By the time I was 13, I had actively thought about taking part in eating disordered behaviors. I thought about restricting and over exercising. I thought about being anorexic. But I did not actually do it. I hit puberty pretty early—definitely much earlier than my peers—and that fact made me feel somewhat insecure about my body.
Trigger warning: Descriptions of eating disordered behavior.
Yet, at 13, I managed to push off the onset of my eating disorder, but only for a couple of years. Around the age of 15 I began restricting a little bit, then a little bit more, then a lot bit more.
Within a year I started behaviors, then started therapy to reduce the behaviors, continued to do the behaviors, and then was put into a rehabilitation facility. Six months was all the time it took for me to go from healthy to drastically unhealthy. Eating disorders hit hard and recovery needs to hit even harder—for me, early intervention helped with fighting back.
When you have an eating disorder, you often have a routine of what you eat, how you eat and when you eat. You start to form habits. For me, restricting my intake, even if it no longer reduced my weight, made me feel like I was in control. Soon, restricting felt like it was second nature, or a habit—one that I thought would be insane to break because it “gave” me so much control, so much power.
Once I was put into rehab and had to give up control, I was forced to break these deadly habits. We all know that habits of any kind are hard to break because you often don’t even think about them when you engage. The longer you take part in a habit the harder it seems to be to break. For me, this felt similar to my recovery story. I had been engaging my in ED behaviors for several months before I was entered into rehab and had to stop them. Had I been engaging for years then I think it would have been even more shocking to try and let them go—perhaps I would not have let them go at all…
To continue reading this story from our partner, Proud2BMe, click here.
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