Anorexia, Bulimia, Binge Eating, & Orthorexia: I Kind of Have Had Them All, and Still Struggle With Them

• Binge eating: the consumption of large quantities of food in a short period of time, typically as part of an eating disorder.
• Anorexia nervosa: eating disorder characterized by an unrealistic fear of weight gain, self-starvation, and conspicuous distortion of body image.
• Bulimia: eating disorder characterized by episodic binge eating followed by behaviors designed to prevent weight gain, including purging, fasting, and excessive exercise.
• Orthorexia: an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, an extreme dedication to extreme diets that can starve the body of basic nutrition.

From the time I was literally born, I've always been tall and lean. As a baby I was apparently long and thin, and that continued to perpetuate my everyday life until childhood and beyond. I had an incredibly fast metabolism, and a ridiculously large appetite. I ate and ate and ate, and never really gained a pound. I didn't grow up on the "kids menu", I grew up eating adult, large sized portions. This is probably around the time that my binge eating began to develop. Of course I didn't know that then, and neither did my parents or family. When you grow up in a household where food is seen as comfort and love, it never strikes you as odd to grow emotional attachments to it. When you look up and everyone else at the table is have 7 tacos and two helpings of beans and rice, you never think that there's anything wrong with it. Especially if you're not gaining weight. You just think, "Wow, this food is so good!" and then the inevitable "Wow, my stomach is so fullllll!" It never goes beyond that. I didn't realize I was a binge, emotional eater until much later in my life.

I remember a time when I was around ten or eleven where I would always binge eat at my favorite restaurant at the time, Day-Day's. It was around the time I had been molested for the second time in my life. Hormones were also kicking in, and I had just gotten my period. It was a crazy time, and food helped comfort me through a lot of it.
Every time I would go to that restaurant, I would order this incredibly large helping of "Day-Day's Jambalaya". I would scarf it all down within probably fifteen minutes, and then completely crash in the booth, laying down, full and incapacitated. My mother's only concern was that I sit up like a respectable member of society, instead of sprawling across the chair like a limp fish. Eventually, he ended up naming that jambalaya after me, instead of himself.

It wasn't just that restaurant that I ate compulsively at though, it was any and every restaurant. Everywhere I went as a child (and now sometimes up into my adulthood), I would wow servers with my ability to consume food. I can't count how many times I've been somewhere as a child and asked for a dish, only to see the server look over at my mother and smirk, saying "Oh, it's realllllly reallyyyyy big," as if I wouldn't be able to finish it. We'd always laugh and my mom would say "You've never seen this skinny mini eat. Oh, she'll finish it!" and sure enough, I always would. This was the beginning of my obsession with food and eating. As a child, I just didn't know it.

It wasn't until around 6th grade that it occurred to me that eating as much as a burly lumberjack wasn't "feminine", "sexy", or "cute." Again, hormones were raging. Boys didn't like me for a number of reasons and I began to feel self conscious. I started to thicken up a bit and even out of my 000 children-type body. I was suddenly a size 1 with two huge mounds on my chest- bordering a C cup, and the beginning of an ass. I wanted my Paris Hilton body back. And that's when the anorexia began.

At first, I didn't really see it as that. Like at all, at all. I just kind of stopped eating. I would try to skip breakfast, but my mom wouldn't allow it. Sometimes she didn't notice, but most of the time she did. I'd skip lunch all together because I was at school. I'd just throw my lunch in the trash, and after school I'd avoid eating as well. Sometimes I'd give in, and I'd eat a whole lot. This went on for a year, until I discovered purging.
The idea that I could just puke it all up afterwards had never occurred to me, but once it did, I started to do it basically all of the time. At school. At home. In restaurants. I could eat as much as I wanted to, but still get about half of the nutrients out. By eighth grade I was also on a lot of meds, and those meds took me from a size 0/1, to a size 5/7. It was a terrifying time for me, being a "normal size". I thought I was huge. I wanted to be a 0. I wanted to walk out of Abercrombie with XS's feeling flawless, like I did when I was younger. My mind was so distorted, and my self esteem was so low. Around this time my mom had also obviously caught on, so losing weight became nearly impossible. She'd monitor my eating and make me wait at least an hour before going to the bathroom. I wasn't happy with my body, and I wasn't happy with myself.

After a stint in a group home for six months when I was sixteen, I came out heavier than I had ever been. It was only 135 lbs., but it was large for my small frame. I had also been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at this time, and food had become an all-time best friend. I wasn't purging or starving myself much anymore, but I was shoveling junk food into my mouth like nobodies business. Some of my favorite meals included a "quesadilla taco", which was comprised of two medium or large sized flour tortillas with a shit ton of cheddar cheese in the middle, wrapped around refried beans, white rice, and meat, and more cheese, or incredibly greasy nachos covered in the works. I ate, and ate, and ate, and ate. I would eat at least six large meals a day, sometimes within an hour or two of each other. I wasn't even hungry. I just wanted to taste something good. Something that would make me feel better.

It reached it's peak when I started to realize I couldn't see where my belt buckle was, or like half of my feet, when I'd look down. I started to develop a mean gut. I actually began to "look bigger". It wasn't just in my mind, because other people noticed it too. Considering most of my family was overweight or considered obese, this became a genuine concern of mine. I was in a full size 7, sometimes size 9, and I was terrified. That's when the anorexia kicked in again.
I found pro-ana blogs, and even made my own, which looking back at is very shameful to me. I knew better, but I had a disorder telling me that I was completely in the right. I started on a 900 calorie a day diet, began working out daily, and got a calorie counting app. At my worst, I would weigh and measure literally everything so that I knew exactly how many calories were getting into my body. It became an obsession; something to control. I couldn't control anything else in my life, but I could control my food intake and my body.
900 calories a day became more like 600, and I wouldn't even be hungry or miss food. I became so "proud" of my "self-restraint". The pounds began to continue to fly off. I had my own personal bathroom scale, and I'd chart my progress by the week, aiming to lose at least 2 pounds each week. Around this time I also became a vegetarian, which helped me to lose quickly as well.
Once I got to my "goal weight" of 115 lbs. though, I felt my thighs were still too large. Since middle school I've had this body dysmorphia thing with my thighs. I wanted the thigh gap, to be "skinny and boney", not just thin and healthy, so I kept going. My doctor began warning me. My parents began to warn me again, and try to trick me into eating "fatty" foods. I kept going, convinced they were the crazy ones, not me. My new goal weight became 105 pounds, and right before I left for college, I reached it. My therapist told me that it would never end, my "goal weight". That I'd continue working towards the weight loss with no real end in sight. That we needed to work on this before I left, because "Eating disorders are a lifelong disease". I ignored her. She was the crazy one, right?
Near this time I basically became extremely obsessed about all my food too, and anything that went into my body I needed to read the ingredients of. Everything was "fattening" or "GMO" or "with pesticides". It wasn't "safe."
And this is where the orthorexia kicked in.

From seventeen years old to about a year and a half ago, I switched from being anorexic and basically starving myself, to convincing myself I had to restrict my diet in the name of "health". I would barely eat anything because it was all "bad". I cut out butter and replaced it with this vegan butter called Smart Balance. I cut out eggs and replaced them with egg whites. I cut out meat and replaced it with organic non-GMO tofu. I cut out milk and replaced it with soymilk. I cut out frozen foods all together. I cut out all rices except brown rice, and even then, didn't allow myself to eat that often. I cut out corn and flour tortillas and replaced them with whole wheat, same with white bread. I cut out regular oil and replaced it with the spray 0 calorie oil stuff. I replaced regular yellow and orange cheeses that I loved with low calorie white cheeses, or no cheese at all. I replaced juices with water, because juices had "too much calories". I basically replaced and replaced and replaced until I couldn't eat anything that I couldn't prepare myself.
I couldn't stomach fast food. I couldn't stomach pizza. Fried foods made me sick. Real meals exhausted me. I basically became a bird, picking at tiny pieces of nothing and calling them meals, convinced that anything else was toxic and would eventually kill me.
I wasn't getting the nutrients I needed. I was deficient in so many things. But you couldn't convince me that my diet was "wrong" because I thought yours was wrong too. I couldn't see through my obsession with control, and my general obsession with food, weight, size, and health. Sometimes I would binge or cheat when I dined out, but it was rare. For the most part, I was just the weirdo who basically ate nothing.
Then I began partying, and it occurred to me how much easier it was for me to suddenly lose pounds if I spent a night out drinking, or doing Molly, or snorting coke. I'd wake up and weigh myself, and immediately have lost like five pounds. This was a pretty morbid time for me, because I was basically a walking skeleton almost. I was 5"6 and 95 lbs. at my worst - shoulder, collar, chest, ribs, and hip bones jutting, thinking I was hot shit because I could fit into a children's size 8/10 and I was eating "healthy". I was in denial about the drugs as much as I was in denial about my eating disorders.

After all the drinking during that time, my health started fading, obviously. I became scared, and I remembered my old therapist saying that eating disorders are a life-long battle that don't just go away because you decide to stop thinking about them. I also read a really powerful short story about a woman with an eating disorder who was wasting away and might have had to go the hospital, and I just got very scared.
I decided that I wanted to live, that I didn't want to end up breaking my hip at 35 because I refused to eat nutrients. I didn't want to pass out in the Ralph's line because I was running on 150 calories on a hangover. I just didn't want it anymore. So I began putting in work.

Even now, I'm not ideal. I'm not perfect, and I have to remind myself that it's a life long journey. With my depression and PTSD and bipolar disorder, sometimes its hard for me to remember to eat, or even have the energy to eat. Sometimes I forget that just because I've ate three times today, doesn't mean I've had the recommended calories for my height and weight. A lot of the time I do only eat 1,200 calories or less probably, but that's usually because I'm lazy or busy, instead of it being a conscious choice.
I've started buying Ensure, which 15 year old me NEVER dreamed of putting into her body, and lots of vitamins to hopefully make up for the damage I've done in the past. I'm still a vegetarian, but I'm working on getting more whole eggs, butter, and milk into my diet. It's a slow process, but no recovery is immediate. I try to eat at least three meals a day, even when I'm "not hungry". I try not to binge as well, or over-eat because I'm sad. Struggling with all of these disorders coexisting can be really hard because it's like, Do I want food because I'm hungry, or because I'm sad, and if it is because I'm sad, should I eat 500 calories because I'm sad, or because I've only had 3 meals today? It's just confusing. But I'm slowly learning what's best for my body, and how to get better.

My name is Kay, I'm 20 years old, 100 - 107 lbs., and I am a recovering anorexic, bulimic, binge eater, and orthorexic. And I will continue to do so. And you can too.