Eating Disorders and my experience with them.

I figure since most of you know anyways, I mind as well blog about it because I've been trying to think of something to blog about for a while now. I have been suffering from an eating disorder for about three years. I'm proud to say that I believe I have fully recovered from it.

It started in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. Previous to the summer, in elementary school I was picked on a lot. 5th grade was the worst year. It was mostly the 6th graders that picked on me about being overweight. I was afraid of telling someone about it because I knew they would get mad at me for telling on them, and pick on me even worse. Anyways, so I had low self esteem because of that, and it's not like I didn't already know how I looked anyways. So during the summer, I got really sick and the doctors didn't know what I had. They thought I had mono, but the tests came out negative so they put me on an antibiotic, sent me home and hoped that would work.

So I took the antibiotic, as directed by my doctor, but it made me feel worse. I was nauseous, I couldn't eat anything because it made me feel even more nauseous, causing me to lose weight at a fast pace. Finally, after about a month or so, my parents took me back to the doctors and the doctor told me that whatever I had in the beginning of the summer was gone, and that I needed to stop taking the antibiotic. At that point, I had lost about 20 pounds and was getting a whole bunch of compliments from family members and friends. So instead of throwing the medicen away, I kept taking them until they were gone. When they were gone, I continued to starve myself until I started passing out all the time.

I didn't tell my parents about the passing out until one day, about a month or two into seventh grade, I was in my room doing my homework when I decided that I needed help with it so I got up and then blacked out and hit my head on the end of my bed and hit my knee on the wall, and made a loud noise. My mom heard it, and came upstairs to see what had happened. At that point, I was standing up and really confused and still really dizzy. My mom asked me why I fainted and I told her I didn't know, and she immediately called the doctors and made an appointment so we could find out. I refused to admit to my doctor and mom that I starved myself, but they made me see a nutritionist anyways. At that point I had lost about an additional 10 to 15 pounds. Everyone was really worried about me so I started to yo-yo diet. Yo-yo dieting is when you eat for one day, but then starve yourself for the next couple of days or vise versa. So I did this for the next year or so, until it was pretty stable, I was eating pretty much every day but would have a day or two where I wouldn't eat much.

At the end(ish) of 8th grade, I weighed myself for the first time in about a half a year. I had gained a little weight, and it triggered me to start up with my eating disorder again, but I started purging too. When the summer came, I was really bad. I was purging a lot, I was fasting, and I was toying with the idea of excessive exercise. When 9th grade started, I decided that I wanted to get better, I was scaring myself. I started talking to my therapist about it, and I started talking to Colin, a counselor at my school. I was still purging, but I was slowly getting better. In the middle of September, I was at a friend's house and freaked out about something I ate, so like always, I decided I would make myself throw up. So, I did, but this time there was blood. I knew that many bulimics have died from their esophagus tearing, and while they are asleep, it bleeding and the person chokes on their blood. I pretty much scared myself shitless, and decided that if I woke up the next morning, I would never purge again. Obviously, I woke up the next morning, and I never purged again (with the acception of one time I had a lapse).

I have been healthy for 7 months. I have found that talking with my therapist, and Colin, is a really big help. I also found support in my friends. I don't know what I would do without them sometimes, they mean the world to me. I am a stronger person now than I ever was, and I couldn't do it on my own. I am lucky to have so many understanding and supportive friends. I don't ever want to go back to the way I was, and I don't think I ever will.

Just What We All Need, More Lies About Our World.

I am ashamed of my natural hair color. A majority of you know what my natural hair color is, and don't really understand why I am ashamed of it. I am a natural blonde and I am ashamed of it because blondes get labeled as the stupid, ditsy, dull girls with big boobs. Plenty of young adult women and teens are striving to be beautiful and perfect, and gain attention from the opposite gender, when really all they're doing is making a fool out of themselves. Women, trying to get high into the workforce, using their sex appeal to get attention from their boss.

Its fucking ridicules! It's degrading! It makes all the other women in this world look bad. Men start to automatically assume that the majority of us are automatically easy and stupid. They talk to you with patronizing voices, treating you like a child or some toy. There are people in the world that portray women as people that can only do well in the world by selling their bodies. There are 8 year old girls going around and dressing like really fake, cheesy, slutty female cracker-box idols like Britney Spears. Every time a cool rock chick or actress seems to respect themselves as a strong woman, I get excited and think maybe there will be some change in what the media portrays women to be. And then they start to go downhill and people aren't paying attention anymore, so they start stripping their clothes off, because that's all they have left, and that's wrong.

There is so much more to a woman than just their sex appeal. Believe it or not, the majority of us are actually smart! *gasp!* And, you might not believe this one, but we can play sports, and have opinions too! Is this too much for you to handle?

One thing I'm not proud of is the fact that I struggled with an eating disorder, and I believe that the media's image of what I "should" look like played a part in that. I will never be good enough for the media, I will never be pretty enough, skinny enough, even smart enough for them, and neither will you. No matter hard anyone tries, they won't. The pictures you see in magazines have been played with so much to look "perfect" when in reality, those women don't really look like that. I am so sick of spending the majority of my life trying to live up to people's expectations of what I should do in life. People, including my parents, told me that I should do basketball my whole life because I'm tall. I almost played basketball this year, but then realized I was doing it because someone told me to, not because I wanted to, so I quit before it even started. I got a lot of shit from people, especially some of my friends, but I wasn't doing it for me, and thats not ok.

I promise myself that I will stay true to my nature, I refuse to cheapen myself by using sex appeal to get places in life. I will never buy into the mainstream notions of sexiness. I refuse to tart myself up or show a lot of skin just to draw attention to myself. It's sad to see girls do that to themselves. I wish I could say that I believe things will change in my lifetime, but I don't think thats possible.

Here are some celebrities that agree with me, and are trying to make a difference:

Pink - Stupid Girls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oGBvN3rAi0

Evanescence - Everybody's Fool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewO5NWQ97sI