There’s something about weight loss that is so empowering that you feel like you can do anything. Control your caloric intake, control how many pounds that you’re going to shed in the next few days or even control how your environment is going to react to your situation. Control, control, control. Who knew that having all that power in the world could lead you to the Hell hole that you dug yourself in? As a recovered anorexic woman, I now know that I didn’t control my eating disorder, it controlled me.

To this day, the event that started my eating disorder still isn’t clear to me. I was raised in two households that were like night and day. My single father never let go of his hippy 70’s past and my mom married a red faced alcoholic that I swear is gay. Tension between my mother and stepfather grew over the years and particularly, when I became old enough to talk back. The only way out of hearing a whiskey bottle slam down on the counter or ignoring appalling remarks made about my brother and I was to sit in my room, lie on the floor and hope the time would go by quicker than the night before. Boredom quickly turned into self destruction.

Even though I had problems with my stepfather, I wanted something more that I could brag and complain about. When it came down to it, I really just wanted someone to listen. For years I took razors and coins to my arms and my freshman year in high school I overdosed on so many pills with the intention of ending it all, that I can’t even bring myself to take aspirin when I have a migraine. When you're following the path of self destruction, you’re bound to hit every disorder in the borderline personality diagnosis.

Somewhere along that rocky path, I saw that my 5’4 one hundred pound body just wasn’t looking as thin as it could be. As a child, I always had a fear of breaking each weight in tens such as; 70, 80, 90 and 100. I thought that I would never grow out of each weight and I never wanted to. Until this day I can’t stand being over one hundred pounds.

When my weight hit 100 for the first time, my little game with my weight became an obsession and a competition within myself. "I wonder if I can get to 97." Soon, those numbers turned into 93, 88 and at my lowest, 83 pounds. Each night I would take off every ounce of clothing on my body down to the bobby pins in my hair. I'd sneak the digital scale down to the laundry room and stand butt naked, looking down at my new accomplishment or most of the time, gain. Most of the time I ate in my bedroom and sealed my dinner in plastic bags that I hid in my closet and would eventually bury in the trash. I slept hungry, woke up starving and had sunken eyes when it came time for school. The times that I did eat, I downed laxatives that ate up my stomach and ran miles on the treadmill. I walked everywhere and spent hours in my locked room every night doing crunches or sleeping when I didn’t have any energy.

My motivation for losing weight came from Kate Moss and other stick thin models at the time. I kept a photo journal of my progress and also had several online and paper diaries of this horrible experience. Pro anorexia websites were my haven and books about eating disorders were piled up at my bedside. I still have many of these books and diaries, but their presence is only good for inspiring me never to go back.

Out of all of the people in my family, only my mom noticed weight loss, but never did she ask questions. I lived with an eating disorder for five years, self injury for two years, suicidal tendencies for one year and I never received professional help for any of them. All I wanted in those times was someone to help me. I wanted to be locked into a hospital room with tubes leaking nutrients into my stomach and I wanted to scream and kick my way out of it. I wanted to be the kid with problems.