This time last year I was struggling. I was neck deep in an eating disorder that had I not started to get better, definitely could have claimed my life. Did you know that eating disorders are the mental illness with the highest mortality rate? It’s the mental health disorder that more people die from compared to others. That’s crazy.
Also did you know that a lot of places turn people away from getting help if they are not underweight and not everyone with an eating disorder will ever be underweight. In fact you may never know if someone is dealing with an eating disorder because they could look perfectly healthy.
I was diagnosed with OSFED (Other specified food and earring disorder). I was struggling severely. I lost a lot of weight very quickly from this. I was going downhill quickly. I was at a eating disorder clinic to go to therapy and a dietician, but it didn’t help. I started them in September of last year and left at the beginning of December of last year. I didn’t really get help with things I didn’t already know and it just wasn't helping so I went back to my original therapist I had before switching.
The end of last October / the beginning of November was when I really started to decide I wanted to get back to a healthy spot and not be struggling as much. This is when I started Target. I went from walking maybe 10,000 -12,000 steps to anywhere between 16,000 and 27,000 steps at work. I needed to be able to have energy to do that and be in a place physically where my body could handle that.
It was not an overnight process. It took time to be able to get back to a place where I could eat more and not be skipping as many meals or just not eating enough. It took a while but slowly I did it. It did not help when I would get comments from my family talking about how good I looked since I lost weight or when they would comment on how much I was eating. This was a trigger before I had relapsed and had just continued and made things worse but I worked through it.
Fast forward to April of this year. I moved out in April of this year and one of my biggest fears of living by myself is that there would be no one to be there to keep me accountable with eating and stay strong. I thought that this was going to be a huge struggle and that a relapse of my eating disorder would be coming soon after I moved out because there was no one there to make sure I was still eating.
That did not happen. I have not relapsed in my eating disorder. Actually I have never done better in my relationship with food as I have been doing. This was an exciting thing to tell my therapist.
On Tuesday of this week, my therapist asked about my relationship with food and how it was going and I was able to tell her that it is going super well and that I have never done better with food since starting to develop my eating disorder at 13. I was not living in freedom from my eating disorder until now. Between the ages of 13 and 20, I was very much basically a slave to my eating disorder. I would go through periods where I would not eat or purge (it’s been 5 years since I last purged, thank God) or where I would binge eat. At one point, I was on a med that made me hungry all the time and so I would always be eating and very rarely would I eat anything healthy.
Food freedom was non-existent to me. What didn’t help was living in a house where I couldn’t keep my own food without the risk of if my brother liked that food, he would eat it. I didn’t have the ability to keep anything just for me without the risk of it disappearing.
Food freedom looks like being able to eat what I want, when I want. It looks like being able to have that ice cream or pizza without guilt. Is my life perfect now to where I don’t get urges to skip meals or to purge? No. I will probably deal with this all my life. But that’s okay because my God is stronger than these urges. He’s the David fighting my Goliath.
Being able to tell my therapist that I am doing well and have found food freedom is huge. This time last year, that idea would have been very foreign to me and I would not have understood it. But this year, I am thriving. It takes going through hard times to come out stronger. It might have taken over 7 years, but I am finally experiencing food freedom and it is amazing.
Hold onto hope and stay strong.
Madison Rae <3
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