Warning: It is going to be a very long story. English is my second language so please forgive my grammar mistakes.
Trigger warning: Binge eating disorder, bulimia, obsession with calories, depression, bipolar disorder.
Current stats: Female, 19 years old, 5'4'', 118 lbs, 25% body fat percentage. Down from 190 lbs.
My story:
I have always been at a very healthy weight and body fat percentage growing up (around 115 lbs, 5'4''). Being brought up in China, most of our daily food options was healthy and out diet consisted of mostly whole, unprocessed, home-cooked foods. Snacks, if any, were mostly fruits and seeds. (When I first came to the US for college, I was astounded by the amount of snacks people consume. Snacking wasn't really a thing China when I was growing up. People viewed processed snacks as rare treats. It might have changed now but whatever.)
My second year of high school I went through a really horrible break up, got extremely depressed, and turned to food for comfort. I would eat my normal three Chinese meals a day: breakfast was either meat buns or savory crepes, lunch and dinner was veggies, meat (mostly non-lean pork), and rice. Apart from that, I ate whenever I had access to food. It was around the time when online take-out (similar to Uber Eats but much cheaper and more prevalent -- almost every dining vendor offered online take-out) was a huge thing in China, and I would order the most unhealthy options multiple times a day. At the school lunch break, after finishing my regular lunch, I would order a whole fried chicken. Take-out food wasn't allowed at my school, so I would tell the delivery guy to sneak in my food through the campus fence alongside a riverbank, so security officers wouldn't notice. I would eat it secretly in an unused classroom, or in a restroom stall. After school I would immediately head to the convenience store and buy whatever looked good to me -- chips, chocolate, ice cream, a Japanese dish/snack called oden, and instant ramen. I would go home and devour them, and then order more food : sometimes sugary boba, sometimes even full meals (ramen, rice drenched in greasy meaty sauces, or western fast food). I would eat everything before my mom gets home from work, and then have dinner. If she goes out in the evening, I would order even more food (mostly sanitarily questionable night market food). On the weekends I would beg my parents to take me out for Korean BBQ/ hot pot (1000+ calories per meal) and they would usually agree. And I didn't even get full from all this eating/binging. I was in puberty, and had a huge stomach. The void in my chest was insatiable.
I packed on 75 pounds of weight within three months. I was already bullied in high school by a mean girl who constantly called me ugly (and I am quite sure that I am actually not -- my looks are, at worst, average), and after I gained so much weight, the amount of bullying towards me was unimaginable. (Side note: obesity among teenagers in China is extremely rare. The average girl would weigh around 110-120 lbs, and anyone over 120 lbs were perceived by society standards as overweight. So I, with my 190 lbs ginormous body, was a spectacle at school. Even some teachers called me fat and told me to lose weight.) I got even more depressed and didn't want to go to school anymore, so I decided to apply for college in the US and was homeschooled for the last year and a half of my high school years.
Not meaning to brag here, but something that made me feel better and kept my self esteem to be finitely negative (instead of infinitely negative) during my days of extreme depression: in my last year of high school I self-taught 8 AP courses, got straight 5's, got nearly 1600 in my SAT, and got accepted into one of the top 2 US institutes of technology, as well as two ivy league schools. This brought up my spirits and I finally decided to lose weight. I didn't want to go to an elite college full of high spirited people while looking so obese and unhealthy.
As I was so determined to lose weight and very motivated by my glamorous college offers, my depression got better, and I lost weight very quickly. All I did was cutting out all the excess food apart from my three meals a day and got back to my former eating habits I had growing up. My parents were also very supportive, and I am so thankful for them. I quickly lost 55 pounds in 4 months. When I went to college, I was 135 lbs, and I looked like a normal human being. I still had slabs of fat on my arms, thighs, and belly, but with proper clothing I was able to hide them rather seamlessly. From afar, I looked like 125 lbs.
I wish this were the whole story, but it really wasn't, and things went downhill again.
My first college term went smoothly --- classes were easier than I imagined, and my dating life was good. In the second term, I got into a steady relationship with my current boyfriend. At that time, I started to be self conscious about my body again. I didn't want him to touch my waist because I was afraid he would notice the excess fat. I refused to have sex because I didn't want him to see my chubby body (but I really wanted to have sex tbh). I wanted to lose weight as fast as possible, and youtube got me into keto.
Now, I'm not saying keto is bad. It just couldn't work for me. Ya Chinese girl needs her rice and carbs. Also apart from keto, I was extremely under-eating, was doing intermittent fasting, and also prolonged fasting a couple times a month. I really went as extreme as I could. Cutting out carbs and so many calories quickly got me back down into a depression (later re-diagnosed as bipolar disorder). I started binge eating. And this was different from my binge eating in high-school. I never felt full during my binges in high school, but this time, I stuffed my face even if I was uncomfortably full, and made myself throw up after that. And I would try to fast the next couple of days, which would eventually lead to another binge. An endless cycle. I was miserable all the damn time. I couldn't stop thinking about food, and I craved sweets and carbs every single waking moment. But I didn't realize I had a problem. I just thought that I didn't have enough willpower, and I would start over and stay on track tomorrow, which of course, never happened.
I quit keto sometime later, and tried a ton of other different fad diets: whole30, no-sugar diet, kpop diets, the military diet, the 5-2 diet, one meal a day, and the list goes on. All of them felt extremely restrictive and I always ended up binging and purging.
I didn't lose a pound for an entire year of being in complete turmoil. I didn't know how to eat normally anymore.
Things started to change when I discovered two youtubers: Yoora Jung, and zoenotzoey. These two channels were extremely helpful for my ED recovery journey.
Yoora's content are mostly college vlogs, and nothing about fitness and health (I actually came across her channel when she posted a video about trying out a kpop IU diet, which is so ironic). And to be frank, her diet was unhealthy. It consisted mostly of my fear foods: instant ramen, fried rice, soylent, pizza -- your standard diet as a broke college student. But she has no guilt at all while eating those foods, and she eats very intuitively. Her channel helped me realize what a *normal* college student eats in a day, and that you can eat your fear foods in moderation and still look pretty like her. It was initially hard to believe that a girl with that kind of diet would be able to maintain her weight, but now that I look back on it, it was me who was extremely under-eating and had a wrong perception when it comes to how much food we should eat.
Zoe is more of a health/fitness youtuber, and honestly, she really has my dream body, slender and dainty. Her diet was 80% healthy food, and 20% treats --- she would have ground turkey and tofu and spinach and quinoa and avocado toast for most of her meals, but she has a treat every day and would go out to cute food places with her friend on the weekends. Her diet looked healthy and not restrictive at all. It was what I would imagine my 105-lb self would eat like ideally. I came to a realization that I couldn't live on 800 calories a day forever. And I didn't need to "diet" at all. All I have to do to achieve my body goals is to ask myself, "what would a healthy girl do?" when making decisions. A healthy girl would eat salad when she feels like it, and not feel guilty when she eats pizza and cake. After all, I want a healthy life, and not a healthy month.
What really turned around my relationship with food was when I went home for one month of summer break after my summer research internship ended. I already decided to stop dieting and eat normally, but I haven't actually implemented it yet. At home, my parents treated me a lot. I had hot pot three times, had rice for every meal, and had boba 2 times a week. It was summer time and so I also had ice cream. I didn't binge once, and always stopped eating when I was full. To my astonishment, I lost 2 pounds during that month. Me from a few months ago would think that I would gain a ton of weight from that diet, but no, I lost weight. My metabolism was higher than I imagined, and my maintenance calories was definitely not the number that online calculators told me.
Being somehow not so fearful of food anymore, I went back to school after my break, and followed a mostly healthy diet: overnight oats or avocado toast for breakfast, sushi for lunch (sushi is soooo good), and healthy protein and veggies for dinner; I had healthy snacks and treated myself to a small amount of chocolate or ice cream every night. I enjoyed every single meal, was never physically hungry, and was looking forward to working out. With my high metabolism as a teenager, I miraculously lost 15 pounds of weight over the three months of my sophomore fall term of not being restrictive at all. I am now almost back to the weight before my immense weight gain, and feel much more confident about my body.
Now, I am far from fully recovered. I still binged a couple of times, and even purged sometimes. My brain is still not free from the habit of binging and purging, but I am definitely improving and trying to break that habit. There is a long way till recovery and I'm still at 10 pounds from my goal weight. But I know I am at the right track and I am very optimistic about it.
If you read until this far, I wanna say a huge thank you! I can't believe how much I ended up writing. Wish you all the best on your weight loss journeys!
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