want to kind of make like an ongoing series where it's a little more structured, I guess, the way we talk about it. Today specifically I want to talk about, I guess, trans youth and eating disorders, but I guess I was gonna say transmitting disorders, but I'm pretty sure this would apply to more than just transmitting. But why I think so many trans guys have a history of eating disorders, why so many trans youth are afflicted with eating disorders. So here's my theory. I always hated my body growing up like I just said it was, it was awful. And I realized when I hit puberty and I started to hate my body more, I realized that when I didn't eat trigger warning, I would have menstruate. And I also noticed that the less that I ate and the thinner I became, the more boxy and boyish I looked and the smaller my chest got and there were things that I was almost doing subconsciously. It was just sort of like I didn't like my body when it looked curvy and I didn't like that the way that my clothes fit and I was wearing a lot of boys clothes. And I found that my clothes fit better when I was thinner, but like it was never thin enough because there was nothing to do about the fact that I just I didn't know what binders were. So I feel like that is kind of a common theme and I've actually encountered a lot of trans guys who've had eating disorders in the past and still presently struggle with that with somewhat. I think it's sort of like a mix of the fact like when we're not eating and when we're smaller, it kind of makes us look more a drodgenous and amusing quotation marks because you could be a drodgenous and look how are the fucking ones. But I'm just saying it made it harder for people to read me, but it was also this feeling of control when I felt so out of control of my body and what was happening to it and the way that I was being perceived and my eating disorder just really helped me feel in control and feel like I had a choice in what was happening with my body. It was just a big horrible mix of things. I would consider myself presently recovered from my eating disorder. My last relapse was I would say a year ago it got really bad again around around this time last year like September, October and November. And the reason why is because first I like before I started tea, I went through another phase of sort of like you know true warning to self harm and not eating and just sort of doing whatever I could to my body to make it bearable to live in. Then once I started to saw strewn and after I had to get my surgery I kind of went on this kick of just being like the healthiest fucking person in the world and like being really strict about what I ate which is something that happens to me a lot. But being really strict about my workout routine and all that stuff and that that wasn't a way to live. I know that working out and eating healthy are good things and usually for regular ass people it is a good change but for me it was still my eating disorder controlling my life in a different way. I helped guilty every time I ate. I felt like when I worked out it was never enough. It was just fucking like it wasn't a way to live. And the anxiety of having to work out kind of paralyzed me and I never wanted to leave my house because I was worried that I wouldn't have the right food at my disposal and I would have to eat food that would make me you know gain weight and whatever the fucking just it was exhausting. I kind of took a step back from that and I started just sort of being less strict with what I was eating and not thinking about working out and when I exercise it's just for the fucking fun of it. And I don't push myself past my point of being injured because I realized that I get injured really easily and there's probably something going on there medically but I don't fucking know what it is. And now I'm in a place where I still have really deep seated thoughts of just self-loathing and I have a lot of trouble being okay with my body image. Like I'm looking at myself in the viewfinder of my camera right now and I cannot stop just finding problems with it in the back of my head that I'm trying to fucking ignore that shit. It's harder when I can't work out but again I need to accept my physical limitations that I would consider myself recovered because I'm not engaging in any eating disorder activity. I'm not binge-eating, I'm not restricting, I am not over working out, I'm not doing any of that but I would not consider my mind fully recovered because it still beats me up every day and a big part of that I still feel is my dysphoria because when my dysphoria is at a high, I feel worse. Like even if it's high to dysphoria, the first thing that happens is my eating disorder comes up and just fucking walks on in. But when I'm feeling good about like my masculinity or I don't fucking know when I'm feeling not dysphoric, I don't feel my eating disorder as badly. So I really think that there's a correlation there, I'm just gonna go ahead and make that assumption. So that's it for this video, I just wanted to talk about my eating disorder and how I think there is a parallel between trans folk and having eating disorders and I think I really think that is a thing, especially in trans youth because that's an age where we usually don't have access to hormones and surgery and we're going through puberty. There's just so much happening to our bodies that we're not okay with and we have no control over that that is the only way that a lot of us feel like we could retaliate or take some control or just fucking love ourselves and it's awful and you shouldn't do that because there are a lot of ways to love yourself and just fucking please don't develop an eating disorder because it's like a line that cannot be uncrossed. I don't want that to happen to anyone else. I'm gonna be making more videos like this. I want to make some videos about like my strategies on how to do with when I'm not feeling well here with my body and the ways that I dress that are different that usually make me feel like it's okay to go out and you know all that stuff. So hopefully that'll be interesting and helpful at least and that's it. I hope you all have a great week and I hope you're all doing well. Thanks. Bye.