This post might be a hard post to read and could be triggering for some people. If you have an eating disorder or are in recovery, read with caution and if it triggers, stop reading. If you are currently struggling with an eating disorder, please reach out for help. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness but of strength. You can and will get through this. Recovery may seem scary but it is so so worth it.
So my battle with food really began when I was younger. I always just say I am a picky eater because that’s what I was told but there is a lot more to it. I am really sensitive to smells, textures, tastes, etc. and I have been since I was younger. I was never really pushed to try new foods. I stuck with the same basic foods (pizza, ramen noodles, chicken, burger meat, steak, pork chops) and that's pretty much still the basis of what I eat. My problem is that I get sick really easily with food so trying new food now is hard because I hate getting sick from it.
I most likely suffered/suffer from a disorder called avoidant restrictive food intake disorder or ARFID. This is really common in kids and as some people put it just a fancy way to say picky eater. So where some kids will eat whatever you put in front of them even if they don't like it if you tell them they have to eat it, someone with ARFID will just sit there and not eat. They would rather not eat then eat something that isn’t a safe food for them. Every person with ARFID is different.
Let’s fast forward to when I was 12. This is when it started to get bad. I started to restrict my intake of food. There would be a lot of days where I would go through and not eat anything. I was in general not the biggest kid but I wasn’t the skinniest and got picked on a lot so I needed something I could control. By the time I turned 13, this turned into purging if I did eat. I would feel guilty about eating because I felt like I didn’t deserve it or that it would just make me bigger. I had gained weight because at the same time, I was partially binging and I wasn't always purging at that point. I think I was up to 180ish pounds. That was in 2014. After my 8th grade year, I got a lot worse. There was a lot going on, you can read about it in my testimony that I posted a couple of months ago, but I wasn't really eating much and my sleep schedule and stuff was really screwed up. When I started my freshman year of high school, I was down to 160ish pounds.
My freshman year was rough. More kids started to bully me. My tourette’s was starting to get worse and so was my mental health. The difference was that I had started going to church and found a small community there. A lot of my lunches I sat alone because I didn’t have friends or they just didn’t want me around them.
I was never really honest with anyone about what was going on. No one knew I was struggling. No one knew I had an eating disorder. I started to make more of a community at my church with some of the people and the leaders and I kinda told them about what was going on in my life but they still didn’t know how bad I really was.
All during this time, I was being praised by everyone in my life for losing the weight and looking better and better when in reality I was just getting sicker and sicker. I wasn’t getting better, I was getting worse and no one saw. No one knew.
My 16th birthday is the last day I purged. I still have not to this day purged since them and I am so proud of myself for that because it has been a rocky road.
The last weight I can remember from around then is 127 pounds. I was the smallest I had been in years. Everyone kept telling me I looked really good and that they loved that I was skinny. I was being praised on my body even though I was severely unhealthy.
My 16th birthday I told myself I would not engage in the eating disorder behaviors I was engaging in again. Now here and there I would skip a meal but it was nowhere near how bad it was. The only problem is this is when I started to be put on medications and these medications caused me to be hungry.
So while I wasn’t restricting or purging, I started to eat more and more food because according to my brain I was always hungry and instead of being able to realize that I wasn’t, I just kept eating and no one in my life ever noticed it. This is when the journey of gaining a lot of weight happened. I don't remember specifics but I do know that by August 2019 I was at almost 250 pounds. I was not healthy but I wasn’t recognizing it either. Or if I did, I didn’t want to admit it. I knew I had gained a lot of weight and I was unhappy, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do to help it as long as I was on that med. January 2020 I was taken off that med. It was causing a lot more issues in my body than just the weight gain. It was raising certain hormone levels in me and just making my body not healthy. January 2020 I believe I was at 235 pounds.
March of last year I was still struggling with depression and such and I could just feel a relapse in my eating disorder coming. I told one person in my life and they didn’t help. They kinda made me feel bad for saying it and is why I didn’t talk to anyone else about it.
In July of 2020 I broke up with my fiancé and that was the catalyst. It was nothing he did. It was just my brain screaming for control so I took control in the most familiar way I knew how and started restricting how much I ate and if I ate. I usually ate at least a little something because I needed to for a med but not every day. This got really bad and lasted through the end of October. In September I reached out and started to get help for it. It didn’t help a lot but helped some. I did get diagnosed with an eating disorder called OSFED which stands for other specified food and eating disorders. It was more something that I needed to go to God about and get my help and strength from Him. That is how I was able to finally start getting back on the right path.
The end of October, I was starting a new job and knew that I didn’t want this to follow me there so that was a big catalyst of getting healthy. Also I hate living like that. I don’t know anyone who would say they enjoy their eating disorder. It is a source of comfort for people. It gives them a sense of control which is why it can be so hard to give up.
This may be hard for some people to read because no one really knew how bad I was struggling those months last year. I was at about 230ish pounds in July of 2020. By the end of october, I was down to about 195 pounds. That is really hard to admit and actually I don’t know if I have told anyone that. It’s really scary to think that I lost that much weight in about 4 months and what would have happened if I had kept going down that way. Eating disorders actually have the highest mortality rate of any of the mental health disorders.
So this is kinda my journey with my eating disorder. I am always open to talking about it if anyone has questions or wants to talk about it. I do not mind talking about it at all.
Hold onto hope and stay strong.
Madison Rae <3
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