Take a deep breath… sh*t’s about to get heavy. If you’re curious about how and why anyone would be so “stupid” as to try and starve themselves, I hope that this progression through my adolescence might shed some light on how eating disorders can appear.

Names have been changed.

TLDR: My eating disorder developed through an adolescence of self-hatred. It started with a 13-year old’s obsession with becoming thin and attractive (and believing that would solve all of my problems) into a harmful and addictive vicious circle of behaviour.

 

I remember from when I was 11 or so, thinking I was too fat and, as a result, ugly. I ‘knew’ that being pretty would solve all of my problems; being pretty was the most important thing in the world. In retrospect, it seems clear that a lot of this came from my family’s attitude toward weight, as well as the more obvious societal and media pressures to be thin. My Dad’s offhand comments about attractive (and, of course, thin) women; my Mum’s comments on her own ‘fat legs’; my grandparents’ judgemental sidelong glances at overweight or obese passers-by.

I remember always thinking that I was never good enough at anything. I wasn’t as intelligent, sporty or good looking as my boffin older brother, with whom I vied for my parents’ attention. By the time I was 11 or 12, I became convinced that I was overweight and hideously ugly. I was a healthy weight, but not thin like as the girls on TV. Although I now know that getting a boyfriend is NOT the most important thing in the world, my impressionable young mind absorbed the cues that are everywhere in films, TV, and magazines, telling girls that male attention is the most important measure of one’s worth. And nobody was interested in me. 

I started quitting sports clubs and societies, and stopped trying so hard at school. It was clear to me that nobody cared how much I achieved if I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t good enough at anything anyway, so there was no point embarrassing myself trying. I clung on to singing for a few years, but gave that up eventually too. I hated going on stage because everyone could see how fat I was, and I knew they would laugh at me when something went wrong.

When I was about 12 or 13, I read a novel about a girl who threw up all her food to stay thin, and I thought, well that’s a good idea. I experimented with it, occasionally at first I think, though I’ve been doing it for so long now that I can’t really remember exactly what it was like in the beginning, the same way I can’t remember the first coffee I drank.

What I do remember was the summer when I was 14, directly before I moved to private school where my eating really became a problem. I thought I was fat, ugly, stupid, awkward and untalented, and I hated the way I looked so much that I decided I wouldn’t keep any food down for our whole two-week package holiday. I lost 4 kilos in 12 days (I’m 5’1 and weighed 60kg at that point). All my family commented on how great I looked, so I thought, simple! I’ll just keep going like this until I have the body I want. I didn’t realise that I was getting involved in harmful, addictive behaviour that would quickly lose its weight-loss effect. Or, I knew vaguely that it was “harmful”, but I still thought I would be alright. I was throwing up after mealtimes, around 3 or 4 times a day; I was very insecure about my body and hypersensitive to comments about my appearance.

When I started at the new, private girls’ school, I suddenly didn’t have any friends. Being lonely made everything worse. There was nobody asking whether I was ok, or where I went at break times.

It was around this time that my mum noticed something was going on. She’d noticed before that I’d thrown up my food after a meal, but dismissed it as being ‘silly’. Eventually I think it was only when she realised it was happening at every mealtime, and my older brother was noticing too, that she said I should see a doctor. She sat in on a session once, her usually composed face crumpled with the conviction that she had been a bad parent for not noticing anything was wrong for such a long time. I still haven’t told her that I think I was heavily influenced by the comments she made about herself; though I do now complain when she says negative things about her weight. I’ll talk to her about it at length one day.

I went to see a couple of private psychiatrists while I was on the waiting list for NHS treatment. They both suggested I started taking antidepressants to stabilise my mood. I didn’t want to do that, so I stopped seeing the doctors. I had a few sessions with NHS doctors, finally (that’s where my Mum sat in), but then I moved to China to live with my Dad, and there was no treatment at all there. He had never lived with a child before, let alone a troubled teenager, and had no idea what to do. Even less so his wife who I hadn’t spoken more than a sentence to at that point. So they just left me to it. My Dad even complimented me on how thin I looked. He said I seemed happy, so he wasn’t going to stop me.

That year, I got involved with a boy, Adam*, who quickly figured out my food problems but who had depression problems of his own that took the limelight. I became a kind of carer to him, skipping school to look after him when he said that he felt “suicidal” (I later realised that he was never actually suicidal; he used this to manipulate me into doing what he wanted). He was so wrapped up in himself that he didn’t ask about my eating after a while. He used to buy binge food for me, then play a computer game while I threw up in the bathroom.

My school didn’t do anything to help either, really. I reached out once, when I had been throwing up 10 times a day and felt out of control, but the school didn’t deal with it very well. The teacher I confided in, that I trusted, shared the information with several teachers that had no relation to me, without my permission. I overheard one teacher talking to another about me ‘throwing up ten times a day’, in a busy hallway at lunchtime. I felt so humiliated that I never spoke about it again to the school.

Adam left to go to college eventually, so my last year in Beijing was much more free. I had fun, mostly, but my eating was getting worse and worse. I would eat nothing all day, then binge once I got home at 6pm and immediately vomit up everything. The ridiculous thing was, it kind of worked. I weighed 50kg at my prom and nobody was stopping me from eating however I wanted.

After China, before I went to university, I tried to change. This was summer 2014. My mum noticed with anger that I was still throwing up at home . She suggested we try a no-sugar diet together to try and break the addictive cycle of binge eating and vomiting, and it worked for a while, but after 4 weeks at university I started bingeing again and from there my whole first year went downhill. I slept around a lot to make myself feel wanted and worthy (remember how male attention is the most important thing for girls?), but the whole time I just felt like I wasn’t good enough. Every two or three weeks I would get so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed. These ‘black moods’ as I called them would last for one or two days. I couldn’t work, couldn’t think, and talking to people was exhausting. I would turn off my phone and lock my door, and take weird routes in and out of halls to avoid seeing people. I went to a doctor who said I might have rapid-cycle depression, but there was never a follow-up appointment. The last term of first year, and my summer spent with classmates in Taiwan, were both bad periods for my bingeing. I was partying a lot, throwing up everything, and still hating the way I looked.

At the end of summer 2015, when I came home and my Mum, again, noticed that I was throwing up everything I ate, she got really angry. She said I’d been lying to her (I had, constantly) and that she thought I was getting better (I wasn’t). That was the wake-up call, and second year was the year that I really, finally started to change my behaviour, helped hugely by the entrance of a massively supportive best friend, J, onto the scene.

It’s been tough. I’ve been scared of being fat ever since I can remember, so going from 50 kilos to what I weigh now, around 58-60kg (I don’t weigh myself anymore so I don’t know exactly) has been a painful process at times, but now I think the worst is over.

Lifting weights has helped me have a better relationship with how my body looks. I care about how strong I am now, instead of (just) how I look. The emotional problems are mostly gone. I don’t hate myself anymore. But, I still have binges, and bad streaks, and I still feel utterly crap about myself sometimes. One thing I would say to anyone in recovery, is don’t expect it to be quick, linear, or easy. You have to keep trying, but you will get to a stable place, eventually. And it’s so, so worth it.