To generate awareness that February is Eating Disorder Awareness Month, Two students who have experienced eating disorders share their experiences.
Please note: These pieces contain information that may be sensitive to readers who have experienced any form of disordered eating or an eating disorder. Campus resources are included for support.
Riley Orr, first-year
I have never had a healthy relationship with food. When I was very little, I was very shy and struggled to make friends. Because of my awkwardness, I spent many hours at parties alone and discovered the comfort of the snack table. Instead of talking to the kids my age, I comforted myself with food — and as a result, I became a bit of a chubby kid.
Being on the heavier side as a young girl and watching media made me very insecure. I vowed that when I became an adult, I would lose the weight. This timeline was accelerated when I was 11 when my dad suffered a brain stem stroke. During his recovery, he spent many hours doing physically intensive training and working out. To make up for the lost time with him (he spent months in the hospital), I would join him exercising. He set the lofty goal to complete a triathlon exactly a year after his stroke, and I — wanting to do something for him — decided to take up triathlon and trained for a local kid’s race over the summer.
Over that summer (right before I turned 12), I lost 10 pounds and became noticeably better at sports, eventually finishing second in the triathlon. Fueled by my success, I signed up for a competitive triathlon team and immediately took a shine to it. In just a couple months of intense training, I went from being the slowest my age to the second best girl on the team. My training led to more weight loss, and my confidence grew exponentially.
It was not until race season the following spring when my eating disorder took a true turn for the worse. I went to nationally competitive races and performed decently, getting 40th out of 75 on average. I thought hard about what would make me better and noticed that all the girls faster than me had one thing in common: they were skinnier.
I began to starve myself. I ate my breakfast at home, threw away my packed lunch (lying to my friends at lunch about forgetting it), went to triathlon practice for three hours after school, ate dinner, and went to basketball practice afterwards. I ate a little over 1000 calories a day and at five- foot-four I lost weight drastically. Nobody even noticed; in fact, I convinced my family that I ate a lot because I would always eat a ton for dinner (and because I had nothing else really, I still lost). The weight loss worked, too. I went from 40th in a race to top 10 in a couple months, cutting my mile times from 6 minutes and 20 seconds to 5 minutes and 30 seconds. I enjoyed the sport’s success and became addicted to watching the numbers go down. During my eating disorder experience, I got the stomach flu once and smiled after weighing myself post throwing up, feeling accomplished. At my lowest, I had a BMI under 15, and still no one stopped me. My pediatricians, in fact, applauded my weight loss; they felt I was healthier than ever during a time in which I was too weak to do anything but crawl up the stairs at night to get to bed.
Although I initially got faster, my anorexia ultimately bit me in the butt. I began to rack up injuries, getting tendonitis and stress fracture after stress fracture. I was put out of sports and into strength training in physical therapy — I also began to eat more, and I recovered for the first time. Once the injuries slowed down, I got even faster than before. For a while, I enjoyed the benefits of recovery and improved my habits.
Disaster struck again in my first relapse when after suffering numerous panic attacks, I was forced to quit triathlon, taking away the hours of training per week that usually kept me slim. During this relapse, I discovered something further about myself — during periods of struggle in my life, I leaned on my eating disorder, since it was something I felt I was “good at.” I got injured more, and I recovered again — and the cycle repeated.
The summer before senior year of high school, I recovered for what I assumed was the last time. I gained weight and accepted my new body. I went into college a year into recovery, and although I struggled, I was consistent. Over the year, however, I found myself faced with the most stressful academic challenges in my life. I failed tests for the first time and spent every spare second studying or drinking, causing me to gain weight rapidly. Eventually, this chipped away my confidence, and I went back to relying on my ED as a coping mechanism. In wake of the breakup of a toxic relationship, I leaned into it heavily and lost 50 pounds in the span of five months.
When I came back to school my sophomore year, I was determined to implement healthier habits. I started eating again and exercised for myself, developing important self-care habits like reading books and doing skincare. To help my stress and improve my mental health without the ED as a coping mechanism, I got on meds, which vastly improved my mood and motivation. I’ve since gained weight and enjoyed life more, but I would be lying if I said every day was not a struggle. I still think about my daily calorie intake constantly and go through periods of eating less intentionally. It is very hard to cope with gaining weight, and I am constantly afraid of gaining even more. Despite the fact that I feel like I am always on the verge of relapse, I am attending therapy to learn better habits. I have never wanted to succeed at recovery more, and I remind myself every day that I will never stop relapsing if I do not get a handle on it. I try my best, and it is difficult, but I believe someday I will beat my anorexia and live a life not dominated by my caloric intake.
Mae Harkins, senior
“Write down everything you eat. At the end of the day, you’ll realize how much you ate. Throughout the day, you’ll think about whether or not you want to add that bite to the list at the end of the day.”
“Use smaller plates! That way, you’ll trick your brain into thinking that you’re eating more, and will feel full faster. Plus, you can’t fit as much food on your plate that way.”
“Speaking of not fitting as much food, buy smaller Tupperware. Then you can portion your packed lunch properly, and can’t physically fit too much food.”
“Avoid avocados and chocolate, since they’re fattening.”
“Get rid of all your clothes from your larger size to motivate yourself to fit your wardrobe!”
“Don’t drink your calories. Avoid drinking anything other than water, so that you don’t put non-filling calories into your body.”
“How to remove cellulite!”
“Drink lots of water before meals, that way you feel full before you start putting calories in your mouth.”
“Eating celery burns more calories than it contains!”
“Craving a crunchy snack? Eat ice!”
“Wear a size down to motivate yourself! When you feel the squeeze, you’ll remember not to eat.”
I remember the first time I felt self conscious about my body. I was in fifth grade, 10 years old, and reading a book where the main character lamented about not having a “thigh gap.” As soon as I got home from school that day, I stood in my underwear in front of the mirror in my pink room decorated with flowers, stuffed animals and statuettes of saints, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that the top of my thighs weren’t touching. I had this desired thigh gap.
Although I was satisfied that I had this godforsaken space between my legs, I began to obsess about it, and would check every day to make sure that it was still there. And soon, its existence wasn’t enough for me — I thought that my thighs were getting too fat, too close to touching for comfort. And I began to change how I ate.
I started cutting out snack foods. I had overheard my parents talking about giving up chips or snacking between meals for Lent, and I quietly followed suit. But there was no Sunday indulgence for me; these foods were forbidden for long beyond 40 days.
In seventh grade, my public school distributed tablets to each student, for use in class. I soon became enthralled with Pinterest, and beside my boards inspired by Harry Potter and cool photographs sat a board dedicated to dieting. I scrolled through countless new diets and tips and tricks to lose weight, earnestly believing that this was something I had to do. Because when I looked in the mirror, all I saw was fat. And that, to me, was bad.
Weight Watchers ads and posts recommending measuring and weighing your food, buying smaller tupperware containers so you couldn’t pack too much, which foods to avoid... my Pinterest board was filled with them. Soon I started saving these dieting tricks and inspiration as my background on my beloved tablet. But not all of the tricks applied — I couldn’t weigh my food, since my parents would notice and put a stop to it. I couldn’t control what I ate for dinner, as my parents cooked. So to make up for it all, I just stopped packing lunches. At lunchtime, I’d sit and talk with my friends, claiming that I had forgotten my lunch again. They’d offer me their apple slices or their pretzels, but I always refused. “I’d eat when I got home,” I’d say. “No, I don’t want you guys to go hungry.”
I stared at girls’ bodies in the locker room when we changed for gym. As I read blogs about cellulite and muffin tops, I inspected my body for these and thought I saw them. I tried to see if my peers had them too. They didn’t.
Eventually, I was restricting my food intake so much that I started binging food. My body was screaming to be fed, and I turned to eating spoonfuls of Nutella out of the jar. (It doesn’t make sense, it isn’t logical, since this would be seen as a fattening food, but neither was any of this. I was, in reality, very thin. Being fat, in reality, is nothing bad or to be avoided. None of it will ever make sense; it’s an eating DISORDER.) So I gorged on Nutella, secretly, and ate nothing else aside from dinner, which I had to eat since my parents would notice if I didn’t.
After years of this binge eating continuing, with the foods I would binge ever changing as I grew tired of them, it finally happened in my sophomore year of college: I began to purge. I started carrying a toothbrush in my backpack, in case I’d purge between classes. I tried to keep it quiet, a secret, but people started asking if I had a black eye since the blood vessels around my eyes would pop from throwing up too much. And I knew that it was something I had to start telling people. My therapist warned that I would become very sick if I continued, and that there would be long term effects on my body and health.
So I had to solve the problem in the opposite way of how it had started. Instead of hiding and secrecy, I began to tell my friends every time I ate, and every time I purged. If I didn’t text in the group chat and announce that I had eaten a meal, I would get private texts asking if I had eaten yet, accompanied by invites to the dining hall, or my friends would show up at my door with a protein bar and yogurt. My friends upheld me and kept me safe. They kept me accountable in gentle, loving ways that didn’t make me feel ashamed, but instead made me proud when I ate and didn’t purge.
Through it all, there was this nagging voice in my head telling me I needed to change. “I need to be skinnier, my thighs are touching, my arms are hanging, my pants are tightening.” Except these weren’t just made up voices; they were things that had been said to me as I grew up. Offhand remarks that the person saying them would never remember saying, yet they stuck to me like they were tattooed in my skin. And as I started treatment, and started opening up to people, the thing I kept hearing left and right was, “you’re perfect.” A lie, my brain told me, and not only because I believed that my body was fat, and again, that this was a bad thing, but because I had grown up hearing that God had made us imperfect. My mind was able to convince me to discount the things people trying to help me were saying, because I believed that their one catchphrase was false.
Recovering from my eating disorder has been a nonlinear, exhausting, and beautiful process, where I have had to uproot some of my deepest beliefs in order to allow myself to heal. This started with the belief that being fat is bad. It was only once that I could recognize that fatness is not something to fear that I began to eat freely and properly. And at the core was this belief that I was either imperfect or perfect. The truth of the matter is, I am both and neither. I am an imperfect person, and my body is just exactly how it is meant to be. I can recognize my faults as a person while recognizing that there are no flaws with my body—there are no flaws with any body. Bodies are good, bodies are perfect. That’s just what they are.
As I move through yet another Lent in recovery, I am reminded of the times when I pretended that I was skipping lunch as a sacrifice to Jesus. Maybe some will think that I’m a bad Catholic for this, but as someone in recovery from my eating disorder, I do not physically fast during Lent. At all. And I don’t know ifl ever will. Because it’s possible that I will spend my whole life unlearning the lies that I believed for so long in my most formative years. Instead, I challenge myself to love my body as an act oflove to Jesus, and to myself. And I hope that one day, it will no longer be a challenge.
RESOURCES
Students who are struggling with their eating behaviors, have body image concerns or are worried about the eating behaviors of friends, roommates, teammates or family members are encouraged to utilize the following resources for assistance. Many students minimize their eating concerns and wait until the problem has spiraled out of control. Eating disorders impact both male and female students. Whether a person is eating too much or not enough, is overweight or underweight, or avoids activities and interactions because of how she/he feels about her/his weight, appearance or behavior — there are many campus resources that can provide assistance. Those students who worry about the eating behaviors of others may also benefit from the support services described below. Eating behaviors can impact students whether they are worried about a friend or have begun to worry about their own eating behaviors and appearance.
University Counseling Center Saint Liam Hall 574-631-7336 ucc.nd.edu
University Health Services Student Health Center 574-631-7497
Food Services Nutrition Office in South Dining Hall 574-631-0106
RecSports Rolf Sports Recreation Center 574-631-6100
Residence Hall Staff
Visit https://dulac.nd.edu/campus-life/wellness/ for more information!