Eating disorders are becoming more and more common, especially among teenage girls. I myself have had some experience with that little bitch called ana, and I felt like I’d share it with the world.
I was a perfectly normal 13 y.o. girl. I had a lot of friends, I didn’t bother counting calories and my biggest concerns in life were boys and teenage magazines. Although I did a lot of sport ever since I was a kid, I was always on the chubbier side. My dad would often tell me that I shouldn’t eat so much, but I didn’t really care, midnight snacks were life. I mean, look at that happy 13 year old me.
After I finished 8th grade, something very unfortunate happened. We were having dinner with the fam, and just like that, my dad announces that we’re moving to Germany. As you can imagine, it was quite a shocker for the little me. Like I said, I never had a problem finding friends, until this crucial move happened. I spoke neither English nor German when I first got there, and the other kids at my school weren’t exactly welcoming. They would humiliate me and laugh in my face while speaking German, which I sadly understood with the basics I knew. Their comments were about my hair, about my face, about my weight, about the way I dressed… There was one girl that called herself my friend, but she didn’t exactly make things better. She’d often say things like “Julie, you’d be so pretty if you weren’t so fat”, or “you should try losing some weight”.
I tried ignoring it for a while, but the wombo-combo of mean high school kids, my dad dropping a comment on my weight every other day and this great “friend” I had eventually got to me. I started to believe that my looks really were the reason for my troubles. The saddest thing is that I wasn’t event overweight, throughout all this time my weight has been in the healthy range.
Shortly after I came to this realization, I had a bad skiing accident. I spent a fair amount of time in the hospital and lost some weight as a result. When I got home, I was ecstatic. I didn’t care about the pain, I didn’t care that I couldn’t stand for longer than 2 minutes; all I saw was a flat stomach in the mirror. And I really liked it. So I continued eating close to nothing, in hope to keep my new weight, and I soon as I could exercise again, I did. I became obsessed with diet and exercise, in a very unhealthy way.
My parents only started to notice something when I was severely underweight, but once they did, they took action immediately. It took a few psychiatrists, some happy pills and a lot of tears, but I recovered. I went to University as the old, happy me. And I loved it. My freshman year in university was definitely the best year of my life. I was free of all the calorie counting, depression and I found some awesome friends after a long time. I did some really awesome, spontaneous stuff, and I even got into my first serious relationship.
But of course that can’t be the end, that would be too good. With my happiness came food, and with food came the extra pounds, and for the first time in my life my weight slipped up to the overweight range. At first I didn’t care, but after meeting my boyfriend, I realized that I should probably do something about it. I tried to do it right this time, but ana got the better of me once again. I lost 20 pounds in around a month and a half. And even though I now look better than I ever did before, I can’t come to terms with my body. There's around a month between the two pictures below.
This is a topic I rarely talk about on here, but I felt like it was time to share. Compared to some other cases, what I went through is probably nothing, but it still left quite the scar. I'd appreciate it if you kept any mean comments to yourself :)
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