Life with an Eating Disorder

I don't think anyone outside of the Eating Disorder community can fully comprehend the extent to which an eating disorder dominates your life. It's commonly a perceived idea that a teenage girl suffering with either Anorexia, Bulimia or any other difficulty with food is either;


a) Attention Seeking
b) Just wants to be skinny to look like Victoria Beckham


Honestly, I can't vouch for everyone else but for me it's certainly not either. I personally suffer with a body dysmorphia problem as well as an eating problem, which means for me, I don't see what everyone else see's in the mirror to such an extent that I do drastic things to change it. For me, I can't remember a time in my life in which I had a healthy relationship with food and myself. As a highly sensitive young girl, I think I just naturally sheltered myself away from others due to such a large fear of getting hurt, which led to severe trust issues. Because I've never been able to control the trust problems I have, I think that I just took that out on stopping eating and purging.


I have such a strong memory of when I think my eating disorder began. I was 6 years old, a dark-skinned little Italian looking girl in a primary school full of porcelain-colored china doll girls and realized how inadequate I felt. I guess a way to control this feeling was by not eating. Anyway, one day at dinner, I refused to eat what my mum had prepared, and was sitting on the stairs crying because I thought I was fat. My Dad, being the person that he is, came up to me (after shouting for a good half hour... typical) and showed me a magazine article of a young anorexic girl who ate one slice of toast during a week, who had recently passed away. He told me I'd end up like her if I continued the way I was going, that I was pathetic and over-sensitive and needed to toughen up.


I could never complain about my childhood, but it physically hurts me that with each memory I hold, my fear of food and lack of control dominates each and every one of them. A trip down memory lane for me is a pro-ana websites dream. I wish my childhood wasn't wasted upon these mental illnesses I suffer with, and I would do anything to be healthy, even for a day. If I could speak to the five year old me, I'd tell her she's beautiful just the way she is, and just because she looked different to the other girls, it doesn't mean it's a bad thing or that she's any less than enough then they are.