Realize your Real Eyes

How It Starts

For everyone with an eating disorder, it begins differently. My anorexia was genetic.

I'm five feet tall and two inches. My natural body weight is 98 pounds, making my BMI 17.9, which is already underweight. That should not make me feel like I have to lose any weight to be thin.

My mother has always been concerned about her weight. She was teased for being overweight at school, and that has haunted her ever since. A coping skill for her was eating. She told me she would go home and eat her feelings away. She said this was her was of isolating herself, until the taunting got worse. She started throwing up after she would binge. Her eating disorder was not severe. She did not purge everything she ate nor did she spend time counting and memorizing calories. This form of bulimia only lasted a few months, then she was over it. For her, it began when she was fourteen. My anorexia started when I was thirteen. I am almost fifteen today.

I read the book Wintergirls. That was my trigger. It's funny how something so small can have such a huge impact on your life. The book was amazing, and to this day it is still my favorite. But, it wasn't the book that "made me anorexic", it was my genetics. Because of my mother, I'd gotten the mental illness passed down to myself. Small things had been leading up for my anorexia to launch, and this book just happened to be the last bullet in the gun. It fired and shot the target.

Since I was young, I can remember reading nutrition labels to check grams of fat and serving sizes. I would feel guilty if I had over one serving, or if what's I ate had over four grams of fat. I never intentionally made myself vomit, but if I ever got the stomach flu, I'd feel lucky because I would get to eat loads and it would all come out in a matter of time. All this was just building up.

I wish I had told myself earlier that I was beautiful and that I didn't have to worry about my weight. I wish I had told myself that I was perfect just how I was. Sadly, we can't change what's already happened. But, we can change where we go from the past.