UPDATE 11/18/12- Checked into an in-patient program for eating disorders at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis.

07/01/12-
WELL. Where to begin?

I guess it all started at the end of the summer of 2011. I was soon going to begin my Senior year. The only friends I had were skinny, fashionable people that never had to think about what a “calorie” was and who ate like it was going out of style. My friend Joanne and I decided that we were going to try hanging out with the “cool crowd” and began going to parties the next night. Let me just skip this whole story all together and just summarize it like so: Drinking + Low-self esteem = sudden realization that I was “fat”.

I have no idea how it came about. Maybe it was because I had quit dance after 13 years and my metabolism decided to shut down completely. Maybe it was looking at all of my friends and realizing that I wasn’t skinny in comparison to them any longer. Either way, I went into Senior year with the idea that I needed to start controlling exactly what went into my mouth.

Up until the beginning of this year, it wasn’t that bad. Sure, I’d skip lunch at school most days; and sure, I’d pick the “lighter” options for coffee at caribou. But it didn’t really phase me that I really needed to lose weight until my grandfather surprised me with a trip to visit him in Kauai for Spring Break (at this time I was about 130 lbs). I panicked when I looked in the mirror. I was disgusted by every bump and fold on my body. I imagined myself in a suit on the beach in front of other people. I was absolutely horrified.

It didn’t help that I had gotten in a fight with my mother at that time and was living at a friend’s house. I was in charge of buying my own groceries, meaning that if I didn’t eat that day, nobody would be there to notice. I also began purging whenever I did eat, mostly when I went out with friends. Even after moving back home, it was very easy to cook my own food, have my parents see me eating it, and then purging it up quickly after they left.

This was how the last three months of high school went. Eating, purging, not eating, so on and so forth; not to mention, this was also the time when I started becoming obsessed with exercise. Running after every meal not only would make me throw up, but also made me feel like my legs weren’t going to magically expand that night when I was sleeping.

The worst of this all came when I had my “Lifetime Fitness” Intensive Theme (a 7-day long class at the end of each of our school’s trimesters). In this class, we were given a packet to track our food intake, our exercise, and our mental health. We would go to the gym for 3 hours in the morning, come back to school and watch a health video, eat lunch (or not eat in my case), read health articles, and do 2 hours of yoga. This class was really supposed to be taken by out-of-shape people looking at becoming healthier, but I couldn’t resist. Throughout the class, I went from 124 lbs to 117. I loved it. Looking at the scale every day and seeing that the number decreased made me feel in control of everything.

Since then, I have continued to eat, not eat, purge, exercise, and do whatever is necessary to feel skinny. Nobody has noticed. Not. One. Person. My mother is on a weight-loss journey of her own, so she even encourages me to talk about losing weight with her. My father eats one meal a day, and it’s easy to tell him that I’ve already eaten before then. My 13-year old sister suffers from an ED as well. I don’t know what to do about.

I decided on the night of my High School graduation that if nobody else was going to help me, then I would have to help myself. That is why this blog exists. To help me recover from what is still happening.

I keep my blog as anti-ed as possible.

I will never post my weight or other stats unless you ask me off of anon.

I will give the best advice I can on this subject because nutrition is something I am very interested in studying (but not following myself).

Overall, I am here to help. Please talk to me if you feel that you need to.