What was the cause of your ED?

Have you discovered why you developed your ED? What were the fears or situations that helped trigger it? 

I've come to realize that a big reason I developed my eating disorder was because I feared growing up. I loved my childhood and early teen years. When I entered highschool, I didn't talk to many of my old friends - they had either moved away or turned into skanks only interested in boys (they've grown out of that phase now, though). Also, I was very close with my two older brothers, and they both moved out last summer at about the same time. I was also a late bloomer and starting to gain some weight in "those" areas. So I was at a vulnerable stage but felt alone.

Now I know that women are supposed to have a higher percentage of bodyfat than guys, and need bums and boobs! Also, just because I'm not a kid anymore doesn't mean I can't still act goofy and stupid. It just means that I have more responsibilities, and therefore need more confidence to carry them out.

I'm 6 ft and have been 6 ft since about 15....I was always a pretty fat teenager, I got bullied a lot at school and college by people I thought were my friends, but were really just a group of insecure people trying to put weaker members of the group down in order to make themselves feel better...

Also I'm your classic perfectionist - everything had to be perfect about me.....

control: I felt that everything was just slowly sliding out of my grip and I had no control over anything, but deciding not to eat, that was MY decision.  I seemed to have drifted into my degree, my uni, my job applications, but eating, that was something I could control.  And when I felt I wasn't improving at Uni, losing weight was something I could do, it was my success, and when I was suffering, I felt like a good person, it felt like I didn't deserve to eat, because I was a bad person, but suffering made me better...wow, I sound really crazy, don't I?

And then there's my family: nothing I do will ever be good enough for them, it was a way of showing my anger, particularly at my mother, because she just doesn't care about anyone but herself - she finds it hard to deal with her own emotions, let alone mine, I've never felt like my parents really care for me, they just want the perfect daughter they can wheel out at events, they have no comprehension of how to relate to me, of how to deal with emotions, essentially they are two good people who should have not have been allowed to have children.  My god, I have huge hatred and anger - it's just not healthy.

I wanted to be able to tell the world to **** off - I felt like the world was telling me a way I should be, should act, should look, and I wanted to opt out of that system of judgement, anorexia was my rejection of society's system.  It just seemed unfair to me, the whole thing, the cycle of growing up, getting a job, gettingvmarried, having kids, and I was bored of that, why the **** should I?  Whose rules was I having t live my life by?

Essentially I think my ED was born out of anger, and it was the only way I could, I can think of to show that anger, but I'm slowly realising that no one will get the message when I'm this underweight, and if I want to really and truly stick two fingers up at society, I have to be a healthy weight to do it!

I just want to be able to stand up and say a big **** You to everyone...and I now know that anorexia is not the way to do it....

Good luck to us all

bitchy girls....i used to call them my bestfriends. long story short, they changed and i was no longer cool enough for them. 10 years of friendship down the drain. so in order to be better than those girls-along with being an absolute perfectionist-and to hide all the feelings that were screaming to come out, i started restricting...and quickly. i also started excersising religiously for at least an hour and a half a day burning at least 600 cals. and i wouldnt let myself eat more than 200 cals a day. after i lost 30 lbs. the doctor and my therapist and nutritionist told me to stop excersising. so i did....and kept losing weight. my lowest weight was 80 lbs. at 15 and 5'4" and they told me i had a week to stop losing or i would be hospitalized. i started letting my feelings out and crying a lot more especially at meals. gaining weight it NOT as easy as it sounds...trust me. the first pound i gained i freaked out and started restricting harder again. then i got threatened with ED clinics after school. i completely understand how you guys feel and never thot that anorexia would happen to me.but once you get in it is almost impossible to get out. im now 86 lbs. and still struggling to gain weight. i have no idea why it is so hard to just eat but i guess thats where anorexia rears its ugly head. all together i guess my anorexia started with the pressure to be mentally strong and so much better than these girls that i thot being super skinny was the only way to do it.

oh and some other pain in the ass things that come along with not being able to "really eat": complete lack of energy, weird furlike armhair(?), having your butt bones kill when you sit on anything/bathe, being freezing in july, losing your hair, gross chippy nails, getting paler, no boobs or butt :(, getting easily annoyed by everyone, hating when people talk about going out to eat or food in general, obsessing over cookbooks and cooking/baking for others, being told five bajillion times a day your too skinny, and the list goes on

 

Original Post by positivelinny:

My cause....

Figure Skating (pressure to be a certain weight and told by coaches that I couldn't eat certain foods)

Ballet (weighed weekly and measured)

College (promised myself that I would not gain weight)

Sorority (compared to 90 other amazingly gorgeous girls)

and writing for a fashion magazine (ummm stick thin models who I thought were fantastic)....

could I have been any more of a "screaming victim"??

what fashion magazine did you write for?

anyway, my cause. i don't know probably a lot of different reasons.

my dad left when i was pretty young so i guess i was a little weird about guys. not your typical "my daddy wasn't there for me i'm going to make myself highly available because i crave attention from the opposite sex". i mean, i did want a relationship with a boy but i didn't want just any boy! i wanted someone i thought was incredibly special so i didn't end up really liking a boy until i was probably in 8th grade and by then i hadn't even held a boy's hand yet.

but i guess i kinda felt like no one could love me as is, i had to change myself because i was unlovable and unattractive. (or so i thought) so when i met a boy that could love me i would be lovable if i lost weight and was pretty. if that makes any sense?

also i was always kinda poked at for my weight. not a ton but just little comments here and there. some from my brother and some from my dad. i still remember him saying something like 'watch out. you are genetically prone to thunder thighs.' as i was eating one day.

i wasn't ever seriously overweight but at my highest weight i had a bmi of 23.2 which is on the heavier side of healthy. i went to school with a lot of girls that were thinner than me and i was kinda of a tomboy and never felt like a real girl. so also one of my reasons was because i wanted to be small like i thought a girl should be.

i continued starving myself for yet another reason. because i felt guilty that i could eat plenty while a lot of other people were starving. not by choice but because they couldn't eat because they were too poor. i felt like i should know what it felt like to be starving. and every time i ate i felt like i was giving in and being selfish. i worked at a coffee shop at the time and people would come in and order these huge 800 calorie or more drinks and complain about how it took a whole 3 minutes to make like they were dying of thirst/hunger and that just added to my hatred of what i saw as overindulgence.

i guess i still haven't overcome all of those fears and reasons yet but i am working on them and i have realized that i need to eat to be healthy and that i shouldn't put food in my mouth (or not out food in my mouth) for anyone but me. i should think about what is going to keep me healthy and happy. and i'm going to be loved for who i am or hated for who i am and i can't help that so i might as well just do the things i know are good for me and not worry about it. : )

Mine started when I was 19.  My very abusive boyfriend whom I lived with told me he had been cheating on me the whole 1 1/2 years we were together!  I broke up with him and moved back in with my parents.  He kept threatening me and saying he was going to kill me.  He would follow me to work and sit in the parking lot for hours.  At first I would get sick from the stress.  Then I would work so fast that when I was finished I would puke.  I used to unload trucks.  Finally I just did it cause I noticed I was losing weight.  I finally stopped when I started dating my current husband.  I felt guilty for purging the food that he paid for.  The I gaind all my weight back.  I had lost 45 pound in a month.

The second time I was about 25.  I started taking phentermine to lose weight.  It was working too so I just stopped eating all together.  When the doctor took me off of them I would get so hungry I at all the time.

Now I am 29 and trying to do this the healthy way.  Although I have tendencies to starve or purge, I try not to give in to them.  It's really hard for me, but I know I can do it.

i think that i hated my life and myself so much that i tried to dissapear by starving myself to nothing.

The torment I got by other kids in school. I was never really made fun of for my weight, but just my overall appearance. It seemed from the day I started school in Kindergarten I was made fun of EVERY single day I was in school until I left school in 8th grade and started to get homeschooled. I seriously felt like Carrie White in my school minus the awesome powers, sadly. :( :P

I just didn't have any self confidence whatssoever. My home life was always kind of hectic. I didn't have a father who expressed his emotions and to this day I have only heard him say he loved me 3 times in my whole life and I am 21.

I had a small occurance when I was 13 with an eating disorder, but it soon faded pretty fast though I was still kind of complaining about my weight, but I wasn't overly obsessed.

Basically in 2005 when I was 18, I decided to go on a diet because a few of my friends and I were going to go to a movie premiere and I wanted to look my best, well the diet turned into an eating disorder that grabbed me so fast I didn't even realize I had one. Perhaps, I was in denial.

 The point of the matter is what I learned if there is an inward problem no weight is ever going to make that problem go away. You have to work on yourself inward to improve yourself. Not your outward appearance.

Well being a natural born perfectionist I think that I was a walking target for anorexia. But.. Although I love my Mom dearly I do believe she had a little to do with why I have a screwed perception of food for example my Moms diet when I was a kid:

For example:

Monday: Peas. Couple of slices of bread

Tuesday etc: Probably not much at all

My Mum claims she just had no appetite due to smoking so much  when she was younger, I wish I hadnt have seen her do it though.

But It was mainly when I turned 15 that everything changed, Well lets just say I got hooked on alcohol pretty severly (Beer/Lager) to be exact and it put me a stone in weight on! Now I had always been 5'7 and naturally 133lbs but suddenly going from this weight to 147lbs made me freak out pretty crazily. I stopped drinking and felt so discouraged with myself I seemed to just stop eating over night because I was so ashamed.

My "dieting" causes? Heart palputations, the loss of 4 years of my life, and my lowest weight which was 98lbs and 5'7.

Crazy.

 

the reason for my eating disoder was...when I was about 8 years old, I used to be the typical girly girl that had lots of friends, outgoing, pretty happy nice girl. My dad who had divorced my mother a few years before (when I was barely 5) started dating this woman, who he eventually married in the long run. At first she was "nice", you know...she didnt say much, didnt really make m uch of a statement in my life....but after she got married, we were at my dad's house...and things started to go wrong. She would treat me and my brother really badly...but things got even worst with  me...for some reason or another, she just attacked me left and right. She would call me fat, and ugly, and would basicly say that my clothes fit her, and she's way older, that I should be ashamed. She used to say that I Was unworthy of love, and gifts, and that I shouldnt be loveable with my dad infront of her, or she would get really angry at me and punish me. She would lock in bathrooms whenever Ididnt clean up her dog's necessities...Back then I had really long curly hair...that was mainly what peopel loved about me the most. They all loved my hair and how it was naturaly curly, and long and so healthy looking. So she woke me up, she put clothes that were hideous on me, and got me into her car. I asked her, scared, where was she taking me...she wouldnt speak....after a while she screamed saying that I wasnt allowed to talk in her car....anyway....we got to a place Ive never been before...I stepped in and it was a beauty shop...she came to one of the girls there and said "I want all her hair cut off...as short as you can"...I cried real badly...she cut my hair all the way up to my ears and even more on the back....I looked like a boy...

I would come home and tell my mother, and my mother would cry, and tell my father of what was going on...but he wouldnt believe it....he would ask me infront of her if it was true...and I wouldnt dare say it was....not infront of her...Id cry, and he wouldnt understand...

Id be punished the day after for telling my mother....and she would accuse my mother infront of me of being a liar to my dad..

 

I lived like this for 4 full years every weekend I Spent with my father, until he finally noticed and left her.

But since then I was never the same..I became overly concerned with my figure, I always thought I was fat, and just unworthy...even though I wasnt...it was awful..

Ive done btter with the years, but the self esteem issue is still there...and I dont know if it will ever change...

thankfully Ive found inner strength to stop feeling **** about myself and I Think im making some progress....

 

bananee Im so sorry that this happened to you. The way you were treated was terrible and there is no reasoning for this happening to you apart from the fact this woman is an evil evil person.

She really seems like she was jealous of you, especially because of the hair incident, I know people can have such an influence on all of us by the way you have been treated but never forget that you are beautiful and this woman is ugly on the inside.

Original Post by hollie07:

bananee Im so sorry that this happened to you. The way you were treated was terrible and there is no reasoning for this happening to you apart from the fact this woman is an evil evil person.

She really seems like she was jealous of you, especially because of the hair incident, I know people can have such an influence on all of us by the way you have been treated but never forget that you are beautiful and this woman is ugly on the inside.

that's ok :) thank you though...life was tough as a child and yes she was a horrible woman. Beautiful on the outside, but just rotten inside.

My mom and my psychologist and even my nutritionist blame her for my self esteem issues as well as my ED.

I just hope that one day I can finaly be more confident, and just forget about all that past traumatic events.

 

i was always overweight as a child and i hated being the fat girl and always feeling rejected. I developed an ED mindset last year when i severely restricted my diet. It came to the point where i refused to go anywhere or social situations, family holiday parties, vacations.. because i was afraid of food. Finally i told myself i could not live like that. I did gain weight ideally more than i would have liked but i realize that a healthy body and mind is worth it (and salvage my relationships as well)

Original Post by eerica:

i think that i hated my life and myself so much that i tried to dissapear by starving myself to nothing.

As if one day you would just dissolve into the air and then the wind would pick you up and carry you away so you would never have to think again. Me too, Erica. ='[

So many things could have contributed, so I’ll go through a couple!

I’m a perfectionist, was good at everything as a child then I moved to Hong Kong from Australia, quit my sports, put on weight, and stopped trying in all aspects of my life, socially I was not the nicest person I could have been, and academically I just didn’t try to achieve anything

A natural perfectionist, my true self was outraged at my lack of achievement! I was SMART but people thought I was DUMB because I chose not to try.

I moved back to Australia in 2000. I had social issues in HK and they continued in Aus, I was a little socially inept and could not connect with people and was a loner and created such trouble in high school and got noticed for all the wrong reasons, high school was utter hell for me and I abused my body with the wrong foods, and ate more then I needed and I was never obese but I became a little over weight at one point but I was within the healthy range most of the time, but at a weight that way past comfortable weight.

A “ friend” of mine who was always the same height and size as me joined a gym and lost a little weight, I saw her after a few months and thought she looked great and was jealous of course. The word “ fat” ad being called fat has always hit a HUGE nerve with me, because of how I felt about my own body, and I obviously had a desire to be thin

I was a toxic person who was not happy within my self, so I could not feel happy for other people; I could only feel jealously.

 

I joined the same gym, lost weight and looked great but I kept loosing weight. It started out healthy, but I became hooked on seeing a loss on the scales!

I starved for many reasons through out the disorder, my dad came back for months at a time from HK and lived with me and my then boyfriend and he was being a bastard about me slacking off at college

I felt better about my body once I ditched the junk food and ate the right foods, enough to feel motivated to try at school and I was getting all A’s in all my subjects. Through out my life I never persevered or finished anything I started, something always sabotaged things, and college was no exception.

My parents are great and were just worried that I would never get a good job if I didn’t pull my finger out academically, so when I was too sick to finish they did not accept it, they think I could have went on and maybe I could have, it was all a haze that I don’t remember.

Dad moved back for a couple of months from Hong Kong and lived at home with me and my then boyfriend, and he screamed so much at me about college, and at the thought of me not finishing it so his screaming made me not want to eat, he called me worthless once and I definitely did not feel like I wanted food in my body at that instance.

I wanted to be skinny too.

So a whole lot of things shaped my anorexia!

I have recovered and I have battled binge eating more recently, the old preoccupation with food from my anorexia came into play, and I was not eating enough this year when I started working out so my body WANTED to binge on food, and I lacked confidence for not finishing years 11 or 12 despite being intelligent enough to.

I have gotten my certificate 3 and 4 in personal training since, got my license, and I plan to do a course that will gain me entry into university for 2010.

Educating myself on nutrition and fitness has changed my life and I want to make a career out of helping other people realize their potentials through getting their bodies to function optimally.

mine could've been any number of things.

 

i started off because i went on birth control to try and get rid of my acne when i was in 7th/8th grade. I put on about 10 lbs and i didn't think i was heavy or fat, but i was uncomfortable with the weight i had put on. i just basically wanted to take it off. once i lost the weight my mother talked about how great i looked and i felt better too with working out and all. pretty soon i lost 5 more lbs and then 5 more, then 5 more. my boyfriend got insanely worried about me, i became obsessed with counting calories (still am but its to maintain and make sure im fueling my body enough to keep up with the exercise i do) and made sure every calorie i ate i burned through exercise. all the way down to 5'7 at 105lbs from 138lbs. i was weak, always tired, cold all the time, depressed. yet my mother kept saying how great i looked so i kept it up, it also could've been my parents divorce, my perfectionism in school translated to looks and always aiming for that perfect size zero. i still relapse there's no doubt about it. but at least im back up to 115lbs and still working on it!

 

 

 

 

Bloody oath, I am sick of the stupid underline thing! I never do it, it just does it automatically! Here is my post again so you can read it clearer!

I am HORRIFIED about the mothers in these last two posts! 

ssejaclop

- I am saddened to hear that your mother called you fat and said you look disgusting when you asked her how you looked! That is an UNHEALTHY way to be if you have children, no NORMAL mother would say anything like that.

 

discoqueenx3 discoqueenx3

- perfectionism is such a huge factor that contributes to SO many ED ‘s, including my own!

I do not know you or your mother but any mother who says those things to their daughter NEEDS HELP.

DON’T let yourself be the victim any more and beat this ED for you, so you can live a normal and happy life without your parents holding you back!

Where to start? When I was only 4 I was molested by the neighbor kid who was 15. This went on for about a month until he moved away. I forgot about it shortly after.

Later in life my parents put a lot of pressure on me because I was the first born so I became a perfectionist. My mom is also a control freak.

I was skinny until I was eight then I became obese and was called fat my entire young life.

I hate change and puberty hit. Being a year older didn't make things better because I was alone. I also wanted to be attractive to girls and get attenion because no one noticed me.

I had a great desire to be like everyone else because of being made fun of for everything.

Finally my Grandpa died bringing the memory of when I was 4 rushing back. I told one of my only friends and he told people sending me into a cycle of depression. That was in my sixth grade year.

Two years later near the end of the eigth grade I watched supersize me in health and I developed food phobias. From there things began cycling out of control. It got really bad in the beginning of freshmen year when the girl I always liked asked me to homecoming because I couldn't possible comprehend someone as ugly as me being with a goddes like her. So I decided to make myself good enough for her. My entire freshmen year becane a nightmare.

Sorry about the length.

-

The cause of my eating disorder...

Well, i was essentially replaced by my best friend last year for someone better... they made me feel like utter *^(*&%^. I became depressed, lost appetite, then avoided food altogether, because to me- food in the past = happiness. I didnt deserve to be happy anymore, i.e. i didnt deserve food.

*&^*(& that.

A year later, now ive got a high self esteem and such pity for those stupid girls. I'm my own person, looking out for number one.

I didn't develop my eating disorder until college. I was very active in high school and had always been thin. I ended up gaining a fair amount of weight my first year in college (beer and cafeteria food).

When I went home on break, I was really uncomfortable with my body and asked my parents if I looked like I had gained a lot of weight. My dad told me my legs looked like sausages and my pants were digging into my hips. Then one of my friends told me that I looked round and soft, like a new mommy. WTF?? I look like I just gave birth?

Hello anorexia. I dropped from 125 lbs to 90 very quickly eating 500cal/day. Funny thing is, I was actually happier at 125.