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My scars

We all have scars and I have many, some are mental and some are physical. However, today I want to tell you about my eating disorder and how I was able to recover from it. This story starts off in the 9th grade, I had dealt with many mental health complications and I was on medication for it. However, one of my medications caused me to gain an excessive amount of weight very quickly. I had gone from 115 lbs to 165 lbs in just a few months. Additionally going from the 8th grade to the 9th grade can be a big change for a lot of people. I went from a relatively small middle school to a massive highschool of 3,000 people; because of this all of my friends split apart and joined new friend groups. I went from having so many friends and knowing everyone in my grade to having no friends. I felt like I had lost all of my friends because of my weight gain, and I began to hate my medication because of this. My doctors also thought that I was doing better now so they started to wean me off of my medication. However I did not know that coming off of my medication would lead me to some deadly coping mechanisms. 

One day I heard a song by Melanie Martinez called orange juice; which is about a girl who binges and then throws all of her food back up. For whatever reason this sounded like a great idea to me, I could eat whatever I wanted and be able to lose weight. However I was too scared to test this at home out of fear that one of my parents would hear me so I decided to test it at school. I knew I couldn’t throw up in any bathroom because someone would hear me, so I decided to tell my gym teacher that I left something in the locker rooms. I knew no one would be in the locker rooms during lunch so I could test my theory without anyone finding out. My gym teacher thought nothing of my lie and he let me into the locker rooms where I proceeded to throw up. It seemed so easy, and I thought to myself “Wow I can do this all the time, it’s a super easy way for me to lose weight!” Little did I know that throwing up that day would lead to a horrible eating disorder. I began to make myself sick every few days, but this quickly turned into making myself throw up after nearly every meal. I started to lose weight and I loved my results. However one thing that no one tells you about bulimia is that it's a very slow process. Some days I would lose a lot of weight and others I would gain. This wasn’t good enough for me, if I was gaining weight I felt disgusted with myself. I needed something else, some other way to lose even more weight. So I composed a list of “purge foods''. These were foods that I must throw up if I ate them. However as time went on this list was virtually any meal that was more than 500 calories. The binge purge cycle consumed my life for my entire 10th grade year. Until one day when I stumbled upon a youtube video about pro ana.

Pro ana is a community of people that want to be anorexic, and they help people become sicker. I obviously thought this was horrible, however I was intrigued so I decided to join a pro ana forum to see what they talked about. That's when I found out what laxatives were. One girl said she took laxatives to purge food because she didn’t want to throw up. Making myself sick was one thing but taking pills when I didn’t need to was a really big deal for me. However I was so engulfed in my eating disorder by this point that I decided to try it. I decided to take the pills and this greatly helped with my weight loss, in fact it sped up my weight loss more than any other method I was already doing. However I found that taking laxatives was extremely painful when you shouldn't be taking them. So I decided to take them right before bed every single night so I could sleep through the pain. Every morning I would wake up in excruciating pain, having to run to the bathroom where I would proceed to vomit and then have diarrhea. Some days I would be so weak from the laxatives that I would be unable to stand while I was showering. This cycle continued for an entire year until one day when I couldn’t take it anymore. I was done suffering in silence, no one knew about my eating disorder and I wanted out. I had no idea who to talk to aso I decided to call NEDA (National Eating Disorders Association.) The woman I spoke to that day helped comfort me, and provided me with eating disorder therapists and psychiatrists near me and she also urged me to tell someone in my life about my suffering. I was scared but I knew to get better I would have to tell someone. So I decided to tell my mom.

I called my mom on the phone that day and began to tell her about my eating disorder. I was scared but she was comforting and understanding. I came to find out that my mother was bulimic when she was a teenager too. We composed a plan to help me recover, since I had been sick for so many years. We knew this would be a slow process but we were committed to getting better. We first started by finding an eating disorder therapist. I had to go through a few different therapists until I finally found one that worked for me. Her name is Alex and I still see her every week. She suggested that I would benefit from a physiatrist and nutritionist too. After many months I was finally able to find a physiatrist and he diagnosed me with Anorexia with a binge purge subtype. I know some people are scared to get diagnosed however this comforted me. I was finally able to recognize my symptoms, which greatly helped my recovery. The next thing I knew I needed to do was quit the laxatives, this wasn’t easy for me but I knew if I wanted to recover this was something I had to do. So on December 1st of 2021 I threw away all of my laxatives and I haven’t taken any since. I have now been in recovery for over a year, it's a battle everyday but I am so much happier now than I ever was when I was sick. I haven’t thrown up in over 10 months and I haven’t taken laxatives in a year and a half. My advice for anyone that Is struggling with an eating disorder is to reach out and ask for help. No matter what the eating disordered voice tells you, recovery will make you so much happier than skinny ever will.