I've been complicated when it comes to eating ever since I can remember myself. As a child, before the second grade, I was pretty fit and slim, I used to dance and do group sports, and was genuinely happy. But everything changed when I went to the second grade.. We had this after-school child care facility my mum sent me to, that had a huge playground and lost of fun stuff for kids. As a child growing up, I never had any sweets or fatty foods at home, my mum has always been trying to eat healthy, and we only had sweets on occasions. The after-school child care facility fed the kids the exact foods I was never allowed to have. My first memory of eating a chocolate sandwich happened there, as well as jelly beans, white-flour pita bread and pasta, and many other foods I never knew existed because my mum forbidden them in our house. I specifically remember liking the chocolate sandwich so much, I ate and ate and ate more and more of it every day for a whole year, and any other sweet\salty food I could lay my hands on, and by the end of that year- you guessed it- I turned from a slim happy 7 year old, to a fat unhappy, confused 8 year old. My puberty started pretty much a year later, of course I developed a lot faster than anyone in my class or perhaps even the entire school (or at least that's what it felt like at that moment). I got my first period in elementary school, when I was just 10 years old. With puberty happening faster and faster, and because I was then a chubby girl, my breasts developed really quickly, and as in almost every school, or actually pretty much everywhere on this fucked-up planet, if you're different than the rest, you'll get laughed at and made fun of. And that's when my what seemed to be a never-ending nightmare of school life began, as the fat kid in the class with a round butt and a pair of boobs too big for her age.
I'm just gonna try and go over everything quickly because if I really start bringing up memories and emotions, this will never end. But ever since that year in the second grade, my life changed drastically and everything began to revolve around food. I remember standing in the shower for hours, in front of the mirror, looking and examining every part of my body (a habit I still have and will probably take with me to the grave), taking a bath, praying for some God out there, asking him to make me skinny, my only wish every birthday and every falling star I see, just make me thin. I remember sitting there, in the shower, saying to myself "tomorrow I'm going on a diet!" every god damn day, forgetting all about it the next day once I got served something I like eating, feeling like a pig every single time "tomorrow I'm starting my diet!" for years tomorrow never came, because as time passed I developed a deep emotional connection to food. Like Marya Hornbacher said in her book Wasted, "'Hungry' was a substitute for 'lonely'. And not hungry was a substitute for 'scared'". I couldn't phrase this better myself. This explains exactly my twisted relationship with food. You see, I had pretty happy childhood, my parents were pretty much always in peace with each other (although I remember a few harsh fights), and I've always been the troublesome one. Food became a substitute to everything. "I'm hungry" was a desperate search for attention from my parents, baking a cake with my mum, going to McDonald's with my dad, eating ice cream together, going shopping with me sitting inside the shopping cart, going to a restaurant on birthdays, Christmas feasts we had at home, cooking class at school in the 3rd grade, munching on peanuts and popcorn watching a movie, eating cotton candy at festivals, all because I was so desperate for my parent's attention. Only now, sitting here writing it all down, I realize maybe this whole search for my parent's love and attention, began because my sister was born and they had to take care of someone else but me. Maybe I was so desperate to spend time with them, that only by saying I was hungry I could actually make them listen?
As my eating continued, and my body was developing and expanding, I became lazy, and then every time I had something to do, like homework or chores, I would tell my mum I was hungry even though I was already stuffed just so I could get away with it for a little longer...
As I said before, my mum has always been trying to eat healthy and look good, up until this very day, and when my weight began to really get out of control, she started giving me all those comments about what I should and shouldn't be eating, how I don't wanna be fat when I'm older, how I need to be moving around more, she sent me to a dance class in which I was obviously the biggest girl, and I always felt like a little hippo trying to be graceful near all those Does in tights. At concerts I've always been put in the back line, with all the other girls who couldn't dance, and practicing at home I was pretty good at dancing, but in classes I could never let the fear of people seeing my fat jiggle go. So I quit dancing, continued eating and got even fatter. My mum sent me to a nutritionist, which was the highlight of my humiliation, since one of the girls (skinny) in my class saw me walking out of there and was kind enough to tell the entire school. My nightmare just turned into a complete and total catastrophe. She sent me to a Tennis lessons, which I took for a couple of years but still was the fattest kid there and too slow for my team, so I also quit.
I remember they weighed me at the HMO and at 11 years old I was 15 pounds heavier than my mum. I cracked. I felt horrible for being so fat so I ate, and felt worse and kept on eating, went on a diet and broke it after a day or two, hated myself for it and ate more. I used to cut my wrists and do all sorts of self-harm acts because I hated myself so much. By the age of 12 I was listening to metal and heavy rock music, dressed all in black, quiet, distanced, secretly binging on everything I could lay my hands on, especially at night, then hitting and cutting myself for doing that, I had only one good friend whom I met that year and has managed to keep me sane for a while, and yet I hated myself, this world, and everything existing on it a deep and dead serious hatred.
I met a guy over the internet when I turned 13, and we had an online relationship for 4 years. At first, he didn't know what I looked like, then I sent him a picture of me with my camera set to that specific angle that will make me look as normal (and not overweight) as I possibly could. It was a cute and strange love story over the internet, until I introduced him to my good friend (who was blonde and thin and had blue eyes and was-and still is- way more beautiful than me), and she showed him a full-body picture of us, unintentionally. I was 14 or 15, and he then realized I was actually way bigger than he thought I was. I remember him getting mad at me, saying I wasn't honest about myself, that he thought I looked different (never saying the obvious truth- "cuz you're fat!") and we had that huge fight. Of course I got crazy mad with my girlfriend, who never thought she was doing something wrong. At that time, I felt like the ugliest, loneliest being on this planet. I decided to stop eating. I remember drinking one huge cup of coffee after the other, trying to suppress my hunger, and after 2-3 days of running on nothing but coffee with cream, I got terribly sick and was grounded to bed for a few days. I had some virus in my stomach, and had to puke every 5-10 minutes, until the point I couldn't eat or drink anything because it'd automatically come back up. I lost about 15 pounds that week alone, and I was so happy with the results, I decided I don't really need food. Food was the the cause of all my problems, and I didn't want to get anywhere near it. My mum never knew, she was cooking for me and I'd run to my room saying I had homework and throw it out of the window, and when there was already too much food on the grass below my window, I'd hide meals in my closet, under my bed, in my shoes, anywhere really. I remember my "fasting record" being 120 hours without any food, and then something just cracked. My body was starving and I started binging like crazy, on everything and anything, and I got to the wonderful, most self-destructive realization so far, that if you can get food in, you could also get it out! "Just look at how much you've lost in those days when you were sick and puking your guts out! That's your escape ticket from this vicious cycle!" But of course, it started a whole new cycle, that never ended until this day, of binging and purging. I started going on all those pro-ana-mia websites, looking at deadly thin women, wanting to be like them, entering a limbo of fasting for a while, then binging and purging, fasting, and again eating everything and purging it out.. and so on..
Since I tend to get very extreme with everything I do, I started doing that everyday, even when having a small healthy meal. I lost a lot of weight and my long-distance boyfriend liked that a lot, I felt more confident and had no reason to stop, until one day my little sister caught me purging. She immediately told me mum, and at first she didn't talk to me about it, testing my behavior. Until one day she barged into the bathroom while I was in the middle of a purge, and took me to see a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, and a social worker (?!) [also partly because I started drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, and she got worried]. I of course, got mad, started hating myself and this world even more, started hating my mum and my sister and everything about my life. I was being watched every day, and my friends (made a few more as time passed-all thin) got worried too, so I started purging at parks and anywhere no one could see me.
I don't remember what happened, but at some point my ed just.. stopped for a while. It might be because I started drinking A LOT and smoking a packet of cigarettes a day, and doing drugs... But my obsession with food never suppressed, even though I was already eating pretty normally. From that time, everything's just a big blur, I had episodes of bulimia and anorexia occasionally, and went from that to eating normally and back to my eating disorder. When I was 19 I left home and got an apartment of my own, and finally had the opportunity to tear myself apart with no one there to watch or care. I had some hard bulimic episodes and long days where I didn't eat anything, but again, also normal eating episodes. I even had a month or two where I got to amazing realizations about life, and that only by eating clean and exercising I can actually achieve my weight goals- the healthy way. And I was eating good clean, healthy foods, exercising a few times a week, until my knee started hurting for some reason, maybe because I was doing squats and lunges wrong for a long time until I learned how to do them right, maybe because I was lacking a lot of important nutrients, or I don't know.. But I stopped exercising, felt like my body was giving up on me, and started binging and purging all over again. And as for this day, I'm somewhere in between... The last few of weeks were a bulimia party, and in the last couple of days I went on approximately 700 calories, give or take.
I can go on and on and on for days without stopping, there is so much I'm finally starting to remember, it's my first time actually writing everything down, from the very start. This post took me a few hours and I'd really like to sum it up now, I just know this has really helped me to get a bigger view on my life and I'm not going to stop here. This time, I'm gonna do it right.
Till the next time,
Edith.
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