I was a happy child; pretty, popular and confident. I had lots of friends and was very happy. But I was always slightly concious of my weight and of what was an "acceptable" weight to be. I was a chubby child, like any normal kid, but my mum was always on a diet, and tried to make me eat healthily to lose weight. She first took me to a nutritionist when I was 8, and my bmi was around 26.7, so not hugely overweight. But her and the nutritionist put me on a special diet, and from then on, my mind was twisted. I thought that in order to win my mums love, I had to lose weight and be thin and beautiful. She had always taught me about calories and fat, and I thought that was the only way to make her happy. So from a young age I had a very negative relationship with food, and began eating food in secret; stealing chocolate and cheese from the fridge and sneaking it upstairs to eat.
Then, at the age of 10 I moved to America. I loved it there and made loads of amazing friends. But aged 11, we moved back to England. I've never liked change, and all this moving really unsettled me. In my new school (I had moved to secondary school in the UK), everything was different. I wasn't funny or popular or confident. I was shy and withdrawn, and soon developed depression. I hated my new school and just wanted to go back to America. I began self harming around the age of 12, and soon after that went on my first diet.
At first it was nothing too serious; cutting out snacks and chocolate, but it escalated quickly into an out of control eating disorder. I was restricting to around 300 calories a day, and was losing almost half a stone every week. But it only lasted a month, when people began getting suspicious. I lost control, and started binging again. Soon, I started making myself sick. Since then it's been a constant cycle of fast, binge, purge, restrict, binge, purge....
There are others causes to my eating disorder, of course. Trying to fit in, trying to live up to other peoples expectations. Also, I'm a total perfectionist, and want to be perfect in all aspects of my life. My sister is super clever (as in, she got all A*'s at GCSE, and 5 A's at AS level) and she's going to Cambridge university to do Medicine. She's the apple of my entire family's eye, and I'm the disappointment. I wish that, for once, I could be better at something. I wish I could have my mums attention for once, and for someone to care about me.
This entire struggle...it's never ending, and it destroys me. Only one friend knows that I've ever had an ED, and she thinks I've recovered. I think if I tell her I'm struggling, she'll be disappointed.
