The Turning Point: How I Started Loving My Body

It was like any other day in 2012: classes, scrolling through Facebook, talking with my roommates and sorority sisters and hiding a big, bad secret. For a bubbly, outgoing collegiate girl, image is extremely important. So important, that facing the pressures (whether perceived through media or while going out on Friday nights) makes a strong, intelligent girl break down and do really difficult things.

The first time I stuck my fingers down my throat I had eaten an entire pizza. My excuse was that I was drunk and “once wouldn’t hurt me,” right? Wrong. I was twenty when my struggle with binging and purging started. I wanted to be small. No curves, waif thin and attractive. I wanted to go out on the weekends, which I rarely did, and have guys look at me like I always some them look at other girls I knew. I wanted to be hot….no, sexy. To me, that meant being under 110 pounds and sometimes not getting periods because I was so little.

While I was never rail thin and from the outside, you really couldn’t tell anything was wrong, there was. This is common with bulimia and binging and purging, weight does not always fluctuate dramatically and those struggling are sometimes extremely successful at covering it up. My patterns weren’t really patterns. Sometimes I would go weeks, even months, without getting the urge to binge eat, therefore allowing me to believe I didn’t really have a problem. But when I felt down, stressed, depressed and backed into a corner, that feeling, “I need to eat. I have to eat everything” hit me, and I couldn’t stop. In my mind I was able to eat whatever I pleased: pizzas, cookies, entire jars of peanut butter, without shame because afterwards I could just get rid of it.

Little did I know how much this would mentally and physically mess me up. I would do this and then mentally shame myself, forcing myself to the gym to do hours of cardio to “make up” for the awful thing I did the night before. I would be so controlled with my diet during the day and week. So meticulous about eating “well” and not touching “bad foods” that when the urge hit, I went haywire. It was always at night. I’d wake up full of despair, thinking “now I’ll be fat and gross.” Where did this come from? My first two years of college I was untouched by this fear of being undesirable and out of control. It was as if a switch had been flipped. I couldn’t peg what triggered it and therefore, I couldn’t turn it off.

The hardest thing was hiding it. I must admit, I did a scarily good job. Anyone who knows me from college would have had no idea I was struggling at all. I was fun, outgoing, charismatic and overall, happy.

The guilt was all the more consuming because I felt ashamed, afraid to admit this to anyone until my senior year. At twenty-one, I broke down to my roommate, my totally oblivious best friend who lived not three feet away from me in the next room. As I had joked throughout the year about my appetite, even “getting rid of the evidence” if I binged late night so she wouldn’t find out. I cried desperate tears to her about my issues with food.

That entire year was extremely challenging. I constantly looked in the mirror despising what I saw. I never felt good enough. This was something inside of me that needed to be overcome. After college, I moved far away from home. In a new place, I wanted a fresh start. While no one really knew my struggle, I wanted that clean slate for myself. I would go months without a relapse but when they happened, they were bad. I would sit in front of my toilet for thirty minutes, thinking if “everything had come up.” Did I get it all?

Why did I look at food as the enemy instead of fuel and nutrients for my body? I needed to love myself and feed myself like this was my temple, not my prison.

While I had tortured myself with rigorous cardio, I now began seeking solace in the gym through lifting weights. When I began to feel physically strong, I mentally began to believe it. My episodes became much fewer over the next year, allowing myself a day where I could indulge every week.

Having structure has helped me; knowing pizza or a burger and brownie is in my future seems to help me cope. My inner struggle with binging and purging is my deep, dark secret. This smiley, happy, motivational girl hasn’t always been so. There was a time where I needed someone like that to be there for me.

People wonder why I lift and it is to lift myself up. To make myself stronger every single day because I was not always this way. I was once very weak, very scared and very hateful to this amazing thing: my body.

While I still face times of weakness, moments where I get the desire, feel guilt and want to fall back into my old ways, I look at how far I’ve come and remind myself I’m beyond that. I love myself. I love this little machine I’ve built. I love my body, all of my curves and everything it allows me to do. To force it to struggle, to suffer, to starve is not right. I have not come this far to only come this far.

I can only hope if you struggle with body image, Anorexia, Bulimia, or like me, binging and purging, you can find some solace in this. We are all beautiful and there is a healthy way to have your outside match your inside. While it is not always so easy to overcome on your own, know that seeking help, guidance and support does not make you weak, it makes you strong and it makes you human. It may take weeks, months, even years to overcome but I promise you you can do it and there are so many girls and women who have faced or are facing the same struggles that are here to be your community.