My Eating Disorder Story: The Beginning (Pt. I)

A few of us went out to eat one day on my friend’s birthday. The restaurant was in a town roughly 30 minutes from where we lived. It was quite an adventure and a tremendous amount of fun. The food was delicious and I was so satisfied with my meal, until I started to feel it all hit my stomach. I started to feel it adding up to fat. I wanted it out of me.

“What do I do?” I thought to myself. I couldn’t just purge in a public bathroom. Anxiety kicked in. I started to become fidgety and anxious as we drove home.  Once we parked, I hit the ground running. My boyfriend at the time still wanted to hang out, but I was over it. Who wants a fat girlfriend anyway?

Once in my apartment, I found myself leaning over the toilet with my hair tied back and my two fingers down my throat.

What was happening to me?

It was only a few months later when I returned home to Canada when my family stared at me with horror and said “Shay, what happened to you? Where did all of you go?”

What did they mean? Why were they saying this?? I had lost 20 lbs and I did not even notice.

To put this into a better perspective, I am 5’1 and when I left for college I was 105 lbs.  So, when I arrived home I was 85 lbs.

I was a scary little thing. This was the beginning of a very dark path I was entering into.

This was the beginning of my eating disorder. 

For as long as I can remember I was into fitness. Eat right, work out, and enjoy every second of it. I was definitely influenced by my dad, but who’s complaining about being sucked into a healthy lifestyle?

I loved seeing changes in my body. Little changes added to bigger changes and I wanted others around me to feel that happiness too. So, I started to train my friends.  Definitely made me happier to see others happier with the way they looked.

I knew and still know a lot about healthy lifestyles and how they work and produce the desired results. THEY WORK. However, something happened to me that made me lose sight of that.

One day, something clicked inside. I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. Every inch of my body was something I started to dislike. I was not good enough.

This was a lie, but of course at that time I could not see it.

I started to eat less, and work out more. I believed that eating anymore than 500 calories day was essentially a sin, or so I treated it that way. Purging became a regular practice.

Though I notice my clothes were becoming baggier on me, I did not feel that I was losing weight. I did not see any changes. So I became desperate for results. The fear of food was controlling me.

That fear led me to the dangerous development of anorexia and bulimia.

- SS