My Eating Disorder Story
16:31
Firstly I would just like to point out that this is going to be a long post as it goes into detail and may contain some things that others may find triggering. This was originally a word document that was about 15 pages and unfinished but for the sake of this blog I have tried to cut it down. It is very hard to actually write and publish this as its something I have been secretive about for so many years which is why I need to share it so that I can break the habit of keeping it secret. I first wrote this so that I could try to work out why and when my eating disorder started. Please if you are reading this and feel like you could be triggered then don't continue reading.
Childhood
As a child I was always very quiet and introverted. When I was in the earliest years of primary school I developed something which the doctors thought was acid reflux which meant that my stomach could not keep food down and digest it properly. I had doctors and hospital appointments. I was sent for scans and an operation but nothing was ever diagnosed as they couldn't tell what it may have been. During this time I remember having other children make comments about how they could smell sick and I knew it was from me and I remember being sick in the class room whilst sat on the floor for story time.
From a young age I knew I could make myself sick because of what was wrong with my stomach but now looking back the first time I can remember making myself sick was at dinner time when I was in year 3 and this is going to sound strange (believe me I know it is) but the reason I made myself sick was so that I could get sent home. It wasn't anything to do with food or losing weight at that point, I just wanted to go home and knew they would send me home if they thought I was poorly. I did that on a few occasions but I did it so many times that the dinner ladies didn't believe me when I would say I had been sick. I was also part of the brownies and we had to wear these disgusting coloured jumpers and I would feel really uncomfortable in them because I thought they made me look big, we had a sash with our badges on and I felt really uncomfortable in it because I felt like it was hugging my fat. I would go swimming and feel uncomfortable in my costume and be comparing my body to others around me even though I was always a small child. I was paranoid about how big the splash would be if I jumped in and how big my legs looked to people swimming under water with goggles. When I was in my last year of primary school my grandad died and I would cry that much I constantly felt ill, anytime I had food in my stomach I felt uncomfortable and couldn't keep it down and didn't want to. My case manager has said she thinks that it could have been that I wanted to feel empty so would get rid of the food in my stomach and relate it to the emotions and anxiety I was dealing with at the time. After this had been going on for a while I fell off my chair and grazed my back, my parents looked at my back and said that I was thin and that they could see my spine even though they said it in a concerned manner, I took it as a compliment and was proud that I was thin.
High School
This part will probably be the hardest for me to write as I hated high school so much. I went to a school where "Bullying would not be tolerated." and "Bullying would result in punishment." however most of my friends were bullied and nothing was ever done about it. It was just brushed away like it wasn't happening. High school is definitely the place my disorder kicked into working full time. The first school trip I went on was about team building so that we could all get to know each other. We were given tasks to do, for one we had to sit on the floor building a tower but the whole time I was worrying about how my thighs were squashed against the floor looking huge and then a teacher came around with a camera and I purposefully jumped up so that my thighs wouldn't be caught on picture. We also did races one was a hula hoop race and I should have been focusing on having fun and trying to win but the whole time I was thinking people were staring analysing how much room I was taking up in the hoop. I started watching eating disorder documentaries, reading articles in magazines about peoples stories and visited pro sites, please DO NOT go on those sites! They are vile and I don't understand how anyone who is going through an eating disorder can create these sites to encourage other people to use the disorders habits. I wouldn't wish an eating disorder on my worst enemy. I was a very active child and would play out everyday after school which was where I was getting my exercise from but then some pupils from my school started saying I was weird for playing out and that I shouldn't be doing it, so I stopped playing out which meant I wasn't getting exercise and I felt like I was getting bigger and also not playing out gave me an opportunity to lock myself away in my room and be sick more with out anybody realising. I was being sick in anything I could find from makeup bags to children's toys. I would hide it all in the bottom of my wardrobe and then wait till everyone had gone out before I would flush it away. At school a lot of people just wanted to mess about instead of doing their work and I would get called geeky for wanting to learn and then because I was being called names I would get anxious and not want to talk to any of them which then resulted in me being called a mute and weird because I didn't know how to socialise with them and because of my anxiety I would never stand up for myself and my already non existent self esteem went down the drain. During the summer I would be sat sweating and uncomfortable because I was scared to take my jumper off incase anybody made a comment about being able to see my fat under the shirt. I detested the PE uniform we had to wear as it showed my thighs. PE in particular was problematic for me when dealing with my disorder as when we had trampolining I got told off for getting caught moving to the back of the line and refused to get on the trampoline because I was terrified of having my fat bounce around in front of everyone. We had dance class which was in front of a wall of mirrors and I couldn't stand it so would stare at the floor. Whilst everyone else was getting changed in the changing room I was hidden away changing in the shower cubicles facing the wall incase anyone did come in. I was throwing my lunch away and some of my friends noticed but I would just say I wasn't hungry. Anything that I was eating was being flushed down the toilet when I asked to leave class.
I was going to school and people would make comments about how quiet I was. I was called ugly, was told my hair was greasy, I was weird, I was a geek. I would lock myself in my room after school and would cry and constantly stare at myself in the mirror, looking at the things they would pick out and just hoping I would change. I was drawing on myself in marker pen the places that I thought were too big and what I wanted to cut off, I would nip areas of my body, which had too much fat and just wish that it would come off. I went on a school trip to Italy and I was really self conscious around the pool because everyone was in bikinis and I felt like they all looked thinner than me and I hated it. It was a holiday yet I still couldn’t escape thoughts of being fat. At this point I was hardly eating anything which made meal times awkward as I had to sit at the table picking at food so that nobody would notice but unfortunately one teacher did and she took me to the side and said I needed to eat and when I said I didn’t feel well and that I didn’t really like breakfast food she picked a piece of fruit up from the table and said try this so I had a piece of it and said I didn’t like it so she came back with toast and I ate it just to keep her quiet because I was scared she might have realised and would tell my parents when we got home. The hotel we stayed at made us packed lunches that we could take out with us and we were allowed to wander off by ourselves so I would throw away the bag when we got away from the teachers and just told people I didn’t like sandwiches which seemed to work. I also went on a French trip which I hated! I felt like people were staring at my legs when I was wearing shorts (they weren't I was just over thinking), I didn’t like any of the food they served so didn’t want to waste calories on something I wouldn’t be enjoying. We went to Disney land and I felt like the seat belts on the rides showed my fat hanging over them. I remember we all went down to the beach and everyone was wearing their swimming costumes and I was wearing a black summer dress over my bikini and my teacher said you can't ruin your dress, and I completely ignored him and went into the sea wearing it whilst everyone else was playing around in their costumes having a good time. When I got out of the sea the dress was stuck clinging to my body so instead of waiting for my friends I ran back to our room to get changed. When we got back to school I was wearing jumpers that were too big so that nobody could see the curves I was developing. I would look back at pictures of myself from when I was younger and wish I could have that body back which wouldn’t even look natural on a 15 year old but it was all I wanted. I had to do a speaking exam and with low confidence and anxiety this was already bad enough but when I stood up in front of the class one boy said “ She's actually quite fat.” And with that the people around him started laughing. I was nearly in tears stood in front of all these people, I had no choice but to continue speaking. Thankfully one boy that I hardly ever spoke to said "What are you on about she's not fat." which made me feel a bit better but still that night I got home I closed myself in the bathroom cried and cried and cried and turned the tap on gulping water and forcing myself to be sick even though I hadn’t eaten anything to throw up. In a way it was a type of self harm, I was taking out his criticism on myself because I believed what he said about me.
Prom
Even though prom was part of the high school section I decided to make it its own paragraph as theres a lot to write about and the high school section was already getting too long. By the time prom came around I was so excited to escape school. I wanted to have the smallest dress I could possibly have so that I could feel confident and have one night where I wouldn’t let peoples comments affect me because it wouldn’t matter as I would look nice and they wouldn’t be able to call me fat. So I set myself a mission. I wasn’t eating breakfast. I turned up to class with a big bottle of water thinking that would fill my stomach. I was throwing away my dinners. I would get off the school bus and the first thing I would do was go to the sweet shop and buy a can of coke. I would run to my room leave it in my room, bring my tea upstairs eat the meal then I would down the coke and would throw up until my throat hurt and I could no longer get anything else out. I was telling my parents I was watching films and I would put mean girls on and turn up the volume so nobody could hear me. Later on in the night if I was starting to get hungry I would get a plum chew it and spit it back out into a trinket box making sure I wasn’t consuming it. Around this time was when we were leaving school so everybody was taking photos all the time and I tried my best to avoid them at all costs. But one of the teachers forced me into one with my friends and even looking back at it now knowing how poorly I was it makes me cry, my hair was falling out, my dentist was picking up on the acid damage to my teeth, I was exhausted I didn’t want to leave the house. I was just a mess but I didn’t care because I was starting to see my bones and that’s all that mattered to me. Only one friend knew about it and she didn’t know how ill I was and I made her promise to not to tell anyone.
I was getting told I had lost weight and the fact others were noticing just made me want to continue because finally I was becoming thinner so the cycle continued, every compliment I got spurred me on more as did every insult so whatever was happening I was pushing myself further and further into my disorder. I knew something wasn’t right but I was ashamed. I thought people wouldn’t believe me because in my eyes I was too fat to have an eating disorder, I wasn’t skeletal so to me I wasn’t unhealthy. When it finally came time to go and get my prom dress fitting, I felt uncomfortable having to stand there in my bra whilst this woman I didn’t know measured me. I didn’t want her to know my measurements. I didn’t even want to know my measurements because I felt I hadn’t lost enough yet, but when she said the inch size I was shocked, as soon as she told me a sense of pride came over me as I remembered reading Victoria Beckhams waist size and mine was only a little bigger than hers and she was the main thinspiration celebrity on all of the sites but instead of thinking you can stop now which I originally planned I thought only a little more to go and you will be the same. My mum even made a comment about how she would have to take me to Mcdonalds. When the prom day arrived I loved getting my hair and makeup done even though there was a bit of a disaster with my eyelashes but when I put my dress on and looked in the mirror I didn’t feel confident like I had planned on. I was concerned about how the dress fell on my waist and the size of my arms. Photos were being taken left right and centre and I felt so uncomfortable and claustrophobic. I sat hidden at the table looking after peoples bags whilst all my friends were up dancing and posing for the photographer.
I was ashamed that I couldn’t look at those people that had called me names and made me feel bad about myself and feel comfortable with myself. I was ashamed that I had never stuck up for myself. I was ashamed that I had let their words effect my whole life and my health. Even though I was happy to be getting rid of those people I was already trapped in my disorder and I couldn’t forget the words they used against me.
Childhood
As a child I was always very quiet and introverted. When I was in the earliest years of primary school I developed something which the doctors thought was acid reflux which meant that my stomach could not keep food down and digest it properly. I had doctors and hospital appointments. I was sent for scans and an operation but nothing was ever diagnosed as they couldn't tell what it may have been. During this time I remember having other children make comments about how they could smell sick and I knew it was from me and I remember being sick in the class room whilst sat on the floor for story time.
From a young age I knew I could make myself sick because of what was wrong with my stomach but now looking back the first time I can remember making myself sick was at dinner time when I was in year 3 and this is going to sound strange (believe me I know it is) but the reason I made myself sick was so that I could get sent home. It wasn't anything to do with food or losing weight at that point, I just wanted to go home and knew they would send me home if they thought I was poorly. I did that on a few occasions but I did it so many times that the dinner ladies didn't believe me when I would say I had been sick. I was also part of the brownies and we had to wear these disgusting coloured jumpers and I would feel really uncomfortable in them because I thought they made me look big, we had a sash with our badges on and I felt really uncomfortable in it because I felt like it was hugging my fat. I would go swimming and feel uncomfortable in my costume and be comparing my body to others around me even though I was always a small child. I was paranoid about how big the splash would be if I jumped in and how big my legs looked to people swimming under water with goggles. When I was in my last year of primary school my grandad died and I would cry that much I constantly felt ill, anytime I had food in my stomach I felt uncomfortable and couldn't keep it down and didn't want to. My case manager has said she thinks that it could have been that I wanted to feel empty so would get rid of the food in my stomach and relate it to the emotions and anxiety I was dealing with at the time. After this had been going on for a while I fell off my chair and grazed my back, my parents looked at my back and said that I was thin and that they could see my spine even though they said it in a concerned manner, I took it as a compliment and was proud that I was thin.
High School
This part will probably be the hardest for me to write as I hated high school so much. I went to a school where "Bullying would not be tolerated." and "Bullying would result in punishment." however most of my friends were bullied and nothing was ever done about it. It was just brushed away like it wasn't happening. High school is definitely the place my disorder kicked into working full time. The first school trip I went on was about team building so that we could all get to know each other. We were given tasks to do, for one we had to sit on the floor building a tower but the whole time I was worrying about how my thighs were squashed against the floor looking huge and then a teacher came around with a camera and I purposefully jumped up so that my thighs wouldn't be caught on picture. We also did races one was a hula hoop race and I should have been focusing on having fun and trying to win but the whole time I was thinking people were staring analysing how much room I was taking up in the hoop. I started watching eating disorder documentaries, reading articles in magazines about peoples stories and visited pro sites, please DO NOT go on those sites! They are vile and I don't understand how anyone who is going through an eating disorder can create these sites to encourage other people to use the disorders habits. I wouldn't wish an eating disorder on my worst enemy. I was a very active child and would play out everyday after school which was where I was getting my exercise from but then some pupils from my school started saying I was weird for playing out and that I shouldn't be doing it, so I stopped playing out which meant I wasn't getting exercise and I felt like I was getting bigger and also not playing out gave me an opportunity to lock myself away in my room and be sick more with out anybody realising. I was being sick in anything I could find from makeup bags to children's toys. I would hide it all in the bottom of my wardrobe and then wait till everyone had gone out before I would flush it away. At school a lot of people just wanted to mess about instead of doing their work and I would get called geeky for wanting to learn and then because I was being called names I would get anxious and not want to talk to any of them which then resulted in me being called a mute and weird because I didn't know how to socialise with them and because of my anxiety I would never stand up for myself and my already non existent self esteem went down the drain. During the summer I would be sat sweating and uncomfortable because I was scared to take my jumper off incase anybody made a comment about being able to see my fat under the shirt. I detested the PE uniform we had to wear as it showed my thighs. PE in particular was problematic for me when dealing with my disorder as when we had trampolining I got told off for getting caught moving to the back of the line and refused to get on the trampoline because I was terrified of having my fat bounce around in front of everyone. We had dance class which was in front of a wall of mirrors and I couldn't stand it so would stare at the floor. Whilst everyone else was getting changed in the changing room I was hidden away changing in the shower cubicles facing the wall incase anyone did come in. I was throwing my lunch away and some of my friends noticed but I would just say I wasn't hungry. Anything that I was eating was being flushed down the toilet when I asked to leave class.
I was going to school and people would make comments about how quiet I was. I was called ugly, was told my hair was greasy, I was weird, I was a geek. I would lock myself in my room after school and would cry and constantly stare at myself in the mirror, looking at the things they would pick out and just hoping I would change. I was drawing on myself in marker pen the places that I thought were too big and what I wanted to cut off, I would nip areas of my body, which had too much fat and just wish that it would come off. I went on a school trip to Italy and I was really self conscious around the pool because everyone was in bikinis and I felt like they all looked thinner than me and I hated it. It was a holiday yet I still couldn’t escape thoughts of being fat. At this point I was hardly eating anything which made meal times awkward as I had to sit at the table picking at food so that nobody would notice but unfortunately one teacher did and she took me to the side and said I needed to eat and when I said I didn’t feel well and that I didn’t really like breakfast food she picked a piece of fruit up from the table and said try this so I had a piece of it and said I didn’t like it so she came back with toast and I ate it just to keep her quiet because I was scared she might have realised and would tell my parents when we got home. The hotel we stayed at made us packed lunches that we could take out with us and we were allowed to wander off by ourselves so I would throw away the bag when we got away from the teachers and just told people I didn’t like sandwiches which seemed to work. I also went on a French trip which I hated! I felt like people were staring at my legs when I was wearing shorts (they weren't I was just over thinking), I didn’t like any of the food they served so didn’t want to waste calories on something I wouldn’t be enjoying. We went to Disney land and I felt like the seat belts on the rides showed my fat hanging over them. I remember we all went down to the beach and everyone was wearing their swimming costumes and I was wearing a black summer dress over my bikini and my teacher said you can't ruin your dress, and I completely ignored him and went into the sea wearing it whilst everyone else was playing around in their costumes having a good time. When I got out of the sea the dress was stuck clinging to my body so instead of waiting for my friends I ran back to our room to get changed. When we got back to school I was wearing jumpers that were too big so that nobody could see the curves I was developing. I would look back at pictures of myself from when I was younger and wish I could have that body back which wouldn’t even look natural on a 15 year old but it was all I wanted. I had to do a speaking exam and with low confidence and anxiety this was already bad enough but when I stood up in front of the class one boy said “ She's actually quite fat.” And with that the people around him started laughing. I was nearly in tears stood in front of all these people, I had no choice but to continue speaking. Thankfully one boy that I hardly ever spoke to said "What are you on about she's not fat." which made me feel a bit better but still that night I got home I closed myself in the bathroom cried and cried and cried and turned the tap on gulping water and forcing myself to be sick even though I hadn’t eaten anything to throw up. In a way it was a type of self harm, I was taking out his criticism on myself because I believed what he said about me.
Prom
Even though prom was part of the high school section I decided to make it its own paragraph as theres a lot to write about and the high school section was already getting too long. By the time prom came around I was so excited to escape school. I wanted to have the smallest dress I could possibly have so that I could feel confident and have one night where I wouldn’t let peoples comments affect me because it wouldn’t matter as I would look nice and they wouldn’t be able to call me fat. So I set myself a mission. I wasn’t eating breakfast. I turned up to class with a big bottle of water thinking that would fill my stomach. I was throwing away my dinners. I would get off the school bus and the first thing I would do was go to the sweet shop and buy a can of coke. I would run to my room leave it in my room, bring my tea upstairs eat the meal then I would down the coke and would throw up until my throat hurt and I could no longer get anything else out. I was telling my parents I was watching films and I would put mean girls on and turn up the volume so nobody could hear me. Later on in the night if I was starting to get hungry I would get a plum chew it and spit it back out into a trinket box making sure I wasn’t consuming it. Around this time was when we were leaving school so everybody was taking photos all the time and I tried my best to avoid them at all costs. But one of the teachers forced me into one with my friends and even looking back at it now knowing how poorly I was it makes me cry, my hair was falling out, my dentist was picking up on the acid damage to my teeth, I was exhausted I didn’t want to leave the house. I was just a mess but I didn’t care because I was starting to see my bones and that’s all that mattered to me. Only one friend knew about it and she didn’t know how ill I was and I made her promise to not to tell anyone.
I was getting told I had lost weight and the fact others were noticing just made me want to continue because finally I was becoming thinner so the cycle continued, every compliment I got spurred me on more as did every insult so whatever was happening I was pushing myself further and further into my disorder. I knew something wasn’t right but I was ashamed. I thought people wouldn’t believe me because in my eyes I was too fat to have an eating disorder, I wasn’t skeletal so to me I wasn’t unhealthy. When it finally came time to go and get my prom dress fitting, I felt uncomfortable having to stand there in my bra whilst this woman I didn’t know measured me. I didn’t want her to know my measurements. I didn’t even want to know my measurements because I felt I hadn’t lost enough yet, but when she said the inch size I was shocked, as soon as she told me a sense of pride came over me as I remembered reading Victoria Beckhams waist size and mine was only a little bigger than hers and she was the main thinspiration celebrity on all of the sites but instead of thinking you can stop now which I originally planned I thought only a little more to go and you will be the same. My mum even made a comment about how she would have to take me to Mcdonalds. When the prom day arrived I loved getting my hair and makeup done even though there was a bit of a disaster with my eyelashes but when I put my dress on and looked in the mirror I didn’t feel confident like I had planned on. I was concerned about how the dress fell on my waist and the size of my arms. Photos were being taken left right and centre and I felt so uncomfortable and claustrophobic. I sat hidden at the table looking after peoples bags whilst all my friends were up dancing and posing for the photographer.
I was ashamed that I couldn’t look at those people that had called me names and made me feel bad about myself and feel comfortable with myself. I was ashamed that I had never stuck up for myself. I was ashamed that I had let their words effect my whole life and my health. Even though I was happy to be getting rid of those people I was already trapped in my disorder and I couldn’t forget the words they used against me.
Im going to stop this section of the story here because it's already a lot to read. Tomorrow I will upload part two which will include what happened after school up till now.
If anything in this post affected you or you relate to any of it or think someone around you may be struggling please visit
http://www.b-eat.co.uk as they have a lot on information about support.
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