I am a long, long time lurker here. I know many of you well but you do not know me. I am a quiet veteran of weight loss and disordered eating - I may know this pattern and journey better than anything else in my life and have never spoken of it with anyone. So I'll share it here, with the hopes perhaps someone out there who can relate will read it and feel slightly less alone.
I've had issues with eating since I was a little girl and never liked how I looked. I distinctly remember rejecting invitations to swim parties and beach days as young as 7. By 14 I was on a constant restriction cycle fluctuating from eating normally to throwing lunch in the trash on the way to school and spitting dinner into a napkin. I got relatively thin, but never *really* thin - never looking how I wanted to. I was 5'8 by then (as I still am now), and bottomed out at around 140. I tried my hand at purging but was never much good at it. I ate dry tuna at school and left bread crumbs on a plate in the sink around breakfast for my mother to find.
At 15 I started to binge - most likely as a reaction to the endless hunger - but evened things out with restricting and starving every other week. For a couple of years I hovered pretty consistently around 155. On my 16th birthday I spent my gift money on a cross trainer and built it in my room in silence. At 17, during my first year of sixth form, I lived off coffee and my schooling suffered miserably for the first half of the year. I fainted walking out of class on multiple occasions. The second half of the year I fell into an endless binge and jumped up to the high 160's, putting me at an overweight BMI for the first time. I wore leggings to school and often cried in the bathroom. I stopped speaking to everyone I knew. I was humiliated and sunk into a depression.
I still left for university at 18, headed to a new city - and there, from the loneliness, stress, and building depression - jumped from the high 160's to 225 in a short eight months. I huffed glue in my room, smoked out the window, and spent every penny I had on food. I was now obese and suicidal. My skin broke out constantly. I would often binge to the point of being involuntarily sick. I couldn't concentrate on anything and developed crippling anxiety. I seldom made it to class.
Things remained mostly the same until I was 20 - at which point I went through a full on nervous breakdown and was in and out of the hospital, never admitting my disordered eating to any professionals or otherwise. I went vegan - from a sincere desire of love for animals, with less of a focus on my body - and lost weight rapidly, in a healthy way for the first time. At 21, I hit the 180s. Still overweight - but people told me I looked great all the time. I was still relatively miserable but was functioning again.
There I hovered in the 180s for the past couple of years post-graduation. At 23 I moved to a new city - just earlier this year - and started a new job, headed back to school, learned to drive, met a lovely boy, made a whole new group of friends I sincerely love, and have been so busy that, without any consious effort, have lost some weight.
This morning I stepped on the scale and read 163. At 5'8, 164 is the boundary for an overweight BMI. I stood naked in the mirror for a long time and felt nothing but hate. Hate for the 62 pounds I've lost and hate for the 34 I still want to get rid of. I left the house and for the first time since January felt an intense need to go home and binge. I left my friends, skipped class, and cancelled on a friend for drinks tonight - to come home with the full knowledge of what I was going to do. It was as awful as I remember - the pain and the sickness and the disgust. And, of course, I don't feel any better. I'm still me. I will wake up tomorrow still me. I will turn 24 next week.
You have to work on how you feel about yourself, not just the weight loss. I have come a long way but seeing that 163 this morning and my involuntary reaction to it reminded me there's still a lot left buried under the surface. Be kind to yourself. You're in it for the long haul, not just that one special day when you hit a number you've anticipated for a long, long time. I'm not overweight anymore, but it's really only the beginning.
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