Explaining my ED (part one: the backstory & experience)

 Trigger Warning: ED Talk

People know I have an eating disorder. It hasn't exactly been kept a secret. My friends usually tend to not care or ignore it, my family thinks I'm doing it for attention, and my girlfriend doesn't always seem to understand why I can't just "eat for her". There's been people who've told me I don't look like I have an eating disorder. Because I'm either "not thin enough" or because I "eat all the time".

I have two eating disorders. I have binge-eating disorder, and I also have anorexia nervosa.

I won't go into every detail of my ED story, but I've been suffering with ED's since I was around 9 years old. My mom died and binging became a way to cope, and it became a daily occurrence when I turned 11. At 11 I moved to where I live now and me and my dad moved in with my stepmom and half-brother. At first the binges died down, it turned from 2k binges to just overeating. I ate when I wasn't hungry and always got more food at meals then I should've. My dad liked to joke about how I ate, which I honestly didn't mind, but my stepmom was always on my case.

She always made little comments about my weight and eating habits. Little, but extremely rude. Her words became ingrained in my brain. She told me my thighs shouldn't have stretch marks at my age. When I told her I wanted to join my school's junior cheerleading squad, she told me I wouldn't fit in with the other girls due to my weight. If I got seconds at dinner, she would ask me if I was actually still hungry. I eventually believed that being fat and overeating were both bad, and that my family was embarrassed by me for these things. My stepmom, I should mention, is fat herself. She's at least 300lbs, and she's 6"1. I never cared about her weight, or thought less of her for it, but she clearly seemed to think less of me for mine. I wonder now if she was just pouring her own insecurities onto me. She's still like this to this day.

Eventually it got to the point where I barely ate during the day. I would skip lunch at school, skip breakfast, barely eat any dinner. And then at night I would sneak into the kitchen, grab all the junk food I could, go back to my room, and eat it all at once, hiding the trash around my room so nobody would know. Of course, my family noticed when a whole box of ice cream sandwiches disappeared in one night, but I always played dumb, no matter how much evidence they had that I did it. Everything went on like this for a while. Even when my anorexia started, I had days where I gave up on the idea of weight loss and just binged. After the binge I'd feel horrible and throw up. Eventually the binges became less frequent, and the starvation started. I never tracked what I ate, but I can sure say it wasn't enough, as a doctor once told me if I kept eating so little, my liver would begin to fail. I started trying to semi-recover; but it wasn't good. I started binging again and feeling like shit about myself. My life felt like hell.

Until I moved in with my grandma. Then it got even worse. Like I've said before, my grandma was super controlling over every aspect of my life. Which made my anorexia get worse. I had already lost weight from barely eating when I had lived with my parents. I was maybe around 137lbs when I moved to Arizona, and I had been in the 140's-150's during my binging phase. I don't know if the weight loss was because of my anorexia, or only because I grew taller and my weight evened out a bit. Anyway, the first summer with my grandma wasn't awful. I wrote down everything I ate, tried to eat not as much, and exercised only a little bit (around 20 crunches, twice a day). When I got to school though, things got worse. I overworked myself in gym class, to the point where I sometimes got faint during it. I skipped breakfast, and lunch when I could. If I ate either, I'd throw up, or do 100 crunches in a bathroom stall. I sat in the library to avoid the temptation of getting food from the cafeteria. I started doing around 300 crunches, twice a day. Which might be a normal amount, as long as you get enough calories. I was eating maybe around 300-500 calories a day. I had dropped from 137lbs to 121lbs within a few months. My weight started going in a cycle, from 116-123 pounds. I guess it's good I never got under 116lbs (and also my liver never failed, fuck you doctor).

Then when COVID hit, I had to be around my grandma all day every day. And she made sure I was eating. If she noticed I wasn't, she'd put me on the scale, scream at me for getting too thin, and then force me to eat in front of her and scream at me some more. I tried to restrict my calories, but usually I ended up being unable to due to my grandma watching my eating like a hawk. I remember when I got up to 135lbs and she weighed me, she smiled and said "that's more like it" and when I started crying she literally hit me. My ED voice always told me that my grandma didn't care about my health, she just wanted to keep me fat and miserable like her. When I got to 140lbs, my grandma backed down. She stopped weighing me, stopped paying so much attention to my eating. And the cycle of normal eating and restricting calories began. The day she died I had been restricting and trying to get back to 120lbs.

Since I've moved in with my family again, I've still been struggling with both my B.E.D and my anorexia. I've been going into a cycle of binge restrict, binge restrict, just over and over again. When I restrict I eat maybe around 300 calories in a day. When I binge I eat around 3k calories in a day. My weight went from 134lbs (my weight the night my grandma died) to 170lbs (my weight on New Years). I've already relapsed once in 2022, my weight going down to 158-160lbs. I'm not sure what to do anymore. I want to get better, from both my B.E.D and my anorexia, but it seems so hard. I'm either struggling with one or the other. I want to stop eating so much and also stop eating so little. I'm trying. I think.

Part two of this blog will be about the specific thoughts I have with both these ED's and how it affects my life and feelings, and even other people.