When I was in sixth-grade people started rumors that I was pregnant because I hadn’t outgrown my baby pudge, so in turn, I didn’t eat my lunches because I thought if people saw me eat they would laugh at me. This was the start of my abusive relationship with food. I say it this way because just like an abusive relationship: you enjoy the relationship sometimes and most times you don’t actually realize what is going on.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was busy with school and friends so it was easier to skip my meals. I would pass it off as being bored instead of hungry and not eat. If I got hungry during the day I would just drink water, and by the time I got home, I would say I wasn’t hungry. I just wouldn't eat--and yes, before anyone's asks... I did get hungry. I was hungry.

After a while I realized that what I was doing was hurting me, a friend mentioned they could see my hip bones. I looked down and still, all I saw was fat. I was a 105 pounds and begging to be thinner, I wanted to be beautiful like the other girls were. I left high school shortly after it got to this point, I started eating again and it was great, but the nagging feeling was always there.

Then my brother passed away and I was so distressed I couldn’t keep any food down without my body immediately rejecting it, I didn’t eat for three days. I would hang out with my friends a lot after this. They all had their own lives and issues so they didn’t really have time to keep track of whether or not I was eating.

I was sneaky. I would grab the food while we were all in the basement and I would say I didn’t like it and not eat it, or I would walk around with it and then leave it somewhere and deny it when the person who lived there would complain that someone was wasting food. It was so easy this way. I was out from 12 o'clock in the afternoon until my curfew at 11 p.m. I would have eaten just once that day.

A while later the same friend who complained about the food put two and two together and realized what I was doing. He was pissed, to say the least, but he had other friends who had gone through this, so he knew how to handle it gracefully. My friend sat my ass down and told me I had to eat. He would drive me to restaurants and we wouldn't leave until I ate something. He would even pay for it so I didn’t have a reason not to eat. Once he started forcing me to eat I figured out a way around this and got an app for my phone to count my calories. 140 calories in a can of coke, 287 in six chicken nuggets, and 285 in a slice of pizza. I was over my limit. I allowed myself six hundred calories a day and I had gone over. I was angry and wanted to cry, I felt like a failure. I couldn’t even not eat right. This friend sat me down again and told me he was proud of me. He continued to do this every time I ate, and I strived for the feeling of having people proud of me.

He is the reason I am as better as I can be. I say as better as I can be because I'll never be truly okay. I will always have that voice inside telling me that I shouldn’t eat something because it’ll get me fat and that I won't be pretty if I eat all that food.

It's a mental illness; this voice telling you not to eat. You become so dependent on not eating that once you do you begin to freak out.

It will always be a struggle, the voice will always be there telling you not to eat, recovery is just learning to ignore that voice and do what is best for yourself.