Learn from yesterday, Live for today and Hope for tomorrow

I do plan to go into greater detail about different parts of my anorexia journey but I thought it would be a good Idea to give a really simplified overview of where and how my eating disorder began.

2011 
I was In my first year of college (year 11) and was working extremely hard at school as I wanted to be accepted into university to do veterinary science after college. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well academically and this was reflected in my excellent marks. No matter how well I did, I never felt as though it was enough. You guessed it, I am your typical over achieving and perfectionist anorexic. I find it very interesting that most anorexics have these typical personality traits. Out of more then 100 students I placed second in my year and was well on my way to fulfilling my dream of becoming a vet. 

2012
At the start of 2012 I decided I was no longer happy with how I looked. I was at a very athletic school and while I was not overweight, I was still one of the bigger girls in my class. I would have described my frame as being very average but being the perfectionist I am meant that I wasn't happy with just being average. I wanted to be skinny. Being skinny became the most important thing to me. I think the fact that I was such a late bloomer impacted on me a lot to. Because I went through puberty much later than all of my friends I got used to having a petite and child like body. I didn't cope with 'filling out' and getting a more womanly figure at all. 

At first I just cut out all desserts and 'unhealthy foods' like cake, and chocolate. I still ate a relatively normal breakfast, lunch and tea but replaced all other snacks with fruit. so I was eating far fewer calories but still I lost no weight. I honestly think that as I began to eat less and less my metabolism just slowed down. My body didn't want to leave the weight I was at. It was obviously my natural set point. I started walking to and from school each day but still I looked and weighed the same as I always had. I would go weeks without letting myself eat anything 'yummy' and If I did ever eat a forbidden food I would purge. For some reason I feel most ashamed about this stage of my eating so disorder so I would rather not go into a lot of detail about It but I will say I do not think I ever suffered from bulimia as I never binged. I would make myself sick after eating one piece of cake or one high calorie meal Ie. pasta. It was simply a way I could make up for eating a restricted food. I started reading weight loss magazines and calorie counting.

This went on for 6 months and still I had not lost any weight. I became extremely frustrated. It was extremely hard to see everyone around me enjoying all the yummy foods I was forbidding myself to have while I wasn't achieving anything. one day as I was about to get in the shower I looked in mirror and thought to myself, I am so sick of this. I was so sick of putting myself through all the of pain and achieving nothing. I knew that one way or another I had to change. Looking back I wish that I had just decided that restricting was too hard and that I should just enjoy my life but unfortunately I didn't. Instead I decided I needed to get more serious about losing weight. 

I became scared of nearly all food. I began purging more often as the list of forbidden foods became Stricter and stricter. One day I remember making myself sick after eating some strawberries because I felt like I had eaten too many.  I would eat 1 sachet of oats made with water for breakfast, a salad at lunch and for tea I would eat some vegetables. I lived in a boarding house so I still had to eat something for each meal. I went home for my school holidays and my parents could see I had lost a little weight but weren't really concerned until I refused to eat with them. I was no longer choosing not to eat, I honestly felt as though I couldn't eat. For a few weeks I survived on less then 100 calories a day. 

I obviously started to lose weight quite rapidly. I was extremely tired and cold and just laid around all day. Every time I stood up I felt extremely dizzy and would have to take a minute or so to steady myself before I could move. My parents took me to my local GP and she could tell the moment she saw me that I needed to be put in hospital. I had lost 10kg over a very short period of time, I was hypothermic and my heart was very weak. I had turned 18 only a few weeks earlier but luckily I was still able to be admitted into a children's ward at the nearest hospital (a two hour drive away). I was scared to be going Into hospital but I was also scared of not going into hospital as I had lost all control over my eating. Alone, I couldn't manage to eat any more than 100 calories a day and I knew that I would not survive for much longer eating so little.

I arrived at the hospital and was quickly diagnosed with anorexia nervous. Deep down I knew something was wrong but didn't think I was skinny enough to have anorexia. Now I realize that anorexia Is a mental illness and can effect you no matter what you weigh. 

I don't blame myself or anyone else for my illness and I don't think that any one particular event triggered my anorexia. My mum suffered from an eating disorder in her teens and my dad's sister had anorexia when she was my age. Quite a few of my second cousins have also had anorexia and sadly one of them even took her own life because she couldn't live with it any longer. Studies show that anorexia is both biologically and environmentally triggered and this Is what I believe too. While I do sometimes wonder how I ended up with this illness I always remind myself that it doesn't  really matter how I got it, what's really important is how I recover from it. Dwelling on the past and figuring out why I got sick won't make it go away.

I just wanted to give you all a bit of a background of my life so that you could understand a little about how my eating disorder began.