''On the outside its hard to understand, on the inside its hard to explain."

I remember it all so clearly. The final bell ringing, the smell of fresh cut grass. Summer was finally here. It was the last day of middle school, and I remember walking out of the school doors I had spent so much time walking into the last three years of my life. I couldn’t believe I would be entering High School. I had waited so long for this. I have always been a social butterfly, and going to a new school meant new people, and new friends. All of this excited me, but I had the whole summer ahead of me, and I was totally excited. After a few weeks of hanging out with friends, shopping, tanning, and of course summer snacking, my family and I decided to do a “summer healthy eating challenge.”

I was up for it, besides, who wouldn’t want to look their best for their freshman year of high school? I was by no means fat, just the right size for my age and height. Losing a few pounds wouldn’t hurt me, and my parents didn’t think it would either. So I laid off the snacks and started to exercise. As the weight started to come off little by little, I felt great. I received many compliments, and I felt energized as ever. When I looked in the mirror, I was satisfied with the way I was looking and I wanted more. I thought to myself… if I can go a day with just eating the three main meals, I wonder if I can go with just eating two meals a day, or maybe what if I even cut those meals in half and didn’t even eat full meals. Little did I know these were the thoughts that would change my life forever.

As I started eating less and less, the weight came off faster, and that yearn for weight loss became stronger. Losing weight became my one and only focus and I lost interest in anyone and everything else. I didn’t notice how much of an impact my weight loss had on my friends and family. I didn’t see in the mirror how thin I was. My best friends since second grade started to get concerned and I started slowly pushing them away. When it was time for school to start back up, my fellow peers that I’d gone to school with since 1st grade, hardly recognized me. My Mom began receiving phone calls almost daily from some of my peers parents, and even teachers. They were saying that they suspected I had an eating disorder. When I heard this is what they were saying, I became very frustrated. How could I have an eating disorder? I wasn’t even skinny! This would be my thought process for many months that followed, as I slowly wasted away.

My alarm clock went off that morning like it did every other, but this was the morning that made a fork in the new pathway I had started for myself that year. As I started to walk towards the bathroom that morning, I found myself on my bedroom floor, blurred, not knowing what had happened. As I tried to gain balance and get up again, I found myself once again, falling down onto the floor. I began for my mother’s room falling as I went. I remember the ambulances coming for me… the firefighters lifting me up onto the stretcher, my mother’s tears as she begged my father not to tell my brother, and mostly I remember the threat of the feeding tube.

Imagine not even being allowed to go to the bathroom by yourself because you are too weak to do so. Imagine being forced to pee in front of strangers because the reason you’re too weak is because you haven’t eaten for days. Humiliating isn’t even the word for it. Some people say… why don’t you just eat? If it was that simple, I wouldn’t have been where I was that day in the hospital, lying to the doctor when he looked me in the eye telling me I needed to eat, promising him I would do so.

Although this was only the first “wake-up call” I had throughout the course of my eating disorder, that doctor really smacked me into reality that day. I started seeing a therapist who specialized in eating disorders, as well as having check-ups with a dietician twice a week. This was very difficult for me to say the least. My mom kept a strict watch on my food intake daily, and I literally had to keep a dairy of what I was eating each day. You think being told what to do is annoying, try being told what you need to eat. I felt like such a child, I had to eat everything on my plate before leaving the table, and all our dinner conversations started revolving around my eating disorder.

I didn’t want to live like this anymore. It just wasn’t fair. I figured, I got myself into this mess and I’m going to get myself out of it. I started taking therapy seriously, and actually ate what my dietician told me to eat. By no means was any of this easy for me. It was probably one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my entire life. I relapsed many times, ending up back in the hospital, in and out of school once again. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I really came to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For so long I thought I’d never beat my eating disorder. For so long I thought I would forever have to identify myself as someone who struggles with eating issues.

I found that loving yourself for who you are isn’t as simple as it may seem on the outside. Loving yourself takes acceptance. That acceptance comes from within, and until someone’s able to accept themselves as a whole individually, they will never be accepted or loved by another the way they want to be. There are still days when I feel down on myself and my body, but I just have to remember how unhappy I was when I was a prisoner of anorexia. Acceptance and happiness does not come from being "good enough" to the people around you, but from yourself.