I don't want help
A boyfriend's harsh words resulted in an eating
disorder
Original story submitted to Fashtastic
Edited by Christina Eriksson May 19th 2006
A 17 year old girl from the United States of America
At the age of 15 I had already had one boyfriend for three years. He isolated
me from everyone and everything. He would bring me down with words and
manipulation. I started to never feel good enough, for anyone. Every time
someone would critique me I would take it offensively and beat myself up about
it. I then started to gradually, in a way, quit eating. I kept a notebook of
my calorie intake, I never let myself go higher than 1000 calories a day and
if I only ate around 600 calories or less I was extremely proud of myself.
When I forced myself not to eat I felt extremely good and in control. I loved
the fact that I was in control of it and that I had the power to have the
perfect body, all I had to do was eat scarce amounts of food everyday, or none.
I can’t really help myself. I am always obsessing about my weight, my stomach
in particular. The obsession and worries will always be there. People tell me
I’m skinny, and I know that I’m normal, but I just cannot call myself skinny
and actually believe it. The facts are that I am 5”5’ and I weigh 120, which
is average. But to me average just isn’t good enough. I want to be skinny; I
want to have that perfect body.
When I weigh what I weigh now (120lbs) I am not comfortable with myself. I’m
always nervous about if people are thinking I’m fat etc. When I’m skinny I’m
always a lot more confident and comfortable with everything around me. I’ll go
through these stages, where I’ll tell myself it is OK to eat normally, but then
I beat myself up about it forever until I get back on track and stop eating so
much.
I love the feeling that being skinny gives me. I don’t think people understand
how much my weight bothers me. It is constantly on my mind, no matter what I’m
doing. All I can think is “what should I eat today..?” and “did I eat too
much...?” and if so “how can I make that up..?” My lowest weight only got to
about 106. I could wear a 24 in silver jeans. I went from wearing a 28 or 29
to fitting perfectly into a 24. It was freaky, but I loved it. This was when
I was not eating hardly anything, when it was really bad.
I changed my style for it. I used to dress stylish and wear extremely cool
clothes and expressed myself that way, but when I stopped eating I wore
strictly Hollister clothing and similar things like that because it was easy to
cover up my weight loss with camis and sweatshirts. When I started to loose
weight, I never showed it off because I never thought it was good enough.
I don’t want to get help because I don’t want to get fat. I’m content with what
I have because it keeps me skinny. I literally do not want any help because I
like what I am doing, even though it is unhealthy and completely wrong, it
works for me. I know that’s sick, but I can’t help it.
I’d say that I’m not hungry, or that I already ate when people would ask.
People these days normally just don’t care though. All girls never really eat
much, or don’t eat in front of people, so no one can really ever notice the
difference. Then when people do notice that I don’t eat, they deny it. My
boyfriend would tell me that I had gotten really skinny and so on but I’d get
mad at him and change the subject quickly. I’m going to suffer from this
obsession forever, I would never resort to throwing up though, even though many
times I have wanted to, I just can’t throw up. That’s a good thing though, I
guess.
This story was submitted exclusively to Fashtastic. All Publishing
rights reserved to www.fashtastic.net (Fashtastic), illegal to copy or
reproduce any of the material.
Photography by Christina Eriksson
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