Sweating. Calories. Numbers. Labels. Body checking. These are just a few of the things I became obsessed with at an early age and
unfortunately stayed with me for almost 15 years. Just thinking about sweating took up most of
my day and never felt like I was ever in the present moment. I really never understood what “being
present” even meant. I could not wait
until I felt that first drip of sweat come off my body because in my mind that
meant calories dying, that meant one-inch closer to losing weight. It showed hard work, it showed what I thought
was just being healthy. I started
weighing myself constantly in high school and started to become obsessed with
numbers not only on the scale, but on clothes, on nutrition labels, on anything
that could possibly resemble a body size or what you were putting in to your
body. I started lifting my shirt up
every morning in the bathroom to check and see if I had suddenly lost 10 pounds
over night, if my hip bones were protruding out of my skin, if you could see my
collar bones more-so than yesterday. If
my eyes didn’t see what it liked, then I would go into self-destruction mode
and only eat apples that day or staying on a cardio machine for that much longer. I would grasp for anything that I would think
would help me get to the body I wanted, you know, that “perfect body” we all
have in our minds that we desperately try to achieve and if we don’t, we feel
like a failure, we don’t feel enough, we
don’t even feel worthy as a human being.
So, is an eating disorder just a diet to try and lose weight? Well, at one point in time I said yes. I would think I am just doing the norm of taking care of myself, working
out, wanting to lose a few pounds here and there, eating healthy, because that
in turn would help me feel accepted in the world. I would do whatever “fad” workout or healthy
foods was popular at the time.
After a few years of torturing myself in the gym and not
nearly feeding myself enough nutrients, I was getting so frustrated that my
body hasn’t changed, nothing was changing, if anything I was a tad bigger than
when I started this obsession with my body.
So, being an athlete my entire life, my competitiveness kicked in and I
took it to the next level. What if I did
allow myself to eat, my body would “think” it was getting everything it needed
to function but then trick it by purging.
The diet of barely eating and
working out (oh and forgot to mention, I was playing college basketball during
the midst of all of this) wasn’t cutting it.
Let me try eating but throw it up and continue to work out. Yea!
Let’s do that! How I never passed
out during practice, during a game, after a workout, I have no idea but there
was no stopping me in getting the body I had always wanted so I can feel good about
myself and feel good about my place in the world. Once a day purging became 5 times, to 7
times, sometimes 10 times a day. To me,
it was that instant gratification of feeling empty again after purging that got
me hooked. I was back to feeling empty,
empty of myself, my thoughts, my feelings, all that stuff I never wanted to
deal with at a moment’s glance.
Basically, I was avoiding reality because reality was and still is a
scary place for me. It did however, feel
so good to finally just EAT whatever I wanted because I knew it was coming
right back up. I could never allow it to
digest because it would turn directly to fat (in my mind) and fat is bad,
right? Wrong. You have to have fat to survive, it is an
essential nutrient your body needs to function, if only I knew that then.
After 10+ years of having bulimia, the only thing I felt I
had control over in my life, I became more and more depressed, unhappy with
life, unhappy with my identity, and just never got to the point of loving the
way my body looked or simply loving myself.
In my mind, the way my body looked described how I was as a person. I wanted everyone to know how much I worked
out and that I was a college basketball player, how much I “took care of my
body” so people would think, “Oh, Tracey must be so disciplined, mentally and
physically strong, just a badass chick all around.” Why did I care so much about what people
thought? Why did I already have a story
implemented in their mind of how they perceived me and it was never good enough? Why did I event think people paid that much
attention to me? Because I now realize
that it wasn’t about having the perfect body.
None of this was really about losing weight or thinking I was on a
life-long diet. Through years of
therapy, going to a treatment center in Denver, CO., continuously working with
my team of doctors to this very day, I’ve realized this is a mental disorder. My addiction-of-choice was food and exercise
like an alcoholic’s choice in alcohol. I
turned to these two things to cope with unwanted thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I turned to food to numb out everything that
made me feel “real.” If I didn’t feel
anything then I didn’t have to worry about how I was viewed as a friend,
daughter, girlfriend, colleague, because I strive for perfection in every
aspect of my life. I’ve had a Drill
Sargent in my head constantly telling me, “you’re fat, you’re not enough, you
have to be perfect, they don’t like you, no one likes you, your outside appearance
tells everything about you, etc.” It’s
not the food, it’s not a diet, it’s a serious mental illness that no one knows
exactly what causes it but eating disorders are not a “fad” that comes and
goes. They are not a choice to have and
they are certainly NOT a diet for bikini season. It is something that controls every move,
every thought, every decision you make. So, why didn't I just stop. Just stop throwing
up, just stop working out so much, just STOP. Folks, hate to break it to
you, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s
like telling someone who is deaf to listen harder or someone with a broken leg
to just walk it off. It is not a light
switch we can turn on and off on days we don’t feel like having this disorder
like how you can say “I am going off this diet.” My mind on how it
thinks, how it processes things, how it sees things is just different than
someone who doesn’t have a mental disorder.
Point blank.
Even though I now have
a better grasp on everything I have been through, it sucks to think back on how
much life I missed out on. It seems like
my entire 20’s was a blur because I was thinking in a completely different
mindset than I am now after going through treatment and on-going therapy. One thing is for certain though, I can say
recovery has opened the gates of hell and it has let me out.
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