I am overweight with an eating disorder.
Weight does not define if you have an eating disorder or not. I grew up in a household where I was never told “you’re perfect the way you are” but instead was constantly urged to diet, no matter what my weight was. When I was 11 started to starve and lost weight rapidly, and after that my weight yo-yo’d for about a year because of starving and binging. I had the same thoughts. I ALWAYS WANTED to starve myself, but I couldn’t always do that. It’s the wanting to do it, the thought patterns, that make an eating disorder. My eating disorder has been getting worse because I’ve always been told to lose weight, and no matter how I lose the weight, even if it’s too fast, I’m congratulated, because a fat girl could never have an eating disorder, right?
An eating disorder is the believing you’re fat at any weight you’ve ever been, low or high. Even if you were never a low weight, it’s the aiming for an underweight goal weight. It’s spending most of your day looking at thinspo, meanspo, journaling about food, thinking about food, and starving yourself for as long as you can. It’s fantasizing about skinniness, having a whole page dedicated to your eating disorder thoughts because you NEED to get them out. It’s constantly looking for ways to hide your food, avoid binging, find things to do other than eat, ways to encourage yourself to keep starving, loving the feeling of dizziness, emptiness, and almost fainting because it makes you feel clean and like you’re making progress. It’s the not caring about all of the side effects because you WANT TO BE SKINNY. It’s all of these unhealthy thinking patterns that we all don’t care are unhealthy, or if we do, our eating disorder covers it up.
My mom knows I have eating disorder behaviors but she says I don’t have a real eating disorder. I know why. It’s cause I’m fat and have never dropped too drastic amounts of weight. It’s because she can’t see into my thoughts and how much of a hell it is. Even when I tell her them, she doesn’t get me help, she just makes me eat and lets it go if I convince her I have. That’s what happens when you’re a fat girl with an eating disorder. If you were to say you had one, you’d get laughed at. People don’t notice that you drink Diet Coke and skip meals. They’re actually proud of you, if anything. They encourage you to diet, even if they notice unhealthy behaviors. When you say you’re not eating they don’t stop you, they don’t care.
I am a fat girl with an eating disorder, and I am valid. So are you, if you are overweight and struggle. Thanks for reading
