I just watched a movie called FEED. It portrays a girl who develops anorexia but not because of what, because of the need for control. I think this was a very important thing to portray.
A lot of people think that all eating disorders are about appearance and weight. They really aren’t. I am not saying that there is nobody who struggles with an eating disorder that is solely based on weight and appearance, I am just saying that that is not always the case.
If you know my story, you know that I have dealt with an eating disorder since I was about 12. I have always had a bad relationship with food but that is when it manifested as something more than before. That is when I started restricting.
My eating disorder started for a lot of reasons. One being I was bullied and was being told I was fat and this and that. Another being I had no control in my life. I was waking up, going to school, coming home, having to deal with my brother, going to bed to just do it again. I didn’t have any say of what was going to go on in my life or who would be in my life. I struggled with that a lot.
A lot of the people I wanted in my life left when I was 12 or 13. These were people who were not family but I had built a relationship with them. I think this could’ve also had an impact in my eating disorder getting worse because I lost everyone I felt I could talk to about the hard things in my life.
I wasn’t given a choice about whether or not I could talk about my home life. I just couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed. And if I did, I got in major trouble for it.
Right at the base of when I started restricting, we were moving, my brother was getting everything he ever wanted, it was summer which is always a hard time for me, we were in the process of debating whether or not we were going to stay in the city we were currently living in, my brother was getting louder and more physical, I was about to start school again which was great but also meant that I had to go back to another place I was getting bullied.
Then we moved. And if you have ever moved, you know it’s not all peaches and roses. I moved and then my tourettes started to come out, I realized I had an accent that I never knew I had, I got bullied almost as soon as I started at my new school, My brother was unstable, and I could keep going on.
All these things were out of my control. The one thing I could control was what I ate, when I ate, and if it stayed down. I also could control it by self harming but that’s for another day. My life felt so out of control. It felt like nothing would ever go back to how it was. I started to have more anxiety and could finally put a word to what I was feeling, depression.
All these things pointed me to trying to gain control of my life, which I did so in various ways like my eating disorder.
I still struggle a lot with that. When I feel like everything in my life is out of control is when you will find me struggling the most with my full blown eating disorder and eating disorder tendencies.
Control is the main cause of most of my self destructive behavior. “I can’t control what is happening around me so I’ll control myself in this way.”
One thing that I love about FEED is how this is played out. The main character is a twin. She and her twin are in a car accident and her twin is killed. Then you see his character manifest as a presence and voice in her life. This voice tells her things like he’s starving or that she needs to feed him. So instead of eating her food, she would give it to her “twin” to eat.
She was trying so hard to be valedictorian of her senior year and started to slip after her brother died. She started to get better and do better and get caught up until this presence really came into her life. This presence would make her go and run in the middle of the night if she got angry with it. The presence wouldn’t allow her to eat. This presence would ridicule her all day long. He would always be there telling her lies.
I think that is important because a lot of the time with eating disorders, you develop a voice in your head that tells you not to eat, to purge, to binge, etc. I don’t think a lot of people actually realize it if you don’t deal with an eating disorder.
I don’t think everyone develops it and it’s not in a schizophrenia kind of way. It’s a voice that feels familiar. It feels like it is looking out for you. It feels like you have to listen to it. Not listening to it feels like you are betraying someone you love. It takes time to figure out that that voice is not good and that it doesn’t want what’s best for you.
I feel like this movie did an amazing job portraying what an eating disorder can and does look like. An eating disorder doesn’t look the same for everyone. No person’s eating disorder or tendencies are the exact same as the next.
This was an amazing movie to watch especially as someone in recovery from an eating disorder. I think it portrayed it beautifully and could really educate people on what an eating disorder could look like.
If you are struggling with restricting, purging, binging, etc. please reach out to someone. An eating disorder or even just tendencies are something that is really hard to deal with on your own. It’s very much a secret disorder because it’s something you can easily miss. Please reach out for help. Don’t struggle by yourself.
Hold onto hope and stay strong.
Madison Rae <3
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