Starting from the beginning..

Just a bit about my ED and where it started and where I am now.. (btw this is not the LMW talking, I am sane right now)

Well my journey with eating disorders started when I was about 12, when I started puberty and started actually noticing my body. I felt like all my friends were prettier and skinnier then me. But even though I thought those things I didn't really give it much energy at the time. I started home schooling that year and was in a cooking class at one family's house and each week was a different theme and everyone helped cooked these huugee meals kinda like this.


At one of these classes, I don't remember exactly how I was feeling or where I even got the idea, but I was over stuffed and we hadn't even had dessert yet and so I and went to the bathroom and purged for the first time. And I felt great, I thought man this is so easy I can eat whatever I want, all I have to do is throw up and there will be more room for more food. I started to get obsessive about it I would eat food just because I wanted to purge. It's weird but I really enjoyed it.


The next summer I turned 13 and I was soo excited to show my friends Bianca and Jessie my new bathing suit at a sleep over. It was a one piece modest neckline but I thought it was really cute. Well Jessie comes back with " That's yours? That looks like it would fit your mom! Bahahaha!" I still have that bathing suit and I detest it to this day because it reminds me of that night when they laughed at me and said my bathing suit was big (it's big on me now so that shows how big I was as at the time..Not humongously fat but chunkyish and very unhappy about it.) I also feel I should add how awful it felt to be a big cheerleader I was tall and thick and always lifting people I was never on top, in front...I absolutely loved cheerleading though; it was and still is my favorite thing ever.

(November 2006)

So after that different things had come up and I have them all journaled and remember them crystal clearly but from then on I decided I needed to lose weight. I needed to do something. I couldn't keep eating all this food- that's what making me fat. So I tried to stop eating but I would only make it like a day or so before I started binging again and when I binged I purged. then I got tired of that saw that people were started to notice when I didn't eat so I just ate "normally" and when the restricting stopped, the binging stopped but I still hated how fat I was and wanted to lose weight so I would purge everything I ate. Sometimes, when I was angry or sad or overwhelmed, I would go back to eating something so that I could purge it, to sort of relieve the stress and feel in control again. And that's how my life pretty much went for about 3 years. When I was 16 I decided that I needed to stop. I knew it wasn't healthy and it just wasn't working- I wasn't losing any weight I stayed between 160 and 170 pounds all three years.

(January 2009)

At that time, I started reaching out to Women in my church and they all told me to go to my mom which was soo frustrating because my relationship with my mom wasn't and still isn't that great which I think came from the distance I put between us with the eating habits. Its such a dark secretive thing that the more you get into it, the more self-seeking you become, the further away you get from other people even the people that are closest to you. Physically and Emotionally. I'm home schooled, I'm with her all day every day! and she IS my mom that's what she's there for. But I never did. She found out from one of the women who eventually told her. She started talking to me about it and when ever we had those talks I would freeze up and not say a word and she would get soo frustrated but I just couldn't muster a single sound. Our talks always ended with me in tears and her totally fed up.



In March she decided that I would go see a counselor. I made great progress and within 5 months I had pretty much ditched all the ED behavior. July 15, 2010 was the last day I purged. I thought I was healed. Boy was I wrong. In January 2011 the thoughts started coming back. I held dearly onto my 6 months, 7 months.. I started reaching out to people and discovered Overeaters Anonymous (OA) but the more I focused on the problem the worse it got. I started binging and restricting only to find myself binging again. A friend from OA suggested Eating Disorders Anonymous (EDA).


I was so excited to be around people who really understood what I was going through. OA helped a lot but I really connected with the people from EDA. But again I found myself engaging even more in my eating behaviors to the point of complete relapse. on June 26, 2011 I broke my 11 1/2 month no-purging streak and that set me off. I've now been restricting and purging all week and I'm still deciding what I want to do for the rest of my life. I'm here again I have to choice again.. I can choose to continue in my disordered eating habits and get super skinny and sick.. or I can choose to pull myself out of this hole and start again. Start working towards a happy healthy life, free from the food prison, where I will be able to eat with out thinking about how many calories are in something, or eat a normal sized meal 3 times a day and not go all out and binge just because I *feel* a little hungry, or starve myself because I *feel* a little fat. Abstinence for me is when I abstain from eating or not eating compulsively. I keep hearing progress not perfection and I think, yeah yeah whatever imperfection is not abstinence. But really you cant get weeks, months or years without one day. Soo that's where I am right now. Balance, progression, stability and serenity are my goals. Not eating a certain way, or staying away from certain foods or getting to a certain weight. I'm working the 12 steps and growing closer to God and He's gonna get me through this.