In the spring of my sophomore year of college, I was anorexic.
To describe this story, it is helpful to have some backstory on how I got there. I came back to school for my fall semester of sophomore year. The first few weeks were among the hardest of my life. I fell into a very deep depression. One where my roommate would find me lying on the floor, crying multiple times a week. It was the worst I had ever felt about myself in my life. Not only was I falling apart mentally, but I felt so physically poor about myself and my body.
To attempt to fix the physical aspect, I decided to start going to the gym every single day. The background to this is that I have never been a very active person, so this was a big switch-up for me. The unhealthy aspect came from the fact that I was intensely working out, but because of aspects of my personal life, I had no appetite at all. Essentially, this meant all I could fathom eating was around one meal a day at most because I simply was not hungry. I’m sure you can see where this went. Going home in December of 2024, I had lost around 40 pounds in the span of three months or so.
When I came home for winter break, people were ecstatic at the “healthy lifestyle” I was living. My friends and family were so proud of me for how good I looked and the weight I had lost. I was able to keep my sickness to myself enough not to let the people in my life down. But I had let myself down because I knew the truth of how I became this way.
In reality, this was weight loss I had not caused in a good way. It was incredibly unhealthy, but I genuinely had no appetite. Around this time, I started to get out of my depressive slump. I met my boyfriend at the time, and started to spend a lot more time with my friends. Because of this, naturally, my weight plateaued; I was no longer rapidly losing weight.
Looking back now, this was exactly what was needed to happen, but in my mind, it was not enough. My sick mind convinced me that I needed to go to the extreme to maintain this weight loss or to even lose more weight if possible.
This led me to decide that my maintenance calories were around 1200 or so. Which, again, thinking about it now, is actually around 700 less than they actually are. To do this, I would keep a running total of calories in my phone for the day to make sure I was not going over that. Because in my mind, I placed a moral value on the calories I was eating. That I was unworthy if I went over this amount. This is where my anorexia came from. I was starving myself, and I just convinced myself this was what I had to do to maintain my weight loss.
On top of this, I was doing immense hours of cardio. I would wake up at 6 am to go to the gym to complete an hour on the stairmster first thing in the morning. I had learned to abuse physical activity. My friends and my boyfriend at the time were aware of my struggle; I was blind to it.
In my mind, I needed to go to restaurants and only eat grilled chicken and a side of vegetables. It was normal not to eat an entire protein bar because the calories in it were too high. In reality, nothing I was feeling was considered normal.
One day, I was looking back at pictures from May of that semester at a glance. I realized my hair had thinned out significantly. I eventually learned that this was a side effect of not getting enough proper nutrients; your body sheds your hair to preserve energy. I could finally see the negative effects my eating disorder was having on my life right in front of me.
As summer came, nothing changed. I was still refusing to eat ice cream on hot days because it was “too many calories”. I would only go to restaurants that had a selection of salads on the menu for me to eat. I had become the person I never wanted to be. I remember staying at my boyfriend at the times house over the summer. I remember having to log every single thing I ate and weigh out my food on a scale, to make sure I would not overeat, so the scale would not spike when I weighed myself at home later.
My best friend at school invited me to go on vacation with her family at their camp in Canada. Throughout the five days or so that I was there, I ate exactly what I wanted. There was no moral value in food. I was surrounded by people whose company I immensely enjoyed. And what I ate had absolutely no effect on what they thought of me. For the first time in over a year, I ate pasta. I would have never thought that moment would come.
I realized that the mindset I had was incorrect. None of my value as a person depended on what I ate or how much I worked out. It mattered on the type of person I was at the end of the day. This was the moment I decided I would choose recovery, and for that, I will forever be grateful for that place and those people.
When I came home, I started to branch out more with food. I ate french fries and ice cream, and I did not feel a need to do insane amounts of cardio to make up for it. I continued to work out, but not as punishment, simply as a way to improve my overall health. I started to actually lift weights because I did not feel a need to be the skinniest human being possible. I wanted to be strong.
It has been around 7 months since I chose to recover from my eating disorder. It has genuinely been one of the hardest journeys of my life. But one of the most important, if not the most important, things I have ever done. Losing my hair and experiencing brain fog is not worth it to be the smallest possible version of myself.
Because of my recovery, I have been able to enjoy the special moments in my life, like my friend’s birthday or the holidays with my family. I no longer have to spend my time worrying about the caloric value of food in these moments, instead of being fully present.
There are some days when I do still struggle with my disorder. I have negative thoughts about what I see in the mirror once in a while. Or I will weigh myself and sometimes struggle with the number going up. I have had to understand that my happiness is not determined by a number or how I feel about different parts of my body for the day.
Learning that I could not live the life I wanted on an empty stomach was exactly what I needed to happen to me.