When I first heard the word anorexia, I felt lost, confused and hopeless. I thought that only people that looked visibly sick and showed disordered eating behaviors could have a disease like this. I never had any of these problems, right?
I was a dancer for 12 years, and in that world, avoiding food is second nature. While not all studios are like this, my coaches made comments about our bodies as well as their own, and all of us would purposefully try to avoid food whenever we could, especially before a competition. I previously wrote about my experience with disordered eating in dance and how it has contributed to my issues with food, but it has followed me much farther past my dance years. At dance, food was the enemy. All of us were terrified of gaining even an ounce and looking any less stick thin than we felt like we had to be.
I was 16 when I was first diagnosed with anorexia, which was about 14 years after I took my first dance class. It was pretty shocking when I was informed that my ‘healthy’ eating habits were slowly killing me.
Anorexia is one of the deadliest diseases and it has the highest mortality rate of mental illnesses. According to Eating Disorder Hope, an online resource compiling the voices of experts, 10 percent of people die within 10 years of suffering from the disease, and 20 percent die within 20 years. People with anorexia are also at a higher risk of committing suicide. In fact, most of the non-natural deaths of people suffering from the disease are due to suicide, according to Lauren Muhlheim a certified eating disorder expert.
I have to live with these statistics everyday. Slowly, I may be killing myself from a disease partially caused by a sport that I used to love.
A lot of people ask me what it is like to have an eating disorder. Some even insinuate that it’s a choice to starve myself instead of acknowledging it for the monster that it really is. If I had to describe anorexia, I would talk about the everyday experiences I had with it that made me question every second of my life.
Living with an eating disorder means that I second-guess every move I make when I am near food. The fear of eating in front of other people or having a meal without counting my calories is terrifying. It feels like one bite will destroy my life. My eating disorder gave me a sense of control, but it quickly turned into chaos and began to consume every moment of my life. Thinking of every interaction with food for extended periods of time is frustrating.
Food is an everyday battle to me. It is a constant battle of thinking about calories, nutritional facts, or checking in the mirror 10 times before choosing a baggy shirt, so I don’t have to see the natural curves of my body. These thoughts are everywhere. Or, at least, they used to be. Anorexia used to control me. But now, I control it.
When you have an eating disorder, you may recover from giving in to the intrusive food thoughts, but you will still hear them. I work hard at every meal to ignore what my disease tells me to do, and I choose everyday to not let anorexia define me. I strive to nourish my body and know that I am beautiful while eating three meals a day.
Anorexia is a deadly disease. It is something that has impacted my life for many years, affecting everyone around me. I still live with it, even if now I am more so surviving it. Even though I still struggle with the fears and self-hatred, I choose to put myself first. I may still have to live with an eating disorder, but I refuse to let it define me.