An Eating Disorder

An eating disorder is the worst type of disorder to live with. It affects every part of you from the physical to the emotional. You have to watch daily how it takes its toll on your body without your control. It will disintegrate you or it will double you in size. Food is your worst enemy and your best friend. And unlike other addictions, you can’t live without it. You are forced, even going through recovery to take in and enjoy your addiction three to six times a day. It’s as if someone is forcing heroin into your system, but only enough for you to feel the high for a minute or two. It leaves you aching for more. You have to worry about what people think because that’s all you’ve ever known. You wonder if people have noticed your sudden weight gain or loss. You use the same excuse and tell them you just recently got on birth control and then it’s dropped. You can both tell you’re lying. It’s obvious. Your disordered way of thinking about food is the one thing that brings you comfort while ingesting it, but leaves you feeling empty and painfully full as soon as your plate is clean. You eat normally in front of your friends because no one would accept you if they saw the way you tore through the fridge every night when you were home alone or when everyone is asleep. You store food in your room because the amount your family thinks is acceptable is just not enough for you. You eat a meal before you go out to eat with your friends or family because you know whatever you order at the restaurant will never be enough to feed the monster raging in your mind. You take spontaneous trips to fast food joints hoping that your mom won’t see you on the road or call you when you pull up to the drive through. Because then you’ll have to tell her what you’re doing and god, that’s the worst because telling someone who doesn’t understand is like talking to a broken record. You’ll hear the same thing over and over again. They’ll tell you to just start a new diet, but they don’t understand that’s what got you here in the first place. They’ll tell you to schedule your meals every day but they don’t understand it’s never enough. They’ll give you protein drinks to fill you up but that’s not what brings you joy. You see, the thing with eating disorders is that the very thing that saddens you and makes you feel lonely, will also make you feel loved and accepted for a short time and that’s why it’s so hard to stop. But they don’t understand. You listen to your health teacher talk about people who are obese because they eat and eat and eat and he looks right at you. And yes, you are this way because you eat and eat and eat but what he will never know or understand is that you can’t help it. That you weren’t always this way. That a few years ago you were healthy and didn’t think twice about the way people looked at you. But now if someone gives you a second glance and you catch them doing it, you don’t think it’s because you’re gorgeous, you think it’s because you look like a whale stepping into the store. But you will never be inside their head and you will never know why they were looking at you. You used to not think twice about what your boyfriend was thinking about you when you were naked in front of him. You used to just tell yourself he loved you because that’s what he always told you. But now that you’re covered in stretch marks and you have fat hanging from every limb, you worry with every pound you gain, you’ll steadily begin to lose him. You watch the numbers on the scale go up. Last year this time you were fifty pounds lighter and telling yourself you needed to start dieting or working out because this thing wasn’t going to stop itself. But now you have let it take over your entire body and you have lost your battle and you don’t feel like moving anymore. You ask yourself if there’s any reason to get out of bed because all you’ll be doing today is worrying about how you look and no matter what you decide to wear you won’t be happy with what you see. And yes the camera adds ten pounds but when you see yourself in that picture you see a whale in a sea of dolphins. You can’t stand to look in the mirror and when your friends finally convince you to go dress shopping you only pick out dresses for them to try on because you wish you were that size and you’re too ashamed to tell them your actual size. When your mom confronts you about the amount of weight you’ve put on you try to tell her that you have a disease but she doesn’t listen and just makes you another protein shake and that just makes it worse. What she doesn’t understand is that your life just isn’t worth living to you anymore. That you can’t deal with the people who look at you like you don’t belong here even though more than half of Americans are obese. But you can’t tell her that this is all her fault because she always would tell you that you needed to be skinny to be happy. For convincing you that you can’t be happy and fat at the same time. That happiness is a number on a scale, 140 pounds to be exact. For making you step on the scale in your underwear in front of her so that she could mock you and track exactly how many pounds you needed to lose to reach “happy”. You know she is the one to blame but you blame yourself because she wouldn’t understand.