I have been fighting a losing battle with myself for many years now, I've let anorexia control my life for far too long. There are very few people in my life that I have opened up to about my eating disorder, and I attribute that to the shame I have let surround it. My fight began almost seven long years ago when I was just 12 years old.

I remember the day I became uncomfortable with my body. It was in the middle of the summer, and like every 12 and 13 year old trapped in the sticky southern Indiana heat, I was at the lake with my sister. As she ran around with her friends, flirting with the boys, I was laying out in the sun on the warm sand. I remember looking down at my body and hating what I saw. I remember thinking to myself 'When did I get so fat?' Looking back now, I was by no definition fat. Standing not quite at 5'0" I only weighed around 85lbs.

I wish back then I had realized how wrong I was, but instead I started counting calories. At first, I was still eating enough to sustain myself, but soon the numbers overtook my life. My weight began to fluctuate as I was growing and hitting puberty, which certainly didn't help with how I viewed myself, and to compensate for these new changes happening to my body I began to limit myself to no more than 500 calories a day. I began to lose weight, telling myself I'll lose just five more pounds and then I'll stop doing this. I became obsessed with the number on the scale, weighing myself up to three times a day.

Around my freshman year of high school, I began wearing baggy clothes to conceal what my body looked like. I did everything in my power to keep this secret to myself. My friends showed concern, but they trusted me when I told them I was okay.

In these past seven years, I have made attempts at recovery and occasionally gotten to points where I felt like I may have been winning. I continued to fight the battle, but I still kept myself hidden.

Junior year, the scale and the mirror became the enemy. I was skipping meals, moving food around on the plate to make it seem as though I'd touched it at all. Any calories I took in I made sure I worked off, or I subtracted them from my allotment the next day. By senior year I was only eating around 100-200 calories a day. The only times I ate more than that were the times my family ate around the dinner table because the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself.

I hit rock bottom the summer before my first semester at Ball State. I worked a job at a greenhouse doing outside grunt work, and often worked through my lunch break, promising my boss I'd eat when I went home. I never did. Over that summer I lost 20-30lbs, then school started and I made the move from Boonville 4.5 hours north to Muncie, now completely unsupervised I took advantage of being able to get away with not eating at all. My weight dropped down even further now making the weight loss in total almost 40 lbs. in just three or four months.

Recently I have decided that I am taking my life back from my eating disorder. I friend who also struggles with an eating disorder is helping me hold myself accountable, tracking everything I eat and my feelings surrounding food. In just a month or so I've made progress towards a healthy weight and a healthy mindset.

I started calling my disorder what it is, anorexia. I no longer fear the name, and no longer am I ashamed to share what I'm going through. Because although my progress isn't much, it's a start. This is the year that I WILL win. 2019 is the year I will beat my anorexia.