Eating disorders are considered taboo.

Nobody talks about them. We only brushed on the subject in health class in high school. We weren't taught the warning signs of an eating disorder - the red flags. We weren't taught how to cope with our struggles. We weren't given the resources or advice to help a friend.

Eight million people in the United States have eating disorders, and I was one of them.

Six years ago, I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. Characterized by restriction, overexercising, irrational fears of food, calorie counting, and obsessing over body image and weight, anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all eating disorders. I didn't wish for it to happen. It just did.

At the time, I was bullied. I never felt that I had a sense of belonging or normalcy. I felt that I was just going through the motions and not entirely living. I didn't have many friends because I was at the dance studio for hours and hours. I began to feel inadequate. I compared myself to other dancers. I wasn't thin enough, or a good enough dancer.

Worthlessness and insecurity landed on my doorstep, and the devil that is anorexia snuck in through the cracks.

It started with wanting to eat healthier. Maybe if I adjust my diet, I'll improve my athletic performance. If I lost weight, maybe I would fit in. These thoughts slithered through my head like a snake pit. I was learning how to count calories in middle school, so that's where the calorie memorization came from.

Before I knew it, I tried skipping meals or snacks every once in a while. Before going out to eat, I would look up nutritional information days in advance in search of the lowest calorie meal. Then, skipping meals and snacks became a regular occurrence. I restricted my diet to the point I only ate a handful of foods. I remembered calories of chicken breast, ice cream, cheese, you name it. I fumbled with my school lunches by taking the deli meat off sandwiches and throwing it in the trash.

As if 20 hours of dance a week wasn't enough, I began doing exercises in my room while my parents were asleep or not home. Jumping jacks, sit ups, anything to burn the calories off that I didn't need to burn off in the first place. My weight dropped significantly, and so did my sanity. All I cared about was the next meal, and I thought about forbidden foods and how much I craved them. I had a fear of anything considered "bad": pizza, burgers, desserts, fries, etc.

Then my classmates fueled the fire.

People would notice how thin I was, but they would say comments like, "You're so skinny, I wish I looked like you!" My anorexia was telling me to lose more weight because people were finally noticing me. Nobody understood that there was something wrong with me, and if they did, they didn't seem to care to help me out. So, I continued to be under anorexia's spell.

My parents started to notice when I couldn't make it through a dance routine without losing my breath.

My hair started to fall out in clumps; cold shivers went up my spine, even in the warmest of weather. I became fatigued from walking from the car to a store. My skin turned a grayish green. I couldn't use the restroom regularly. My breath smelled like acetone. I fought with my parents daily over food and threw things at them.

As I was dwindling away to nothing, all I saw in the mirror was an overweight person. You're a fat cow who's unworthy of love. Look at you, you need to lose more weight. If you're thin, you'll have more friends. Anorexia convinced me of these thoughts that weren't true. They were just pawns in its sick game that results in death. I asked my mom if I was fat about a hundred times a day.

My parents let me slip by because they thought I could get better on my own.

I tried, but like a drug addict, I would relapse into my old habits. By the middle of freshman year of high school, things started to take a turn for the worse. After a year, therapy didn't work; every session I wouldn't talk, or if I did, I ended up going home in tears. I spend endless nights crying myself to sleep and locking myself in my room. I began to feel suicidal like the world would be better off without me. I was in a crowded room screaming at the top of my lungs, but no one heard me.

The wake-up call was getting sent to a specialist.

He was pure evil and cold-hearted. Not only did my anorexia hate him because he wanted to rid it, but he was not kind. He threatened to hospitalize me. My parents put me on the scale one day: the red numbers read 99 pounds. I crumbled that day, and the memory of reading my weight on the scale continues to haunt me.

That's when I became tired of the downward spiral.

The regimen set in place was catastrophic: medication prescribed for schizophrenics and an almost 3,000 calorie diet. My parents took me to every single appointment, motivated me through the hard times of not being able to eat any more food because my stomach was so shrunken, and took me home when I was feeling side effects from my medication.

My brother tried to support me the best he could. Not only did I have the help of my family, but my high school counselor supported me every step of the way. When I would feel upset, I would go to her and she would always make me feel better, and she watched over me to make sure I was getting better.

I battled anorexia for a year and a half in silence.

I finally was well enough to be taken off medication in the summer after freshman year. I didn't tell anyone about my eating disorder until months later. I was afraid of what people would think if I told them, so I kept my mouth shut. I thought I was in the clear, but my senior year of high school I was diagnosed with anxiety, and I had panic attacks daily.

I am now under control with medicine. I'm continuing to grow and learn to love myself as I am. I am at a healthy weight now, but the voices will always be in the back of my mind. My goal is to silence them once and for all and love me for me.

Eating disorders are a creation of Satan: they destroy the lives of those who are diagnosed and those who are close to them.

My family almost fell apart from my illness, but it made us stronger. I'm not proud of what happened because I've missed out on so many things, but my life is just beginning. I'm me no matter what; I'm a warrior, I'm a survivor. Six years ago, I didn't think I would be in college, sitting here writing this article. I thought I wouldn't be alive. My mental illness is part of me, but it doesn't define me or limit me from accomplishing what I want in life. It makes me want to work harder than the person next to me.

I'm sharing my story to bring awareness to eating disorders.

Make them a conversation. Know the warning signs. If anyone is reading this, you, yourself, or someone else you love could be suffering and you might have no idea. It's okay to help those who are struggling. From the girl who had an eating disorder, from all the chaos that happened, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.