By Bridget Turro
*TW: This article talks about eating disorders, restricting, binging, and purging*
From the moment I had awareness of my body and what I looked like, I always hated it. I would always compare myself to the people around me and it was always on my mind. I was just a kid thinking that my body was ‘too big’ or just not good enough. I can only remember this stemming from my mother locking the pantry doors to restrict me from eating too much. As a kid, I had no concept of how much I ate and didn’t know I was full. Seeing the zip ties and lock on the pantry door started making me more sneaky when it came to food. Some of my early memories are stealing food and bringing it up to my room and saving it so I can eat it later if I was hungry. This isn’t to say that my parents didn’t feed me, because they did. They limited me on my intake which made me feel out of control in the situation that I so badly wanted control over.
I was also a very picky eater, and most people knew about it. I remember going over to my best friend’s house and her mom yelling at me for not fully eating something. This made me even more scared to eat in front of people. All of these critiques of if I ate too much or too little was building up in my mind and would make me anxious to go over to other people’s houses in fear that I would be judged even more.
It wasn’t until middle school that I began to be more conscious of my body. I felt like I looked so much different than my friends and when I look back in pictures I was skinny and looked healthy but on the inside was just the burning start of my insecurities forming. High school was just a few years after and that’s when my body really started to change. I fully hated the way my body looked and I fell into a dangerous cycle of on and off binging and purging for about 5 years. It caused more harm to my body than good. I developed other health issues that were related to my purging that I will have for the rest of my life.
When I started college I thought that things would be better because I was away from my family and was able to fully control what I ate. The opposite happened and I started to binge and restrict myself. I fell into the toxic diet culture of college that was don’t eat all day so that when you drink later you can get drunker faster. It didn’t help at the time that my peers were also doing similar things and it was a way to relate to others. I stopped purging around freshman year because I knew that I would be sharing a room with three other girls and I didn’t want them to suspect anything. When it came to eating, I wasn’t consistent with it but I would either eat too much or nothing at all. Things only got worse when we were sent home in the middle of freshman year due to Covid.
Covid was a weird time for most people. It was a time when most people didn’t know what to do and I definitely fell victim to it. I started binging a lot more and not caring about my health but was progressively becoming more and more unhappy with how I looked. I don’t think that there was a ‘breaking point’ for me personally, but I knew that I had to admit that I had a problem to someone. It was something I was scared to admit to someone else, let alone myself. I didn’t want to come clean about something that was taking over my life. I told my therapist and as surprised as she was, she was nothing but supportive and helpful. Aside from therapy, I knew I had to do some work on myself to rebuild my self-image.
In no way am I fully recovered or totally in love with myself but I have learned acceptance. This is my body and I only get one, I have to treat it right and I need to learn to be kind with it. I saw a quote somewhere that said something along the lines of you are only borrowing your body on earth for such a short time and you need to take care of it when it tells you to, eat when hungry, sleep when tired, cry when feeling sad. The body that I inhabit is the only one I have and I have to be kind to it. I have to accept that I have a bit of a double chin and some pudge on my stomach. It is a part of me and I am learning to accept and love it as it is.
If you are struggling with an eating disorder and need help call the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) to talk with a trained professional at 1-800-931-2237