Wrapping up the guest blogger’s of the week is Becca (known as @fit_fueled_feisty on Instagram). Today’s theme is dieting– “I had no idea that my quest for health was making me sick”– which happens to go hand-in-hand with Becca’s story. 

A word of caution to reader’s: there is a heavy discussion of disordered behaviors as well as specifics on medical conditions faced. If you are dealing with an eating disorder of your own and are easily triggered, please take this into consideration before reading. 

All of that being said, this piece blew me away. It is very well-written and I am sharing it despite the possibly triggering content because I believe it has a lot of value in the realm of exposing the reality and educating people on what eating disorders are really like without glamorizing them. 

I never really know how to start telling my story. I sure know how to describe the darkest moments, and then skip over the nitty gritty of recovery, putting sparkles and sunshine around my current situation… But it’s difficult to really pinpoint the exact moment that an eating disorder begins. It’s like someone asking you to describe the exact moment you realized that purple was your favorite color, or when you discovered that your closet contains mostly flowered tops and cardigans. You don’t really have an answer, and it’s odd to look back on your life through such a specific lens to try and come up with the answer.

I mean, in therapy I’ve looked back and found all of the risk factors that I identified with, and identified the significant moments that placed me in danger, yet the progression is quite difficult to describe without literally telling my life story. I guess I’ll just jump right in, head first, to the most important and defining moments and time periods of my path thus far. Nitty gritty and all. I’m not going to sugar coat it, and I’m not going to skip over the hell that is coming to a recovered state. I don’t think that that paints a fair picture, especially because many people gloss over it by saying ‘it was the hardest thing I ever had to do’. Well… without further ado, here it is: my story.

It doesn’t start out as an obsession at first. At least it didn’t for me.  I grew up in a home that talked about diets, calories, fat grams, good and bad foods, avoiding carbs, exercising, losing weight, you name it. Dinner-time conversation revolved around who should be eating which foods and why, and that made meals stressful and awkward. However, as I said, I grew up with that situation, believing it was normal and alright. From a young age I associated foods with labels of good and bad, thought everyone always wanted to lose weight, and that gaining weight was a sign of failure. At four years old, I started martial arts training and dance classes. These, too, influenced me. I absolutely hated martial arts, and the dojo was a toxic, abusive environment. The stress and demands of perfection, as well as the yelling, physical and mental abuse, caused me to be a rule-follower to a T, and a dangerously anxious young child. Dancing, on the other hand, became my fun time and my escape. I looked forward to going to the studio every day, though I never really took it seriously until high school. All-in-all, though, I look back and remember my childhood fondly. I was a lanky, stick thin little girl who loved ice cream (even though it gave my lactose-intolerant stomach pains), having a good laugh, and playing dress-up. I didn’t give a hoot about my body or the foods I ate, I just wanted to play Barbies and snuggle my kitten. Like I said, I can’t really pinpoint exactly when it all changed, but I can say that middle school was tough.

I can remember thinking that I was fat as soon as third grade, but puberty hit me like a semi. In fifth grade, I began to change before almost all of my friends. Because my friends were horribly catty, nasty adolescent girls, they began to make comments. It was in fifth grade that I began to compulsively exercise. I did X crunches every night in hopes that I would lose the ‘rolls’ my friends told me I had developed. [It’s important to note that looking back on photos, I had never been overweight or unhealthy. Body dysmorphia is a psychological disorder that makes the sufferer see themselves differently than reality, usually larger or less attractive. When I say in my story that I looked fat or looked huge, to me that was reality. However, when I see old pictures I can compare and realize that it was my mind. I still suffer greatly from body dysmorphia.] As middle school went on, I fell deeper and deeper into a depression that I had been developing for years. The pressures from going to marital arts four times a week, dancing multiple times a week, striving for perfection in school, and hating myself and my friends led me to be a very fragile young girl. I was insecure, wanting to please, and hiding all of my feelings from everyone. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had problems, because I didn’t want to be needy. Because of that, I suffered in silence until the summer before my freshman year of high school. That summer, I lost all of my ‘friends’ and gained two new ones. They tried to help me through my depression and relieve me of my anxiety that never turned off, but they really couldn’t. That summer, I also started therapy. I went to therapy once a week for that summer and almost the entirety of my freshman year of high school. That was an extremely dark time for me, and I was suicidal for almost my entire first year of high school. Not many people knew this, however, because I was (and still am) a professional at hiding my feelings. I can act normal and natural when on the inside I’m falling apart.

After I finally got my black belt, I was allowed to quit martial arts. I feel as if this was really when I started to have disordered food habits. I had been experiencing disordered body thoughts since third grade, as I mentioned, and disordered food thoughts since I could remember. It was when I stopped martial arts, though, that I began to act on them. I had read in magazines like Girl’s Life, BOP, Seventeen, what have you, that when you stop doing as much exercise as you had at certain points, you need to eat less or else you’ll balloon up. ‘Knowing’ that gaining weight was ‘the worst thing that could ever happen to you’, I wanted to avoid that at all costs. I already felt larger than all my friends, being the tallest, and was surrounded by a culture that valued thinness. I began to restrict my calories. I downloaded MyFitnessPal (MFP), and set myself to X calories a day. I figured, if I’m going to be counting, I might as well have a weight loss goal, right? I was unhappy with my appearance and wanted to see if I could do something about it. I remember close to nothing from the summer after my freshman year. I can remember compulsively exercising still, running for hours on our basement treadmill, doing at home workouts, and counting calories. I don’t remember a single life event that didn’t involve food.

That innocent little diet sent me into a tailspin, because I have all of the genetic and biological risk factors for anorexia nervosa. I’ll spare you all of the details as to how the disorder is triggered, but essentially the brains of people at risk for anorexia function differently than those of ‘normal’ people. There is a gene that becomes turned on when the body reaches a certain low weight that changes how the brain responds to hunger. A normal brain sees hunger as a stress and tells you to find food. The opposite is true in an ‘activated’ anorexic brain: hunger releases the ‘feel good’ hormones, and food causes extreme anxiety. This is why people with eating disorders can get to the point that they are unable to feed themselves. In a nutshell, I began to restrict my calories lower and lower. I began to lose weight, and I began to be complimented. So I wanted more. As a perfectionist, this new way of achieving was so fulfilling. I shrank and I shrank, and I lost a lot of my hair. I starved and I starved, and I lost my period. I restricted my calories lower and lower, and I lost all of my friends. I counted and counted, and I lost my happiness. I couldn’t focus in school, my mom was worried sick, I was moody all the time, I hated everything and everyone, and all I wanted to do was get skinnier or just die in my sleep.

It was when I told my mom that I hadn’t had my period for six or so months that I began to wonder if I had a problem. My mom would come to me often, asking me to eat something, but I would either flat out refuse or eat a few bites and give the rest to my dog. I remember drinking cup after cup of green tea, trying to convince my family that I wasn’t hungry, wasn’t feeling well, or had already had ‘a huge snack earlier, you just didn’t see, I swear’… At that point, I had stopped counting calories. Any number would have been too high. Instead, I obsessively weighed myself. The lowest number I remember seeing was X. I’m 5’10”. And yet I still looked in the mirror and saw fat. Fat everywhere. Weakness, for needing food. Pathetic, for not being able to reach below X pounds.

The turning point here was during a dance photoshoot. As I stood up from a floor shot, I blacked out and felt extremely nauseous. I immediately sat back down and stared at the floor with stars in my vision. My dance teacher rushed over with a bottle of orange Gatorade, and asked me to drink it.

I panicked.

My brain said, “No. Do you know how much sugar is in that? She’s just trying to make you fat. She wants you to look fat in the recital. Don’t you dare drink that.” My dance teacher insisted that I take a sip, though, and as she called my mom, I sat alone in the bathroom stall and bawled. That was when my mom took control. She drove to the studio and we talked, but I denied everything. I didn’t have a problem. I wasn’t X pounds. I still ate food, she saw me. I couldn’t have an eating disorder.

Well, I did. And I began to see the best eating disorder specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Ellen Rome… And I hated every moment of it. I refused to get treatment, assuring everyone that I could solve it all on my own. I began to re-count calories in order to ensure that I was getting enough. Enough, though, is a very difficult term to describe to someone who just wants to restrict and waste away. The summer after my sophomore year was literal hell. Again, all I remember is doing anything and everything in my power to avoid food. If someone invited me over, I would decline because I was afraid there would be food. At that point, I had only told my family and my best friend about my problems. I was so ashamed, and didn’t think that I was really ‘sick enough’ to have a problem. I was still in denial, and because of that, didn’t reach a state of recovery. I told everyone I had, though. I ate enough to get my period back, and continued to go to the doctors that I felt were against me and wanted to make me fat, only to find myself even more miserable than before, and back up to my healthy weight. I was still dancing, still compulsively exercising, still counting my calories, and still living in the prison I called my own body.

My junior year of high school is kind of a blur. I remember still obsessing about food and my body, avoiding social situations that involved food, and going through the motions of day-to-day life. The only thing that brought me joy was dancing, which I continued to do three days a week with multiple classes each day. I hated staring at my body in the mirror, and knew that if I started restricting hard-core again, my family would notice. I knew logically that I couldn’t stop eating again to lose weight, even though that’s what my mind told me was the answer to my insecurities. I had learned from my previous experience that quickly slashing calories would ruin my body, so I decided to just start eating healthier. I remember becoming interested in ‘clean eating’ after scrolling through some Instagram accounts, and began following a whole foods diet. These people preached that if you ate the correct foods, you wouldn’t have to count calories. The idea was based on calorie quality over calorie quantity, and I wanted desperately more than anything to be able to stop counting calories and finally give up the food anxiety that had been following me for years. So, I started my ‘journey to healthy’. Oh, boy… but it turned into anything but healthy.

It started innocently enough at first. I would just choose an option that was more whole, organic, less ingredients, blah blah. That is fine. That is healthy. Many people have begun to read labels and choose better options, especially after learning more about the additives in packaged foods and the names that chemicals can hide behind. For someone with restrictive eating patterns combined with perfectionism, however, it is a very slippery slope. First I made a simple swap of say, regular yogurt after school to Greek. Then I learned that the flavored Greek yogurt has added sugars as well as fruit, and switched to plain. That’s a fine swap, great. But it didn’t stop there. I would add my own fruit for a while, maybe a banana. Then it became half of a banana. Then a third, and then one slice. Ultimately, I would eliminate the banana altogether. More and more foods piled onto the ‘unsafe’ or ‘unhealthy’ or ‘unnecessary’ list. By January of my senior year, I had slashed out all sources of carbs aside from non-starchy vegetables. I would eat broccoli, squash, egg whites, chicken, green yogurt, Quest bars, turkey… And that was essentially what my diet consisted of. Not only did I eliminate complete food groups, but unintentionally began to slash my calories due to cutting out anything that was deemed ‘unnecessary’. I wasn’t counting calories anymore, but I was counting ingredients and taking a mental log of the amount of forbidden foods I had eaten. My self-worth became wrapped up in what I had eaten, or what I had avoided. People began to compliment my will-power, ask me for advice on what to eat, and I began to feel amazing about my food choices and my control. I never felt the need to eat treats, and I would look down on others who didn’t have my super-power ability to avoid bad foods. I thought I was better than them, and I wanted to keep feeling that way. What I didn’t know was that I was, again, falling into another trap.

Orthorexia is an ‘unofficial’ eating disorder that now falls under the diagnostic category of Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. It is characterized by “an obsession with eating food that one considers healthy, and/or a condition in which the sufferer systematically avoids specific foods in the belief that they are harmful”. My family didn’t outwardly show any concern, because they watched me put away platefuls of steamed Brussels sprouts and a large chicken breast, followed by a huge night time snack of a tub of Greek yogurt and a tiny dollop of almond butter. Clearly, I was eating. But I wasn’t eating enough of the right things. And my biological hunger drives had begun to shut off, just as they did with my first bout of anorexia. As if the combination of restricting food groups and not knowing how few calories I was really eating weren’t a deadly enough combination, my senior year I also became a lot more serious about exercising in a conventional manner.

Because senior year was such a huge deal at my dance studio, and certain seniors were chosen to have solos at the summer recital, I decided that I was going to dedicate as much time as it took to becoming the best I had ever been in dancing. What resulted from that commitment was my presence in the dance studio for about twelve hours a week. That was contemporary and Zumba on Mondays, ballet, pointe and Zumba on Tuesdays, jazz, contemporary, and Zumba on Thursdays, and conditioning, partnering, and private lessons on Saturday. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday through Sunday, I also started going to the gym. I had found and become fascinated by female bikini competitors on Instagram, and began lifting weights every day. I wanted to look like them: toned, tiny, lean, and powerful. I became obsessed with checking Instagram and looking at these bodies that I envied. We had dumbbells at my house, and I had been using them for a few months. In the New Year, however, I convinced my parents to join a gym. That’s when my obsession with over-exercising, not just compulsive exercising, began. Exercise addiction became a whole new demon. If I couldn’t get my workout in, I went insane. I could ‘feel the fat accumulating’ on my body, I would tell my mom. Food became only a reward for exercising, and the calories I counted became the ones that I burned. I had to get exactly an hour done of weight training. I had to work until I saw stars. I had to do this, I had to do that. The guilt accompanied with missing a workout was so extreme, that I would ditch my family, lie to them about where I was going, or even do three hour-long workouts to make up for missing a day. I even ditched my mom on Mother’s Day because I couldn’t manage the stress of taking a rest day. That’s not one of my proudest moments.

Gradually throughout the year, my doctor began to express a concern. My heart rate was dropping, my weight was dropping, and she knew that I was restricting my food types. I brushed off her warnings because I was finally getting the body I wanted. I was starting to look like the bikini competitors I idolized. It was just like the first round: I was seeing results and I became addicted. Again, the food intake slowly dwindled to lose body fat. Exercise went from an hour to as long as I could manage until my vision literally went black and I began to fall over walking across the gym floor. My pants began to fall off of my body when I walked down the hallway at school, and my bones began to show. At that point, I knew what I was doing to myself. But I couldn’t stop. I was sucked back into my old hell, and I wanted to stay there. I finally liked how I looked. My life began to revolve completely around fitness. Again, it was all that occupied my mind. I would sit in school and think about my work-out that I would be doing later. People would talk to me and I would look past them, unable to focus without proper nourishment. This relapse into my disorder was way worse than the initial run, because I was aware of what was going on and went with it, pushing it ever further and further. I wanted to see how long I could play this weight-loss game until I lost. And by lost, I meant died. I hated my life so much, and I had become so empty, that at one point I literally looked my mother in the eye and told her I would rather die than gain weight. And yet I refused to change.

Eating disorders are so all-consuming that it’s really difficult, if not impossible to describe. Your mind just constantly races with thoughts about your body, and you’re hyper-aware of any and all physical experiences. Many professionals refer to these thoughts as the ‘mental chatter’ or the ‘voices’. Often they are named ‘ED’ (eating disorder), ‘Ana’ (anorexia), or any other variety of symbolic names to help separate the disorder from the self. At this point in my journey, the only voices in my head belonged to my eating disorder, and my own was nowhere to be heard. My parents didn’t live with Becca, they lived with and tolerated Ed and Ana.

My thoughts became consumed by the different, miniscule body sensations I experienced. My hip bones scraping against the back of my chair at school, my spine sinking into the soft cushion of my seat in the car… My knees clinking against one another, my hands ever-present between my thighs to make sure that they never, ever touched. Body checks became an ever-important ritual. If I couldn’t go to the bathroom between every class and check to make sure my chest, collar, rib, and hip bones were still visible, I became a mess. If I couldn’t get into a stall and check that my legs were still small enough that I could wrap my two index fingers and thumbs around the top of my knees, I was convinced that I had gotten fat in the past eighty minutes of sitting on my lazy butt. Even as I sat lying in bed waiting for an unrestful sleep, I would take inventory of my body. I’d bring myself blue with cold, sitting in a sport bra and tiny shorts, looking disgusted at my legs… Even in the winter, because Ana told me ‘being cold burns more calories, and, besides, you wouldn’t even really be that sad if you froze to death and didn’t wake up’. The inventory included but was not limited to pinching the skin on my stomach, looking for striations and separations in my leg muscles, pulling at my hips, flexing my arms to look for any fat to be terminated, and observing the concave curve of my pelvis. I would say that I fell asleep once the nightly body check was complete, but that would imply that my mind ever stopped racing. As I would lay there, shivering and empty, waiting for sweet sleep where I wouldn’t have to feel, my mind was filled with numbers, foods, clothes, horrid images of my own body but larger… always larger. I’d think about the day that had passed, how I had messed up. All the food I had eaten that I didn’t need. All the exercise I could have done but didn’t. All the times that I could’ve sucked it in but didn’t, giving people a chance to call me fat. And then once I’d gone over all my failures, I would move onto the next day, scheming a new perfect plan… But I knew I would never be good enough to fulfill it, and I would be back here the next night thinking about how I could’ve gotten by on less food, could’ve gone harder in ballet, should’ve worn a tighter shirt to remind myself how fat I am.

I’d think of how I would use less egg whites in my omelet, and lie about using the whole egg that day. Or how I wouldn’t use fruit in my smoothie that day, instead only frozen spinach and protein powder. But never a full scoop. Always a ‘fourth’ of a scoop, which was more like a measly half of a tablespoon. And then maybe for my mandatory morning snack, I would still bring my veggie bag and little container of mixed nuts, but only celery today… and only five cashews today, eight is too many for a whale like me. Oh, but what about lunch? Well mom will be suspicious if you don’t pack something. So bring two pieces of deli turkey tomorrow with your hard-boiled egg and some cucumbers. Yeah, that seems good enough. Just roll the turkey big so that she doesn’t see how few it is. Oh, goodie, mom works tomorrow so you don’t need to have a real after school snack. You can just have romaine lettuce and balsamic vinegar. And if your fat ass still needs more, just make extra coffee. You’ll need the energy anyway for the hour-long weights workout you’re going to be doing at the gym after school. And don’t you dare think you need a post-workout snack. The rules of carbs and protein after a workout don’t apply to you. You don’t need that food. You have a special ability, ok? You really don’t need it. Just make sure that you get home in time to make dinner before mom gets home so she won’t know that you went to the gym, especially because you have ballet, pointe, and Zumba tonight. She won’t understand that you need this exercise to live and that without it you would die. She just doesn’t understand because she’s not like you; she’s not special. But seriously, make dinner or she’ll be suspicious… But only make a veggie and something with turkey or chicken. That’s right, our favorite safe foods. Eat only a small bit of it, though, or else you’ll look fat in your leotard. And then at dance you better be the thinnest. You better get your kicks the highest. Don’t let anyone see you breathing hard, or they’ll know that you’re an out-of-shape fat-ass. And whatever you do, don’t sit out. Even when you see stars. You don’t get breaks; you don’t deserve them. It’s another one of your superpowers—to push through the point of passing out. Then after dance, then you get to have the food you actually enjoy. You get one quest bar, a small dollop of plain nonfat Greek yogurt, less than a teaspoon of almond butter, and one piece each of frozen peach, banana, berry, and pineapple. You don’t get to drizzle unsweetened almond milk on it today, though. Because you’re too fat. And don’t you dare even think about having more food after that. You’ve already had too much food today. Look at you. You’re getting chunkier, aren’t you? What a failure. You have to do better tomorrow. Less food, move more.

And on and on and on. Every. Day. Every day I had to eat less and move more. I had literally created a game with myself to see how little food I could eat and still survive. It was fun. I felt high all the time. Those who have starved themselves know exactly what feeling I’m referring to—this feeling of lightness and irresponsibility. You can’t think clearly and your vision become constantly blurry, so life is literally in slow motion and feelings are non-existent. The only thing you feel is fat. And the only things you think about are food, working out, and your body. But it doesn’t bother you, because you like to think about it. Thinking about it ensures that you keep control, ensures that you won’t let yourself slip. Food timing was even a more sensitive topic… During school, I had a strict routine based on my class timing and when I got out of school. The weekends were torturous, because there were more opportunities to slip up. If I woke up too early and had to eat breakfast with my family, there was a wider gap in my day between breakfast and lunch and I had the potential of being forced to eat a morning snack on the weekend. I would stare at the clock until exactly 1:00, the Saturday lunch time. Now, I won’t go into all of the food timing rules I had because they are tedious and irrelevant to my entire story, but the point is that I was ruled by the voices in my head, and it was a torturous cycle that reset every twenty-four hours.

The restriction cycle went on unstopped until April of my senior year. My dance teachers had been expressing concern about my weight loss when costumes came in and all of mine had to be taken in. One of my teachers began insisting that I bring a snack to class, and that I was starting to look like a sick ballerina. They made me sit out for a few minutes each class, and began to change the choreography because I was too tired to continually do the same lift and jump sequences. I ignored their concern, thinking that they were just being paranoid and I wasn’t really that bad. But April was when my doctor really went on crack-down, too. I used to just go in for monthly check-ins. At a check in, they weigh you unclothed (bladder emptied to discourage water-loading, ankles checked for weights, and body checked for weighted clothing), take your resting pulse and blood pressure, then compare it to your standing. All the while, they take your food diary, monitoring your intake. If you had the need for blood work, they then check the blood levels to ensure that you aren’t breaking down internal organs or muscle tissue. The check-in for April was different than any other, though. Instead of being smiley and chipper like normal, Dr. Rome looked grave. I wondered why she was so upset to see me, because at that point I no longer hated her and we had developed a friendship. She seemed worried and disappointed. And she gave my mom a sad look.

I don’t really remember much of what she said specifically, because my brain was so foggy and occupied by the chatter… but I do remember she said I was playing with fire and needed to come back the next week. For the past eight months she had been ragging me about getting my period back (which I had lost again), but now the problem was my heart. My resting heart rate was dangerously low. As if that weren’t enough, my bloodwork indicated that I was in a catabolic state, or rather that my body was consuming itself because I wasn’t taking in enough calories. She made me promise to eat another snack, and of course I made the promise so that I could leave. I didn’t believe her threat of hospitalization, and of course I didn’t eat the extra snack. The next week was worse. My heart rate dropped again, and I had begun experiencing some of the other more serious cardiovascular symptoms associated with severe cases of anorexia. She talked more seriously with my mom about looking into treatment centers, but I felt like it was all talk. I knew they wouldn’t actually send me away. Again, I made the empty promise to eat more and come back in a week. I believe it was the fourth week in a row of visiting twice a week for deeper monitoring that she called me on my bull. She knew that I wasn’t trying, and at that point my resting heart rate dropped to 49. At any rate less than 50 beats per minute, there is a risk that your heart will stop beating while you sleep. At any rate less than 50 beats per minute, you can go into cardiac arrest spontaneously due to the stress on the body. At any heart rate below 50 beats per minute, you are a ticking time bomb. She was legally obligated to hospitalize me. I convinced her to give me one last chance to prove myself, and she put me on exercise restriction. I wasn’t allowed to dance that week, and I wasn’t allowed to go to the gym. I couldn’t drink caffeinated beverages. I had to get my bone density checked. I had to get my blood levels re-chekced. My mom and I left the exam room to go get my bloodwork done, and I literally fell to the ground sobbing. That was the day I told my mother I would rather die than lose weight. I looked her in the eyes, and said those exact words to her. And I saw the pain she had been experiencing, watching me waste away. And I finally started to care. I didn’t know what to do with myself without exercise, but I was beginning to wonder what I was doing to myself with exercise.

Thankfully, that week was photo week at my dance studio, and I didn’t need tell anyone what was going on. I still went through the motions and really broke the exercise restriction when we ran our dances once or twice through each. I looked at the pictures taken and thought I looked so fat, there was no way that Dr. Rome seriously thought that I was sick. I was huge, not anorexic. I really didn’t have an issue, so I didn’t need to change anything.

Well, I was clearly wrong. The next time I went in to visit, Dr. Rome told me that my heart rate was 46 and I was forbidden to leave the premises.

My mind went blank and I literally froze. The voices in my head began to scream. As the news sunk in, they went from elated: ‘You’re finally sick enough!’ ‘Way to goooo!’ ‘What a validation!’ to terrified: ‘Do anything you can to get out of hospitalization, though; they’ll make you eat!’ ‘Oh no, they are going to make you stop exercising…’ After a few minutes of panic later, I started trying everything I could to convince her to let me leave. We went back and forth for about a half an hour… me making my case, her countering my weak arguments. Me making promises she knew I wouldn’t keep, my mom crying next to me in the chair.  I don’t really know how I did it, but I convinced her to let me take some other tests to see if there was any possible way that I could be released to go home instead of staying in the hospital. My mom and I left the exam room, me holding onto her arm for support because I was too weak to really walk on my own, weighed down by my thick sweater I always wore in a feeble attempt to keep my dying body warm. By some miracle, I passed the other thorough heart exams and was permitted to go home. I was on bed rest, though. I was pulled from dance indefinitely, and I wasn’t even allowed to walk to school anymore. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to walk across the stage at graduation. And I actually had to eat more.

That’s when I started going back to therapy. I met with Dr. Nicole, who told me that she was on my side. I told her how angry I was that dance had been taken away from me. I told her that Dr. Rome was against me, and wanted me to suffer. I told her that I had looked forward to my senior solo at the recital since I was four years old, and that I would honestly rather die than have that taken away from me. She asked me the tough questions, like ‘would you rather eat more and be in the recital, or not have the recital and stay where you are?’ With her encouragement, I increased my intake. My heart rate slowly came up appointment after appointment, and so did my anxiety. This is normally the point in my story when I say ‘fast forward however many months, and here I am now!’… But I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to explain precisely what that summer of hell was like for me, and I want to get it out so that people don’t think that their experiences are odd, or that they are the only ones in pain.

I eventually graduated, but the last few weeks of my senior year were horrible. I missed so much of school for appointments with Dr. Rome and Dr. Nicole, and I didn’t want to see anyone. The changes that I saw in my body from the change in intake were too much for me to handle, and I thought that I ballooned up. Prom was a good time, but now the pictures bring back terrible memories. I couldn’t handle the food guilt from the dinner at the dance itself, and I almost passed out each time I stood up at after-prom. At the time, I looked so fat, but now the photos make me cringe a little. I didn’t have the energy to truly enjoy the activities and festivities, and I’m lucky that I even had the brain power to remember the different themes for the days of our last spirit week. I went to school for a total of maybe two and a half hours a day, and skipped classes because I honestly didn’t care about life anymore. I had resigned myself to my eating disorder and wanted nothing to do with high school. The day that I graduated, I deleted so many people from my life. ‘Run away screaming’ is a nice way to describe what I wanted to do after graduation, and is kind of precisely what I did. I ignored anyone and everyone, trying to live from one day to the next.

I was permitted to dance in my recital in June, and after that, no more cardio until further notice. I convinced Dr. Rome to let me continue to lift weights, but she limited me to ten minutes a day. Even though I knew she was just looking out for me at this point, I couldn’t follow her advice and lifted for about an hour almost every day. That summer was serious, serious hard work for me. I saw Dr. Nicole every week. She is not an eating disorder specialist, but a therapist who specializes in empowering young women. I am so grateful that I had her as my partner in crime, because had I been with an eating disorder specialist I don’t think I would have had as much progress as I did. The reason for that is that an eating disorder becomes your identity, and you don’t know who you are aside from it. It’s all you are, all you think about, all you know anymore. That summer I struggled with Dr. Nicole to find myself. That summer I also struggled with Dr. Rome to prove my health was valuable.

With college down the line in a couple of months, I knew I was in dangerous territory. My mom made it clear that she was not above pulling me from school if she felt that I wasn’t prepared enough to be across the state on my own. So I decided to really try this time. I was going to deal with the hard stuff that summer, whether I loved it or hated it. Surprise, surprise, I hated it. All I wanted to do in therapy was complain that I was getting fat. All I could think about was food. Because I was supposed to be gaining weight, literally all I could do was eat food. I read so many books about eating disorders, and educated myself about my own illness. The theory is that knowing your enemy can help you beat it, and that ended up being true. A day for me that summer would have the following schedule: wake up, eat breakfast, watch YouTube videos about recovery, eat, read books, eat, go to the gym, eat, go to therapy, eat, watch TV with my mom, eat,  rant on Instagram about how much I hated life, eat, eat, eat… oh, and eat. Oh, and sleep. I took a lot of naps, as I was constantly tired. I went through extreme hunger and freaked out. Extreme hunger is actually a medical state in which your body continually tells you to feed it after it has been deprived of nutrients for an extended period of time. Your body knows that it needs to repair the damage that has been done, and it smart enough to tell you to eat so that it has the energy to do so. It happens commonly in eating disorder patients, cancer patients, and in some other cases. Both Dr. Nicole and Dr. Rome encouraged me to try and follow these hunger cues, but I felt so out of control. I couldn’t stop eating, but I ended up losing more weight initially. Eventually, the extreme hunger subsided and I felt more ‘normal’.

For me, though, normal was very hard to define. I was used to feeling empty, having muscle cramps, not having a period, and not needing to use the bathroom. TMI? Well, most people with eating disorders will tell you that they haven’t passed a stool in likely weeks, for there isn’t enough food anyway. But my intestines began to get on board, and the bloat diminished over about five or six weeks. In therapy, Dr. Nicole and I discussed who I wanted to be, and I wasn’t allowed to use any descriptors that had to do with nutrition, health and fitness, or eating disorders. The first time that she asked me how I wanted to be described or remembered, I told her fit. That was it. That was all I could think of. I wanted to be known as fit. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself in any other terms, and somehow along the line I lost all of myself. For weeks on end we discussed things that I used to love to do… and we talked a lot about my future. I still wanted to complain about how my body was starting to change, but she wouldn’t let me drag on and on about it. She told me that it was a choice that I had to make, and she would tell me to focus on the other things that were changing in my life aside from my body. At the time, I thought that a lot of the stuff she was telling me, or the tools she was equipping me with were a little hokey. I decided to trust the process, though, (at least for the summer) and did the mental exercises that she asked me to do.

I took away three main things from that summer with Dr. Nicole. The first is physical. She had me buy magazines (non-fitness related) and cut out anything that caught my eye. She wanted me to create a ‘vision board’, cutting out and putting together anything that caught my eye, and we would together analyze it to uncover my interests. Using her idea and making it my own, I made a ‘vision book’, which I still have with me today. I cut pictures of flowers, cats, coffee, movies, small quotes, little words that caught my eye, beaches… ANYthing that made me smile. I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever heard of, but it ended up helping me so much. It reminded me of some of the things that brought me joy, one of which being scrapbooking. I still look at my vision book from time to time, and Dr. Rome has a copy of it to use as an example that creativity can be a tool in recovery programs. The second main thing I took away from Dr. Nicole was that my treatment team wasn’t against me… they were, and still are, for me. They wanted to give me the tools, both physically and mentally, to fight the urges that were my go-to stress managers. Dr. Rome wanted to let me dance, but she had to make sure that I was physically capable. Dr. Nicole wanted to see me go off to college and live my dreams, but she wanted to make sure that I would be able to take care of myself while away. My mom didn’t want to make me fat by giving me food, she wanted to share love and life in one of her favorite ways. The final take-away was a new concept of life: the gray area.

As I had mentioned before, I was an extreme perfectionist. I saw things as either good or bad. There was never any ‘in between’ or ‘maybes’ in life. Everything was on an extreme end of the spectrum. We began to take my thoughts and dissect them, finding the middle ground. For example, the eating disorder voice told me that eating an apple would make me fat. Dr. Nicole told me that was an extreme thought, and made me analyze it until it no longer had an ‘all-or-nothing’ aspect. Countless, countless tormenting thoughts lost their power when I learned to utilize the gray area. I still have to remind myself to think about things flexibly, but the middle ground truly changed my view on this entire thing we call life.

You may think that we’re getting to the end of the story, my friends, but we have yet to talk about college… which I was allowed to go to, by the way. In the back of my mind, I wondered if I was truly ready to be on my own. I was barely eating enough to get past the Dr. Rome tests, and I was new at utilizing the new Dr. Nicole tools. Of course, I assured my parents that I was completely ready, but a part of me wondered if I would relapse at this new opportunity to be completely on my own. Ed and Ana sure wanted me to, and they reminded me at every chance that there would be nobody keeping a watchful eye on me. To my surprise, the exact opposite happened.

When I got to school, something was very different. Perhaps it was the new start, where nobody knew who I was and nobody knew my struggles, but my eating patterns didn’t really mirror what they had been at home. Of course, there was an adjustment period of a few weeks when I had uncontrollable anxiety about food in the dining halls and finding time to fit in workouts, but to my surprise I continued to eat. I chose safe foods, of course, and still worked out every day, but I was actually being responsible for myself and eating just enough.

By just enough, I do literally mean just enough. I was counting my calories, keeping them below the ‘appropriate’ number that I would allow. I did NOT want to gain weight. Dr. Rome had told me that my weight was ‘ok’ or ‘passable’, and I wanted to maintain the smallest body that I possibly could. I had gotten my period back with the help of a hormone test called the ‘Provera challenge’, so any concern about my weight being too low was declared invalid. I began to realize, however, that I was causing myself a lot of stress and being extremely hard on myself. I watched my new friends easily eat an Oreo, or a bag of popcorn without freaking out. They drank regular pop and were still thin. They were active and healthy, but they never worked out ‘conventionally’. In October of my first semester, I decided to stop counting calories and begin eating intuitively. I also decided that I would not exercise every day. I had been running myself into the ground, and gotten extremely sick. I was tired all of the time, and falling back into my old patterns of isolation. My eating disorder had taken away high school from me, and I wasn’t about to let it take away my college experience. The decision to stop counting calories and exercising every day was literally one of the toughest things I did. I gave up control, and my body did its thing.

I gained weight. And by gained weight, I don’t mean that I became overweight and I don’t mean that my eating disorder thinks I gained weight. I really did, and people noticed. I literally thought my world was ending, and I was so embarrassed by my body. I thought that people would be ashamed to be seen with me. I was so used to being skinny because I had been restricting for years on end. The weight gain isn’t drastic, but it’s enough that I’m uncomfortable in this more ‘womanly’ body. My shirts and sweaters all still fit me, but I’m sure that my shorts don’t. At a healthy weight, my body likes to sit around a size 8 or 10. But over the summer, my size 4 shorts were falling off of my body. Luckily, the pants that I have now are stretchy and still fit me. But I would be lying if I said that I am happy with how I look. It’s hard to accept that as I grow up, my body does, too. What I am happy with, though, is my quality of life. I’ve gained so much more than weight. I’ve gained energy, a zest for life, a passion for helping people, and so many wonderful friends. I can now go out on the weekend without worrying that I’ll pass out. I am permitted to take dance classes at my college, and can’t wait for the day that I can finally put my Zumba certification to use at the fitness center. I’ve gained a sense of self outside of my eating disorder, and I’ve built a dream for my future that doesn’t revolve solely around changing my body. My body filled out, yes, but so did my life. I actually look forward to my days now, and I make the decision every day to keep fighting.

I don’t want to paint a false sense of managing recovery, though. Is my life all sunshine and rainbows? Hell. No. I wake up every morning and dread looking at myself, not accepting the physical state that my body is happy sitting at. I pinch fat instead of just skin now, and my thighs touch. I can’t see my bones anymore, and my cheeks are round. I’m curvy, not a straight figure. And most days I wake up and miss the old body I had, with its abs and tiny, fragile limbs. It’s hard for me to look back on photos of those times, knowing that I’ll likely never look like that… But I also look back at them and remember how miserable I was. Sure, I looked great but I wanted to die. I thought that I would rather have died than gain weight, but here I sit, months later. I gained weight, and my world didn’t end.

In fact, I would say that I’m just now starting to experience life. I mean, you just read most of my life story. Did it sound like I have ever experienced life? It sure as hell all feels new. I’ve never gone so long with good friends, and I’ve never been more open to talking about my struggles. I’ve never had a relaxed approach to life, without extremes. I’m starting to uncover layers of my personality and my interests that I forgot about. I’m beginning to relax into relationships instead of worrying about messing everything up. I’m slowly but surely adding back old foods into my life… not without extreme anxiety, of course. I struggle to manage my eating now that I’m on my own, especially because I’m currently in a major involving human nutrition. However, I try to remember that healthy eating and restriction are two separate entities. My current mantra is “fight for balance”. And I really am fighting. When I say that I’m working to manage my recovery, I literally mean working. Being my own babysitter is a full-time job. I have a lot more bad habits to kick, mostly involving restricting food groups, but as of late I’ve still been compensating and definitely getting enough calories (my current body attests to that). But just because a body has physically recovered doesn’t mean there aren’t still demons to face. Each morning I have to get up, look at a body I’m unhappy with, and choose an outfit I know I’ll think I look fat in. I have to choose to eat breakfast, and wait with anticipation until I get hungry again. Will I need a snack? Will I make it to lunch? Will I choose to eat lunch today? Don’t even get me started on the days that I can’t get in my scheduled workout, for any number of reasons. The thing is, I know I can get away with skipping meals or working out too long… And sometimes I do. And it always, always ends up biting me in the butt. When I skip meals now, I get the same twisted satisfaction, yes. But I always end up at the end of the day making up the calories later on in the day because, let me tell you, I get hungry.

I think the difference is that I know better now. Not only do I know better coping mechanisms than starving my feelings away so that all I feel is empty, but I know a better way of living. I know what happens when I skip a meal: I get super hangry later on. I know what happens when I over-exercise: I put my already compromised heart in danger, I get extremely fatigued, and I often get sick. I know what happens when I listen to Ed: I miss out on living a life that Becca truly wants to live.

To me, a balanced life would be one where I no longer get high anxiety form missing a workout. I would no longer freak out if I get overly full. I wouldn’t eat too little, and I wouldn’t eat too much. I wouldn’t have to lie to people about how I am, because I would be willing to share my feelings and not be ashamed. A balanced life would mean that I would feel comfortable telling others ‘yes, I made it’… And a balanced life is what I feel myself moving towards.

The last few steps in recovery tend to be the hardest, I’ve heard. I currently have separation anxiety from my eating disorder. It may sound weird to some of you, but for years and years I listened to this voice and now I do everything in my power to ignore it. It’s a strange turn of events, and I’m having trouble coping with it at times. I could very easily return to my old ways, but I’m hoping that the urges to fall into old habits can continue to be beat by the new discoveries I’ve had in the joys of life. I hope to someday spread the messages of self-love and balance to the world. That’s what keeps me going. I do it for everyone who thinks they can’t. I do it for future generations. I do it to educate people. And some days, I can even say I do it for myself.

Because I can finally say that I know I deserve to be happy. And I deserve to treat myself with love. Ed and Ana whisper to me that they’ll always be there for me to fall back on, but the more I use my own voice, the quieter theirs become. One day, I’ll hear them and wonder ‘was that just the wind?’… for my mind will be too full with love and joy.

Thank you for reading my story.

Find more of Becca over on her Instagram.