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Too Fat

The Struggles of Being Overweight With an Eating Disorder

By Christopher NouvellePublished 6 years ago 7 min read
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[Image of fork with blue measuring tape wrapped around it]

People's favorite way to "fix" someone with an eating disorder seems to be to constantly remind the person that they are skinny, so what happens when someone who truly is not skinny struggles with disordered eating? Depending upon who you ask, you will of course receive different answers to this question, but I am here to tell you my experience.

When I first started experiencing symptoms of disordered eating, I was around the age of six. At this point in my life, I was not overweight. I was actually fairly skinny. Everyone always talked about how skinny I was, despite me having a massive appetite. Those comments made me feel good, but also worry that I would gain weight and then lose the "one" good thing about myself. I decided that I would start making myself throw up anytime I ate more than what seemed like an okay amount. What I didn't know was that this was the start of something much bigger, as well as what would be a large part of the cause of me being overweight in the future.

By the time I was nine, I had gotten to a point of being overweight, partially thanks to what I had done to my metabolism in attempt to stay small. This was the point where occasional disordered thoughts and tendencies surrounding eating became much more persistent and something I more frequently and carelessly acted upon. I would skip meals, throw up ones I did eat, and even at times take things to rush my digestion process, such as laxatives.

My family and doctors knew that I wasn't eating much, but they encouraged it, because I was overweight. My friends knew about everything I was doing, but told me they were proud of me for "trying to be healthy." Even when it got to a point that I could barely function, because I would get light headed and dizzy, no one batted an eye. After all fat people can't have eating disorders, or at least that is what everyone seemed to believe.

There are two things about eating disorders that you have to know to understand the things that are next to come in order for you to have a better understanding of the situation.

1. Eating disorders come in many forms. Some people don't eat, some people eat too much, some people eat things that shouldn't be eaten, some try to compensate for eating by "purging" their bodies of what they consumed; plus many more things, as well as multiple of these things combined.

2. Eating disorders distort your reality. You may be very underweight and see yourself as fat. You may go days without eating and be convinced you have eaten too much. Things are not straight and clear, and just because disordered eating is having a negative effect on you, does not mean you are able to realize that it is something you shouldn't be doing. Also, even if you are able to see how bad it is, that does not mean that you are able to bring yourself to stop.

I experienced a combination of many forms of disordered eating, including binge eating (over eating to a very unhealthy extent). Thanks to this, by the age of 12 I was clinically obese, despite having very unhealthy eating patterns that typically result in weight loss. I constantly swayed back and forth between not eating enough while purging and eating way too much. I ended up being admitted to a psychiatric hospital for reasons unrelated to my eating. While there I decided that I wanted to reach out and try to get help in recovering from this disordered eating I had been struggling with for so long. When I spoke to the doctor at the hospital, he did all but laugh in my face. I was not taken seriously by any means. I was told that I needed to listen to the thoughts telling me to starve myself, because the only health-related thing I needed to focus on was my obesity. During the time I was there, I did not eat at all. This is something they are supposed to keep a record of and hold you longer for. I was released at the earliest date you can be on a 10-13 admittance, three days after I arrived.

After getting back home, my weight fluctuated constantly, ranging from 130 to 200 lbs. I didn't reach out much after that, not even to my therapists or psychiatrist. I did, at some point, decide to confide in a teacher that I felt comfortable with, who told me that I was pretending to starve myself for attention, because if I had actually been going periods of time without eating, I wouldn't "be fatter than everyone else at this school." From this point, I began shutting most people out of my life and reached a very bad state of depression. I ended up being admitted to a psychiatric hospital again, a little over a year after being discharged from my first visit. I once again tried to reach out for help with my eating while there. This time I was ignored completely. They looked at me and walked off and never brought it up again. My depression got past the point of suicidal and trying to kill myself to a point of not caring about anything at all. I ate constantly because I didn't care if I was overweight. I didn't take my medicine because I didn't care if I got worse. I didn't go to school because I didn't care about the problems it would cause. This lasted for a little over a year, and then a huge shift occurred in my life.

Everything in my life changed, including who I lived with and where. When change happens, it always tends to push me to create more change. My focus went back to my weight. I was two-hundred and fifteen pounds, more than I had even been before. I was morbidly obese. I hated my body, and myself in general. I drastically limited my eating. I made myself throw up and took laxatives. I exercised, at minimum, two hours a day. I went the longest I had ever gone without binge eating: three months. In that time frame, I went from two-hundred and fifteen pounds to one-hundred and seventy-five pounds. I was extremely sick. For the first time, someone questioned my eating, and by this point I had given up on getting better, so I denied their accusations and it was left alone. No one else ever asked about it. Even my best friend at the time, who I told everything, didn't care. I tried to talk to her about it once and her response was somewhere along the lines of, "whatever works! I wish I had the self control you do." My heart shattered.

It is now five years later. I am 19 years old. My life has changed very much since then. I gained all the weight I lost back and then some. I have found my own ways to cope with my eating disorders. I am diagnosed with bulimia, binge eating disorder, and E.D.N.O.S. (eating disorder not otherwise specified). I am far better than I used to be. Still, though, I struggle daily with eating and my weight. Every meal I have is a gigantic struggle. I don't like my body, and I would love to lose weight, but every time I try to do it on my own, I end up back using unhealthy methods. I have tried to find nutritionists to help me, but I am overweight and have an eating disorder that is not Anorexia Nervosa, so none want to help me with an eating disorder focus instead of a regular weight loss focus. I don't talk much about my weight or my disordered eating. I do have people around me who care now, but no one knows how to help, nor do they really understand.

I am tired of not knowing how to get better, and I am even more tired of feeling like I don't have a right to talk about my struggles because of my size. Eating disorders don't have a specific image, and there needs to be more awareness and resources for people who don't fit the image people have in their heads of what disordered eating looks like. I am better than I have been in a very long time, but I would give anything to feel in control of my eating and weight.

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Christopher Nouvelle

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