Disordered Eating History: Pt 1

TW: Disordered eating, size, weight

This isn’t a post that I thought I would ever be confident enough to write, but I have found that now more than ever, we need to find support. If telling my story can be helpful to even one person- whether it’s eye opening, validating, etc, I want to share. This isn’t a story that’s easy to write, and if you feel that it is going to be triggering for you, please take this time to click away. I want to be thorough, so I apologize in advance for this being long winded and broken into parts.

It is important to note that I was never underweight, which makes sharing this feel superfluous. Parts of me still feel like I should keep this part of me to myself, because I am taking a spot in the eating disorder recovery space that I didn’t “earn” because I was never “sick enough.” A much larger part of me knows that this isn’t true, and disordered eating can impact people of any weight.

With that said, I’m going to take my story back to the beginning.

I have one distinct memory from 2nd grade, when a classmate told me that I looked fat in my leggings. I remember having thoughts at dance class, thinking I looked different and bigger than my peers, but now people in my “normal” life were noticing. This was devastating to me, but at this age, I didn’t think there was anything I could do to change my body. I knew I didn’t like myself, but I hadn’t yet put two and two together that food could be the key.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started to learn that my eating habits were something I could control. It must have been late elementary school or early middle school, when I started making more decisions about what I was eating since my parents gave me the decision to buy school lunch. I started labeling food as good and bad based on the conversations I overheard and the commercials and advertising I saw. I started associating guilt and shame with eating “bad” foods.

By this time, my desire to lose weight felt ingrained. A lot of my family was overweight, and often expressed dissatisfaction with their bodies. Friends in the dance community were always talking about wanting to be thinner. I was surrounded with messages that it was normal to want to get smaller, and age 12 was when I realized I had the control to make myself smaller. It started with small changes, things that I thought were healthy. I started choosing salads at school, shrinking my portions, and creating rules of eating for myself. I couldn’t eat past a certain time of day, and I had to try to fill up with water before eating. My body changed over a couple of months, and no one questioned it. My family assumed it was just puberty- that I lost my “baby fat.” I went from a little bit overweight to a “healthy” weight. I received so much positive feedback- people telling me that I was looking longer and leaner. It was oddly addicting… I loved it.

By the time I entered high school, I had lost quite a bit of weight. My waist shrunk 5 inches, I had smaller breasts, and I was feeling much more comfortable exploring ballet seriously. I was considered a pretty good dancer at my home studio, but I quickly realized that I was one of the farthest behind in my new setting, and I blamed a lot of it on my body. If I were smaller, lighter, daintier… I would be a much better ballerina.

I was DESPERATE to become a perfect ballerina, but during my freshman year I felt like I was losing control of my life. I was dancing for 3-4 hours daily between dance at school and dance at a recreational studio, and I was maintaining straight A’s in my academic classes. The mental and physical demands I was putting on myself were so high, and to cope, I started to binge. It is still hard for me to explain- but my mind was moving like a train and suddenly I had finished an entire box of poptarts. The guilt and shame were so heavy, and I felt like I couldn’t carry them… so I purged.

It was an infrequent occurrence for the rest of the year, and I was feeling much better about myself during my summer break. Upon return to school, purging would become part of my weekly routine. I would “be good” and restrict enough at the beginning of the week. By Wednesday or Thursday, I would be SO exhausted and hungry that I would binge, and inevitably purge. I still didn’t think there was anything wrong with my behavior because I didn’t think it was impacting my every day life. Despite my every free moment being taken up by the thought of food or hunger or my body, I couldn’t see it as a problem. Despite my eventual purging of anything I ate during the school day, I could not bring myself to consider that I was doing more harm than good.

By the end of the year juries (final exams for my dance classes) my body was giving out on me. I had nerve damage in my upper back, ruptured tendons in my feet, and a level of existential exhaustion that I couldn’t shake. Upon receiving my report card, I broke. My ballet teacher wrote, “I am so proud of the positive changes you have made to your body.” How could she be proud of the girl who threw up her trail mix before ballet class? The girl who is STILL one of the biggest in the room? There is no way I can describe the level of hurt I was feeling. No one knew the things I was doing to my body to try to make these “improvements.”

That day sealed the deal- I was going to let go of dance as a part of my future.

Part 2 coming soon.