Beneath the Muscle: Disordered Eating

It's time. I NEED to share the FULL story with you, the full journey thus far. Because I do a lot of listening when I walk around and see the many, many different people I see. I hear a lot of judgement. I hear a lot of lack of understand and flat out rude comments. It's so easy to make assumptions and be hateful towards others because we don't understand their journey. And what really gets me is the people I KNOW have many of their own inner struggles with food, with emotional eating... it really pains me inside that sometimes, even I think these things, too.

I have been making new connections lately with some incredibly beautiful souls and the more people I talk to the more I realize how rare it is for people who have gone through what I have to actually step forward and share it with the world. It's embarrassing, it's dark, it makes us feel weak and vulnerable.

Lucky for you, I have never felt ashamed by these dark experiences, maybe because I know I am not even near that same person I used to be, but I have this sense in my own soul that the world needs to hear what I have to say. And I ALWAYS have something to say :)

Let's look toward the "beginning" (we'll skip the age from 10 years to 19 years for time sake!). What do you see when you look at this picture?

Let me explain to you who was really standing there. A terrified young woman. This was mere days before I was to return home and go into a full-time in-patient adult treatment for disordered eating. I was in panic about my weight that ballooned the second I step foot in Vegas in 2007. I felt horribly about myself and my body was rebelling against my change in routine. It couldn't handle food and I gained 10lbs in water weight (which I quickly shed before I was admitted). This girl was very lonely... she felt very hopeless and lost, like there would never be the beautiful light and sky she was surrounded with.

So I went. And I had decided that this second stint in treatment was going to be my last. I remember being so uncomfortable in my own skin and emotions that I couldn't sit still, the minutes DRAGGED on and I lived in constant fear of the food I was forced to digest. I knew what I was doing and why but I was swarmed with irrational fears I didn't yet understand.

This is something that many, many people will never truly understand. It appears utter insanity to anyone else who has never experienced it but when you grow up lacking SO much control over your life and the things happening around you, in a life full of secrets, sometimes there just doesn't seem to be other options. I grew up being patronized and teased, bullied, my hair set on fire on the school bus, bullied at home and living in a world that constantly told me I'm "fat". Eventually everything comes back on how useless, selfish, and fat you are and this becomes the only thing in your life you feel you can control. Until you can't anymore. That moment is sheer and utter terror, when you realize you have lost it all. You begin to try and heal on your own but seem completely powerless to control your compulsions. Purging releases endorphins in the body and becomes psychologically addicting quite quickly, like drugs and alcohol. It brings the strangest rush you would never imagine... I abused my body and hid in secret, eating mass amount of food in sheer shame, spending money I couldn't even afford, $50 a shot, on food to eat in secret. I was eating in secret at 10 years old, already feeling shame for my habits. It's binge eating, something many more people can relate with, but with a sheer desperation not to gain weight, that we would do absolutely whatever was necessary to prevent that. My entire self-worth was tied in my weight, the scale, and how I looked.

Don't we all wish we could eat whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted and never gain weight? Well I'd found out how. And it almost ruined my life.

I remember seeing doctors and specialists about palpating heart, skipped beats, I saw a heart specialist. I was purging up to 6-7x a day on bad days but could go up to 3 days without eating.

What do you see here? Now that you know, can you see and feel the lonliness and desperation in my eyes? Can you SEE how emotionally ill I really was? Or do you just see how small I was...

Sometimes I still look at this and think, wow... I wish I could be that small. I was 135-139 lbs at 5'9" and lacked any muscle on my body. I just couldn't sustain it. I remember often hating myself in the gym, watching other more muscular, more toned women walk past me. I would watch them work out and wonder why I could never look like that. What was I doing wrong? I ate great....I though.... really.... the things you miss when you think you know someone, right?

Funny, even I am quick to judge this picture, quick to forget the cost that this body and this shot as a whole. It could have cost me my life. I am blessed enough to have had the strength to pull through some of the most uncomfortable and terrifying days, not everyone is so lucky.

It's a journey I still struggle with every single day. A mindset and a disease I've accepted will never just disappear. But I have come a long way in the last 7 years... a very, very long way.

And my journey doesn't end here... ONE MONTH out of eating disorder recovery I fell pregnant and would begin and who new terrifying journey that would alter my life.

Until next time, friends <3

Chelsea