What it’s Like to Have an Eating Disorder

An eating disorder is not something that someone decides they will get. Many times I have heard young girls talking about how they want to catch anorexia (just for a few weeks) or how they wish they could turn bulimia on and off as needed. Eating disorders are complicated mental health issues. Many believe that one is genetically prone to have an eating disorder, that it is like alcoholism or drug addiction in that many factors need to be in place for the disease to take hold.

The truth is you can’t just wish to have anorexia, bulimia or even binge eating disorder for a little while while you gain or lose the weight you want. When someone has an eating disorder they think they are in control but they aren’t. The disease is in control.

An average day for someone with an eating disorder is a roller coaster of emotion, self hatred and trying in vain to reclaim control.

You wake up each morning vowing to eat like a normal person. You promise yourself that you won’t overeat and your won’t purge even if the urge to is strong. Because you fear food – because it makes you feel good and bad at the same time and you just know that isn’t normal – you skip breakfast. You weren’t hungry anyway.

At school an eating disorder is easy to hide. In fact, for the most part you don’t have to hide it because so many girls, and even some boys, have one. Still, no one talks about it, not even the gym teacher who must have some idea since most of the girls purge in the locker room bathrooms.

Because you’re busy going from class to class it’s easy to ignore your rumbling stomach and slight light headedness from not eating. All you have to do is wait until lunch and you can eat a small salad with your girlfriends. You just hope they aren’t serving something like ice cream or pizza because those are difficult to pass up. Luckily they’re both easy to vomit back out. While at the lunch table with your friends you wonder how the other girls don’t obsess over their food. Some of them seem to actually be enjoying the social aspect to eating a meal with other people. They don’t seem the least distracted by calorie count or how much exercise they will have to do if they eat their meal and can’t purge it right away.

You eat your salad and try to make it last. You are starving but drink a diet soda in the hopes it will fill quench your hunger along with the salad. You pick the croutons off the salad.

After lunch you take the long way to your next class so you can get a few extra steps on your Fitbit. You shoot for an extra 5000 steps each day but when you can’t get them all in you feel like a huge loser. You’re also sure your pants feel tighter because you didn’t do all your steps.

You make it through the school day without purging. You’re hungry but you feel pride in that you were able to resist over eating and remained in control of your calorie in take all day. You feel so good you reward yourself with a cookie your mom baked especially for you and left in the kitchen for you when you got home. Mom is worried, you can see it when she looks at you. She isn’t sure why you’re nervous and anxious all the time but she’s glad you’ve lost that bit of baby fat she was getting worried about. She hasn’t noticed the discoloration on your teeth yet but you’re sure the orthodontist will and that he might say something to your parents. You make a mental not to pick up some teeth whitener.

You grad the cookies from the kitchen table and vow to only have one, they smell so good and mom made them just for you so how can you pass them by. Besides, you hardly ate anything all day.

You eat the cookie and it is wonderful. The chocolate chips melt in your mouth and the texture of the sugar dances on your tongue. The vanilla smells so good your eyes tear up. Before you know it you’ve shoved all of the cookies into your mouth and swallowed. You hadn’t planned on swallowing, you were going to spit them all out but the whole experience of eating the cookie was what you really wanted. To feel the food in your stomach, to feel satisfied. Even if only for a few minutes. You grad a huge glass of milk and slam it down because you need something to bring the cookies back up. You wait a few minutes, but not too many, before you head to the bathroom and stick two fingers down your throat bringing up all the cookies and even a little leftover salad from lunch.

After cleaning up the toilet and washing up you notice the red marks on the top of your knuckles from scraping them against your teeth – another telltale sign of bulimia. You’ve become an ace at cleaning the bathroom.

Even though you feel crappy for vomiting your stomach feels empty again and that feels wonderful. You go to your room to work on homework but you can’t focus and instead nod off to sleep for a little while. You’re always tired it seems.

Your phone rings and your best friends wants you to go out. It’s Friday and there are a couple of parties going on. You pass, say you don’t feel very well, it’s true but that’s not why you don’t want to go. You know there will be drinking and the last thing you want to do is drink alcohol on an empty stomach. You don’t want to get drunk (especially on empty calories) because you know you won’t be able to resist the pizza or chips that will be at the party. Besides, you have some homework to do.

You lie in bed hating yourself for puking up your guts and for missing out on the fun that most other kids seem to do effortlessly. They don’t seem to care that much about the way they look, the extra ten pounds they are carrying or how much they eat. You wish you could live life that way but can’t even imagine what you would do if you weren’t trying to control your eating disorder. For a brief moment you think about telling your mom but you know she’ll either make a huge deal out of it and you don’t want her to think you are weak.

As you drift off to sleep you promise that tomorrow you will do better and will eat healthy.