There was a time in my life when I didn’t really pay attention to the kind of food I put into my body. I don’t remember the moment when I decided I was overweight. In fact, there wasn’t a single pinnacle event that changed the way I saw my body. It was a series of moments over a long period of time that led to me kneeling over the toilet with my fingers down my throat. Like any other teenager, I idolized many celebrities and each winter I would watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show envious of women with legs much longer than my own. But I can’t blame the media for my self-criticism. The media was nothing but an enabler of my obsession with the way my body looked.

In ninth grade, I fixated on the ways my thigh touched. I was 100lbs and couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without holding my thighs apart. I would search the internet for all kinds of workouts that would target my inner thighs. I started to fixate on diets that I could never follow through with. There was one diet in particular that I would google over and over and over again. The three-day military diet claims that you can lose up to ten pounds in just one week. I was amazed until I actually looked at what I was supposed to eat.

For example, the meals for day one are:

Breakfast:

1 slice of Wholegrain toast with 2 tablespoons of peanut butter.

1/2 Grapefruit.

1 cup of coffee or tea.

Lunch:

A slice of whole grain toast.

1/2 cup of Tuna.

1 cup of coffee or tea.

Dinner:

3-Oz (85 grams) serving of any meat

1 cup of green beans.

1 small apple.

1/2 banana.

1 cup Vanilla ice cream.

The entire day’s calorie intake is between 1,300 and 1,500 calories. A normal calorie intake for an active 14-year-old girl is approximately 2,400 calories according to the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. What ultimately prevented me from never actually trying this diet was the fact that I hated tuna and I wasn’t allowed to eat chocolate. That kind of sounds ridiculous coming from someone so intent on losing weight but I love chocolate and let’s be real, the mind of a teenager is anything but rational. I never lost any weight, which only fueled my self-hatred. I would look at pictures of underweight girls before I went to the gym for inspiration and again when I was eating ice cream just to torture myself.

At sixteen years old and 115lbs I began to crop pictures of myself in bathing suits so I wouldn’t have to look at my stomach. As a junior in high school, I was really excited for prom at the end of the year. I bought a figure fitting dress, so I wanted to lose a couple of pounds before prom. The week before prom I stopped eating. I worked out twice a day, in the morning before school I went running. While I was running sometimes I would start to lose vision or get really dizzy. Other times I would start to lose feeling in my hands. I didn’t have a good time at prom, I didn’t have any energy and I was starving. The pictures came out really nicely, but it was at least a month before I could eat food without feeling sick or being in pain. This experience should have been enough to make me realize that I had a bad relationship with food and my body.

At seventeen and 130lbs I discovered that after vomiting from binge drinking I lost weight. I hated my body, the way my stomach wasn’t flat, that my legs had cellulite, that my arms weren’t toned. I couldn’t control myself when I ate, to give you an idea I used to literally eat frosting from the can. To compensate for consuming so many calories on a day to day basis I would force myself to puke. It was horrible every time I did it, and each time I would tell myself that tomorrow I would start eating healthier. Each time without fail I would end up back in my bathroom with my fingers down my throat. When you’re bulimic you don’t lose any weight which really helps feed into the vicious cycle of binging and purging. What finally made me realize I had a problem was when one day it physically hurt to stand straight, my stomach hurt badly, it was hard to eat food, and I was as miserable as ever. The summer after I graduated from high school I started eating very healthy and running up to six miles a day. I started to feel a lot better physically and mentally.

My freshman year of college I started doing high-intensity interval training which makes me sweat profusely and leaves me in a great mood when I’m done. I am currently a sophomore in college and I still struggle with my body image on a day-to-day basis. Recovering from an eating disorder in college is really difficult. There aren’t many healthy food options in the dining halls and for some reason, there’s free pizza everywhere. I find the best way to counter my eating disorder tendencies is to go running because running makes me feel strong and to eat what I crave, in moderation. I try not to count calories because when I begin to track what I eat I find myself fixating on calories which is what I did at the height of my eating disorder. It can be hard to be kind to yourself, but being kind to myself is what helps me when I find myself looking for flaws with my body.