What it was_Disordered.
My disorder, I came to understand many years later, was Orthorexia as well as Avoidant / Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID). Orthorexia, is essentially, the obsessiveness of eating very very very healthy — raw, low-fat, low-oil, low-carb, low-sugar, you name it. I paired this with the obsession of exercise. I was terrrrrrified of food, the overconsumption of anything even remotely ‘unhealthy’, for that matter. I would eat in ‘large’ quantities, but that was only when I had previously told myself that this meal was sufficient enough to enjoy. That it wouldn’t harm me. Even this being said, I would scoff, cry, and self-deprecate at the feeling of fullness. Almost as if I’d let myself down.
But this act of ‘eating enough’ allowed for my peers to stay quiet, to never over-analyze my consumption intake. To never butt in to question me. It was exactly how I wanted it to be. Because deep deep down I subconsciously knew there was a problem, but the embarrassment I would have endured would have been enough to establish a questioning of these problems I allowed to sit just below the surface. It all sat deep enough for the spiral of an eating disorder that lasted at it’s most extreme for six years.
I struggled primarily from 14-19 — I use ‘struggling’ lightly here. Looking back at the reality of the severity of this breaks my heart today. For a long time, I could hardly look at my old photos from high school. I see a girl that ‘blended’ in or seemed unscathed from the world, but inside was fighting and torturing her mind and body. I see a girl that brought half a pb&j, 20 pretzels, and six strawberries to lunch every day. I see a girl that would punish herself later in the day if she snagged leftover fries from her friends’ lunches. I see a girl that isolated herself, that would skip out on social gatherings if it involved food, or would show up late or leave early if she got overwhelmed.
I don’t know where my disorder stemmed from. I’ve thought more about it recently and have a better understanding, however. In my mind, I was fine. I was in control. But how much control did I really have? A good friend of mine recently told me about the ED brain when you have these said disorders. It’s as if there’s another ‘person’ in your brain having conversations and arguments with you. They are the ones that tell you ‘you shouldn’t eat that, you are going to gain that weight you’re working so hard not to put on’. You let them win the discussion most times. But the situations where you don’t, you might regret that decision to allow yourself that meal.
You might try to compensate later, to fix it. That’s the thing — for me, it always came back to ‘fixing’ myself. But no decision was right, even when it was ‘right’, I sulked, I tried anything I could to then rid the guilt.
I did crunches in my room after every meal. I would do 100. If I didn’t do 100 I would get in my head, telling myself that this is what would be the reason to my weight gain. I weighed myself every day. At 5'6, I weighed 100 pounds for at least 3 years. I constantly looked at my body, my stomach and thigh gap most frequently. If I ever looked ‘different’, I would punish myself more that day (I believe I also had body dysmorphia — I almost think everyone that’s struggled with eating disorders has some level of this). I counted food, thoroughly observed nutrition facts and took exactly the amount for a serving or half of a serving. I nearly had anxiety attacks when the mention of eating out was brought up. I would religiously research the restaurant prior to. It was worse with my family because I would lash out — scream at my parents if I didn’t want to eat somewhere. This was solely because I didn’t think anything on the menu was raw enough. So I would then resort to excuses — ‘I’m not that hungry’, ‘can we split a meal?’, ‘my stomach hurts today’. I would blame it on money when I was with my friends, or say ‘I just ate’.
Hardly anyone ever questioned me or brought up the hard stuff — none of my close friends, not my family. Maybe I played it off incredibly well. Or maybe they were terrified to know the reality.
I had a lot of resentment recently towards my parents for not addressing this blatant disorder for six years. They began asking and worrying once I was a senior in high school about to go off to college. My family is passive — we never spoke on subjects that adolescents need to talk about. It was almost as if we didn’t speak of the problems of the world, they would cease to exist at all. Over time, I have come to peace with this past. It wasn’t my parents direct responsibility to fix my disorder.
Moreover, when you have a disorder, it actually feels as if no one can help you. Not sure if you have felt this way — but I feel no one will truly understand an eating disorder if you haven’t personally gone through it.
At this point in my journey, I love (strange to use love?) sharing this part of me with others who have also struggled — it feels incredibly freeing, I can’t really put it in to words. I just as equally enjoy being the listener to those struggling. Maybe I strive to be that person for them, because that person was missing for me.
Why is it that we don’t ask our loved ones ‘Are you ok?’. We fail to bring up the depths of ourselves. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s apathy. I promise in the long run, it means more to be incredibly uncomfortable with someone you love, then to see them wither away for good.
That being said, someone very close to me recently overcame a severe period within her disorder. I felt the need to share with her my experience more in depth — parts of my struggle I had never shared with her, nor anyone at all. I didn’t know what could help her, but I wanted to do anything in my power to make her feel heard. This may have been a huge turning point in my journey for growth.
Nearly 10 months ago, this person above, actually allowed me to come to terms more in depth with my disorder. I hadn’t re-assessed my struggles for so long — I know for certain I never truly got the proper help or growth within my mental stability from that time. This allowed me to dive into what made me tick, why I am the way I am today — psychologically assessing these transitions.
The control, the inability to change, the justification that nothing was wrong, that I was fine, lasted for six years.
How I would allow myself to ‘live’, wasn’t even remotely close to living. I was trapped in my mind, with my ED. I took pride in the control I thought I had. You tell yourself that you win, you have more stamina than the next person.
Sometimes when people ask me specific questions about my youth, my prime teenage years, I cannot remember. I can’t remember what I loved, the music I listened to, who I looked up to. I know now that this was my obsession with the control, yet the reality of powerlessness I had during this time with my disorder. What an oxymoron. I had the ability to control my intake, but I didn’t have the control to better myself for a very long time. Sometimes I think about it as like a relationship with a puppet-master.
One person that always made me feel uncomfortable was my grandma. She was the only person who questioned me, who looked at me with sadness, who knew something was off. This out led me to feel sorry for myself, to really dig deep inside and ask myself if I had a serious problem. One that could ruin me.
To this day, I truly believe her blatant worry and her vocal bluntness was a leading reason as to why I wanted to change, and began to progress. I will never forget at my sister’s graduation party when I was around 20 years old and starting to make positive changes, she pulled me aside. She said to me “Taylor, you look great sweetie, you really do”. She had tears in her eyes, I did as well. In hindsight this is not a healthy thing to say to a person with a disorder. But coming from her and our past together, I knew she was solely just proud of me and noticed a light in me that I also began to see in myself for the first time.
Eating disorders are a mental illness. It’s hard to ever imagine it fully going away. What I’ve learned is that it takes understanding who you are to your core, to be uncomfortable, to understand that you’ll be ok eating that bean burger. To this day, I still have these conversations with my ED in my head, and sometimes it wins. But, I now know when that ED is talking, when it wants to take over, and I can better address that as it comes.
