Editor’s note: the contributor of this piece has requested to remain anonymous. We respect her wishes and thank her for sharing her story.
It all started when I was in the sixth grade. I was going through some issues at home and I was under a lot of stress. My life suddenly wasn’t as low-key as I would’ve liked. People started to know who I was. With the attention came a lot of bullying from classmates regarding everything from my name to my weight, and that became the tipping point. At just eleven years old, I became the epitome of sadness, a feeling that had been so foreign to me before. I felt like my life destiny was out of my hands, but at the same time, I had this skewed misconception that my body was the only thing I could control.
I didn’t go in with the intention of developing an eating disorder. In fact, I learned all about the dangers of eating disorders in my health classes. Yet, I still found myself wanting to eat less. My sporadic eating habits started in sixth grade, but lasted for years. There were days when I realized I hadn’t eaten anything at all, and despite my awareness, I couldn’t eat that spoonful of soup. I just wasn’t hungry.
Then, there were times when I knowingly starved myself. I occasionally binged, too. I ate and ate until I felt guilty. I even convinced myself that I could feel my thighs getting larger by the second. I felt absolutely disgusted with myself, and started the vicious cycle all over again.
I reached an all-time low the summer before my junior year in high school. It was a long and rather lonely summer. I didn’t want to spend time with my friends. Instead, I stayed in my room doing some research on how to get the perfect body. At first, it was harmless. I was just trying to be healthier: eating less junk food, eating more fruits and vegetables, and exercising more.
Then, it became an obsession (shocker, right?). I started developing even stranger diet regimes, like chugging two pints of ice cold water on the spot daily. Apparently the cold temperature makes your body work more and thus burn more calories. I also started spending over two hours at the gym every night to compensate for each and every single calorie I had consumed that day. The worst part of it all was that I lied to my parents. I told them I had already eaten that day when I actually hadn’t. I lied so they wouldn’t force me to eat dinner with them. Of course, parents know best, and eventually mine started to notice my excessive weight loss. They tried to make me eat at home, but that just resulted in me taking my plate to my room and flushing the food down the toilet when no one was paying attention.
Two months into living this horrendously unhealthy lifestyle, school started again and added another layer of stress to my life. After one week, I fell ill with what was initially a cold, but quickly turned into strep throat. I ultimately landed in the hospital. After I woke up one morning totally incapable of speaking a sentence without running out of breath and shaking uncontrollably, I learned I had pneumonia.
I was so sick that I had to miss a whole month of school. When I went back, my friends commented on how the jeans I had been wearing were practically falling off my waist. If they had said that to me two months before, I would have been sickly ecstatic to receive such a comment, yet at that moment, after everything I had gone through, it just made me regret my new lifestyle.
If I hadn’t neglected my nutritional needs, I wouldn’t have had such a weak immune system and I wouldn’t have needed to make three trips to the ER in two nights. If I hadn’t followed such a bad eating regime, I wouldn’t have to expect bronchitis or pneumonia at least once a year now.
It’s unfortunate that it required me to hit such a low point before learning my lesson, but now I know. I know that when I absent-mindedly eat a whole bag of Doritos in one sitting, it is not the end of the world and my thighs are NOT expanding in size by the second. I know that it’s better to forgive than to put my precious body through hell and back.
I learned that my body is a temple. I need to cherish it, not punish it, because I will be stuck with this body for the rest of my life. I understand that what I do to my body right now may not have immediate consequences, but they will eventually catch up to me whether I like it or not. I just hope that getting pneumonia once a year is enough of a punishment. I just hope that nothing worse is coming my way, and that my body will forgive me.
Today, I absolutely adore every inch of my body. Sure, there are some days when I don’t feel too great, and sure, there may be times when I feel tempted to fall back into my old habits. That’s when I will remind myself of what I’ve gone through, and that it’s not worth it.
My body is precious, and from now on I promise to love and nurture it in the ways it deserves.