Growing up I was always the bigger girl. I was never fat. There are many things I believe triggered me to become anorexic. It may sound like I am blaming someone, but I really am not, I know that these people did not want me to do what I did to myself. First of all my brothers were really thin and would sometimes make fun of me because I weighed more than them and they were older. Also, my grandmother would sew and make me clothes, she would say comments like; “wow you are almost as big as I am” or “you have gotten bigger since last time”. Being young this never bothered me, but I remembered it.

One time I went school shopping and I bought a sleeveless top. My dad not trying to be mean, just honest, told me my arms looked big in it. This is one of the few comments that really hurt because I though that I looked good. When I was in the fourth grade for a fitness class, all the students were weighed. At that time I was 4’9’’ and 94. I remember that I was one of the bigger kids in the class, but I didn’t care.

Throughout junior high school I would feel bigger when I was getting into junior size 9s. So in seventh grade I went on a diet. I hardly lost any weight in a month so I gave up. I kept going on diets throughout the year and into my eighth grade year but I obviously didn’t follow them too closely because my weight didn’t change. At the end of eighth grade I tried to lose weight for graduation, so I would wake up early and exercise and eat a healthier breakfast because my mom told me to start off slow on a diet. That is exactly how I did it. During the summer I went from being 5’2’’ 128 muscular pounds, I was a strong solid girl, and a size 9 to 5’3’’ 86 pounds and drowning in a 00. I first did this by eating an apple for breakfast and all the other normal foods I used to eat, then giving up soda, then eating fruit and vegetable all day except for dinner. Eventually all I was eating was fruits and vegetables. This also didn’t bother me because fruit has always been my favorite food.

In the most severe times of my anorexia I was never hungry, and I hated the feeling of food in my stomach, any food at all. I would feel out of breath, like my heart was caving in. I would bruise very easily, get dizzy when participating in PE, my veins were popping out, and so were my hip bones.

My disease actually got much worse after my parents seeked treatment for me. In November they took me to an eating disorder specialist who said I wasn’t anorexic, but had an eating disorder. At that time I was 98 pounds and was thin but I wasn’t all bones. My parents started monitoring my eating. I wasn’t ready to recover so I would go shopping with my mom and buy diet foods and fat free foods that I would eat. I would say I only ate about 800 calories a day while trying to recover.