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Eating disorders

I don’t know what title to give to this post as I try to shy away from definite statements for the time being. In any case, I want to talk about eating disorders.

For about 2.5 years now I have been keeping up a diary on my laptop. At least once a week I write about what’s going on in my life and what my worries and concerns are. In general, the entire thing is fairly depressing, which has less to do with the state my life is in and more with my mood when I feel like writing. The point of that document was initially to be able to look back in many many years and see the patterns and course my life takes. However, as I am very impatient I read back pretty much every couple of months and last night was one of those nights.

As I was reading I realized something strange; there was a lot about my weight and about eating in there. I mean, back then I was worrying about it a lot. What happened, in short, is that I’d always been skinny but when I weighed myself after Christmas during my first year of university I realized that I’d gained a couple of kilos. I won’t give you the numbers as it hardly matters, but the truth is that I went from the verge of underweight to a perfectly average and healthy weight.

However, that’s not how I felt. At first, attitude was more along the lines of fixing it. So, I decided that over the following weeks I would lose that weight again and become as skinny as I used to be. Obviously, I did not succeed as I am not used to curbing my eating habits and you know, perseverance isn’t exactly my strong suit.

Over the next months I found more and more diary entries about wanting to go full anorexic. Basically, I considered myself fat and I wanted to get rid of that weight. At the same time, I realized that doing this would be severely unhealthy as I was already quite thin and there was no need for dieting.

When summer came I got a job in my home town and I worked a lot. The thing was that due to the hours of work I ended up eating way too little. I mean, I ate two times a day and usually just a sandwich. Obviously, I started losing weight. My clothes became loose again and I realized that I liked that. In addition, my body got used to the low amount of food so when summer ended I was not only on the verge of underweight again but I was also incapable of getting more food in my system as I my stomach wasn’t used to it anymore.

It took me until winter that year to get back to a point where I was relatively stable again. Or so I thought. Because when I look back on the past years I realize that one thing has not changed. I am still very much obsessed with my weight. Whenever I inch a little bit higher on the scale I get really freaked out and even though I do not take it too far, balancing right on the edge of underweight actually, that is certainly not a healthy attitude.

The reason I’m writing this is because I think it is very important to acknowledge the border cases. I am not anorexic. I cannot possibly say that I am fat or even chubby or whatever I could name it. At the same time, I do have a very unhealthy relationship with food and eating habits and that is worrisome. Most importantly, though, I see my own attitude in others as well. I know that there are many people out there who have this unhealthy attitude towards their weight and I would just like to put out there that just because you do not fit the stereotype image of someone with an eating disorder that does not mean that there is no problem. If you are like me and you are struggling with this divide between what you rationally know and what you secretly feel or believe then you should know that it is okay to seek help. It is so important to not negate a problem because it is not as bad as it could be yet. More so, it is important to seek help before it gets to be that bad. We all deserve help, no matter the size of our issues. You are not alone but only you can take that first step towards fixing the problem.


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