Before realizing that I actually had an eating disorder, I was living my days without acknowledging that I wasn’t truly happy, although even in my happiest moments I couldn’t just truly feel joy.

My mind was constantly wandering around extremely negative thoughts regarding myself. Therefore, I was drawing different conclusions depending on the situation I was finding myself in. I was making a fool of myself because I belittled my problems by equating them to “being too needy”, “just feeling lonely” and “it’s just a phase, it will pass”. But none of these was related to the actual problem: being scared of eating. Once I realized that the root of all my anger and sadness was simply being afraid of food, I began digging into why and how this was affecting me. And I was shocked once I recognized on how many occasions my behavior and thoughts were influenced by my eating disorder.

Living with an eating disorder means having this weird relationship with food, where you are biased to think that you really love food even though food is simply your worst enemy. It triggers so many negative thoughts that at times I pitied myself for hating me so much. This love-hate relationship I had was correlated to the fact that I viewed food only as a bunch of calories. I used to love eating pizzas, sushi and all the cakes. However, whenever I ate them, I would immediately feel extremely guilty and start counting how many calories I ingested and whether I was allowed to skip the gym that day.

The gym was another taboo. Living with an eating disorder means working out with the sole purpose of burning calories. Of getting thinner. Of getting rid of everything I ate the previous hour. I turned an enjoyable hobby into a complete nightmare. My workouts were insanely hard and intense. I would push myself to the point where I could barely breath and started shivering.

Living with an eating disorder means being scared of wearing jeans. Every single morning I was scared of getting dressed as I was petrified of realizing that those jeans that one month ago were perfectly fitting, in that moment they were a bit tighter on the legs. And if that was the case, I would start sweating, sending myself mental notes with so much hate and disgust that if anyone read them, they would probably start crying as well. I would be entirely focused on how the jeans were fitting me throughout the day. I would pay attention to how my thighs’ shape was a bit more visible through my pants compared to the previous month.

This would lead me to being scared of seeing my reflection in the mirrors. Whenever I was walking through the streets and approaching windows or street mirrors, I would look the other way, so that I couldn’t see how I looked due to being scared of finding out that my real appearance wasn’t reflecting the image of myself that I had in my mind. And this would apply to photos as well. Photos were just a means to showing me how ugly I was, meaning to making me notice how the mental picture I had of my body and the real one were differing.

Basically, living with an eating disorder hindered my everyday small actions constantly. The obsession with physical appearance was so prominent that I couldn’t just take part in a conversation without first noticing everyone’s look and I would keep thinking about whether the others were thinking as well that I was ugly and fat. Without constantly being stuck on counting calories and thinking about when I would eat again and trigger this pain all over again.

It’s like my eating disorder prevented me from living. Like a little voice in my head constantly reminding me that I wasn’t allowed to be happy. Even when at times nothing but happiness was the right emotion to feel.

‍