Barely Existing

The reality of an eating disorder is not glamorous or beautiful. It is pain and tears and blood and sweat. It is EKGs and labs and pills and fighting and screaming and living in a world that is completely out of focus. It is black and blue and purple bags under your eyes and bruises down your legs and arms. It is having to wear three pairs of thick socks and heavy clothes in the summer to keep warm and constantly having to spend money on new-sized jeans because your old ones fall off. It is pale skin and thinning hair and dull eyes and hospital stays and countless therapy and doctors appointments. It is self-hate and slowly dying. Recovery isn't much better, gallons and gallons of boost and ensure and water and milk and juice and calorie after calorie and meal after meal of hell. However, your WORST day in recovery will ALWAYS be better than your BEST day in your illness. If you are not recovering, you are dying.

An eating disorder is not a choice. An eating disorder is not to be seen as “goals”. An eating disorder is not and should never be seen as attractive. We live in a world of the media and unattainable body types; the size of someone's waist is a measurement of their success. Therefore, it is hard for many people to see why living in the depths of an eating disorder is so awful.

An eating disorder is being unable to concentrate in class because your mind is racing with thoughts about how the 40 calories you ate for breakfast felt like a binge and now you will have to go to the gym for two hours after school. An eating disorder is your grades dropping because your body does not have the nutrition to remember all the things you studied until 3 AM the night before. An eating disorder is losing all of your friends because you are too afraid to go out just in case there might be food involved and even being around food will make you fat. An eating disorder is ignoring everyone who cares about you when they try to reach out and offer support and even pushing them away until you are completely alone.

In an eating disorder, all you really think about is food. You are so hungry but the idea of having to add any amount of calories to MyFitnessPal is horrifying. Your life revolves around food—eating food, exercising to make up for food, hiding food, cutting up food, getting rid of food, and counting every possible calorie of food plus a few extra just in case. You will take boxes of laxatives at a time in hopes that you can rid yourself of the apple you ate for lunch and spend the night on the bathroom floor in agony from cramps and puking because you took too many for your body to handle and you spend the next day in the school bathroom crying because if you go to class you might not be able to control your bowels. The next night at two or three in the morning you will lie awake in your bed scared because your heart is racing and the room is spinning and you will pray that this is the last time you will restrict and that tomorrow you will start recovery or that you won’t wake up because it’s just too much— but you do wake up and tomorrow keeps getting extended until you forget that night of despair. You will feel faint every morning as you get out of bed because your blood pressure and heart rate are unstable, but this stops phasing you after a few days because it becomes your normal. Every day you have a pounding headache from malnutrition and dehydration, but instead of eating the food you know will make it better, you chug cups of coffee and pop diet pills until you are shaking and can’t sit still.

The reality of any eating disorder is horrifying and something that nobody should ever have to go through. They do not deliver all the promises that they might make. It might lead to a temporary happiness and a false feeling of success, or give you the slightest sense of hope and convince you that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel after all, but with time, that will all disappear. You might tell yourself that you will only give in to the eating disorder’s thoughts and commands until you reach your first goal weight or once you are able to fit into certain size jeans but once you hit that, you will not be able to stop. You will have to keep going. You will feel that you cannot possibly survive without listening to that voice in your head.

This is what living with an eating disorder is.

This is reality.

(This is written from my personal experience, I am not suggesting that you have to have the same experiences to have an eating disorder— this is just my personal reality that I share with many others that are in recovery from a restrictive eating disorder like anorexia.)