*TRIGGER WARNING: PURGING MENTIONED, FOOD RESTRICTION, MENTION OF ANOREXIA AND BULIMIA, AND RELAPSE*

If you would have asked me 6 years ago if I ever thought about starving myself to a dangerous weight or puking up everything that I had eaten until stomach acid came out, I would've told you that you were delirious.

It started with all of the fat comments; from competitive dance to everyday at school. After I turned fifteen and started my second year of high school, I began to think a lot about those comments, and found myself comparing my body to other girls' bodies. I had already been on a diet for cheerleading two years ago and kept up with lean cuisines, salads, calorie books, and sugar and fat-free everything. I developed what is usually known as the beginning of an eating disorder: Orthorexia Nervosa.

Orthorexia Nervosa essentially changes one's mindset to only eating healthy foods, and fearing unhealthy foods. When I was Orthorexic, I threw away all of my school lunches and watched everyone else eat because I was too embarrassed to "look like a cow and eat."

After a lot of bad things happened to me at my high school, I switched to online schooling. I developed severe depression and barely ate. I was losing weight very quickly, and people were noticing. Peers from another old school I had went to were beginning to follow me on social media and calling me body goals. I also hit puberty, so my appearance changed completely. I ate an apple and a salad everyday. Occasionally I would eat PB2 which is a powdered form of peanut butter that you can add water to and eat.

At this point in my life I was already a vegan and had developed gastroparesis (essentially having a paralyzed stomach) from a stomach virus that I caught twice in a row. The small meals didn't really amount to anything considering that my body didn't have much to digest.

I loved my new body and the new wardrobe that I was slowly building due to my old clothes being too big on me.

I then reached the point of having a "starving brain." This means that the malnourishment and lack of food was finally catching up to me. So I did the only thing that I thought was logical: eat mass quantities of junk food in less than ten minutes. I finished an entire box of Twinkies (when they were going off the market) during the length of one Bob's Burgers episode.

I got sick because I'm lactose intolerant, and immediately regretted what I had done. Now, no one told me how to do this, so I taught myself where to find the most sensitive part of my gag reflex and almost itch it until I couldn't puke anymore and was just dry-heaving. My own crazy-colored vomit was all over my right hand, and I had to constantly keep wiping it as I went on.

I then felt refreshed and satisfied with myself for "purging" all of the food that I "binge ate." I'm using quotation marks because these are all eating disorder terms. This went on for a few months until my parents finally kind of tricked me and brought me to a recovery center 3 hours away from my house.

I cried and resented my parents and refused to say goodbye to them. In my mind I didn't have a problem. I was just weight-conscious.

I was then led upstairs to the place that I would be calling home for three months. I was told that I was not allowed to be a vegan, and only a vegetarian. I was taken into the food storage room and shown tons of unhealthy foods, foods that people with eating disorders call "fear foods" which are essentially food items that we are deathly afraid of eating.

I refused all of the options presented to me, so they picked me out a rice dish with minuscule pieces of broccoli and cheese on it. The nurses and other patients sat down at a table and told me to eat. I refused and begged to go lay down, but they said that I had to eat first (they never allowed us to be in our rooms except for at nighttime). I just sat there and cried. I cried like I had just lost everything in my life. I cried as if my parents got into an accident, burned in a house fire, got into a plane crash, etc. (My brain went through every scenario.) I cried like a baby who had their pacifier taken away from them. I cried like it was the end of my life.

Fast forward through recovery, being on 3,000 calories a day, 60+ grams of fat, Stouffers for practically every meal, and having someone listen to me go to the bathroom and then flush for me.

I left knowing nothing. I left and did everything that they said not to do. I relapsed that May and abused laxatives, every single kind and brand. Now, when I actually need them for my gastroparesis, they do not work because I had built up a tolerance to them. I asked for a Dulcolax after every meal that I ate. I ate pasta one time and beat myself up over it for a solid week.

I had a boyfriend at the time who would poke my stomach and say "belly" which really triggered the anorexia from coming out of the shadows. I took "progress pictures" of how I became a practical skeleton.

I was gaining so many followers on social media, all telling me that I was so beautiful and had an amazing body, that I was "body goals." This further fed my anorexia.

I would just drink green tea (still my favorite thing on the planet) and call it a meal, and then go and over-exercise, which I had done everyday when I first developed my eating disorder.

This ended in a starving brain and the failure of laxatives. So I gave up and gained weight after binging on all of the junk food that I could find (6 bags of chips from a vending machine in less than 20 minutes and practically a pound of pasta in an even less amount of time).

I hated my body and wore nothing but sweatpants and hoodies. I refused to look at myself in the mirror, and cried every single day that I didn't look the way everyone liked me to look.

Photos of me were being re-posted on pro-anorexia accounts, which set me off and made me sick to my stomach.

I eventually got better and set the thoughts aside. My mother was essentially giving me a meal plan everyday to make sure that I ate and got in all of my daily values of nutrients.

I was fine until my cheerleading coach at college told me that I was "too fat" to be a flier (the person who gets lifted in the air), which had always been my dream, and at 5'8" I was idealistic height. I began to purge when I got stressed and ate unhealthy foods in mass quantities everyday.

Then something very, very terrible happened and I continued to binge eat. I ended up leaving college after the first day of my second semester because I could not handle the terrible thing that had happened. I got into a toxic, and verbally and emotionally abusive relationship, and stayed because I fell in love. I was back home 15 hours away from school and he was all that I had. I would've taken grenades, bullets, anything that could cause harm to him. It took until I had ended the relationship for me to get my life back on track.

I started eating healthier, going to the gym, and wearing shorts and short-sleeved tops again. I finally felt happy and comfortable in my own skin, and my body was thanking me for being taken care of for the first time in over six months.

I had another relapse of binge eating when I tried to let someone from my past back into my life. It was unhealthy until about March of this year. I finally started eating healthy, getting out of the house, and making friends. I am proud to say that I wore shorts all summer, even tank tops (something I haven't worn in over 6 years), a bathing suit, and crop tops. My body feels the healthiest that it has ever been, and I am proud to say that I have tackled a few of my fear foods, and looked at myself in the mirror without crying or hiding behind three layers of clothing.

I currently love my body, and I want to spread and promote that love and body positivity to others who are struggling with an eating disorder. I have the National Eating Disorder Awareness (NEDA) symbol tattooed behind my left ear (photo at the top of the article) to remind myself of how strong that I am, and that recovery is possible. The NEDA symbol is half of a heart, and half of a body with natural curves to promote body positivity. As someone very dear to me in recovery once told me, and I have it on a shirt, recovery "works if you work it," and I stick by that motto to this day.

I didn't cover triggers, but that is another thing that can cause a lot of damage in the recovery process. A trigger could be something from someone calling themselves "fat" to simply looking at someone that is very thin. Triggers have played a big part in my relapses, and can very quickly turn my day from positive to extremely negative. They are my biggest enemy and my biggest obstacle when it comes to my recovery process. I have slowly begun to take triggers lightly and not let them affect me. It takes time and a lot of dedication, but I'm not as sensitive to triggering content as I used to be.

I still hear who we like to call ED's words in my brain, every single day of my life, but I am finally able to push the thoughts away and accept what I cannot change about my body.

I still have some fear foods to tackle, and will battle with my eating disorder for the rest of my life, but I am going to learn how to let those thoughts get lost in the fast-paced, ever changing fog that is my brain.

Baby steps.

I am stronger than my eating disorder, and I am in recovery. I will not let this hurt me any longer.

Thank you so very much for reading.