There are many things that people don’t understand about eating disorders because TV usually depicts only one type – the sickly and skinny anorexic girl who never eats. This portrayal has created a stigma about eating disorders that has made it difficult for many of those affected by them to speak about their struggles and experiences. I am one of those people. I refused to even admit that I had an “eating disorder,” until I was already on the road to recovery. However, I have decided to share my story for the first time, hoping that it will help break any stereotypes or incorrect notions that people have about eating disorders.

First of all, you need to understand that I am a major foodie. I love food. I could easily eat a full pizza if someone challenged me to. Pizza Hut knows my order. Food is literally always on my mind. However, having an eating disorder made me have such a complicated relationship with food that it actually consumed most of my mental energy.

I’ve had body insecurities since sixth grade, when I overheard my aunt calling me “larger” than her children. Whenever I saw girls with skinnier bodies than me, I wanted nothing more but to look like that. Though I wished to wear their clothes, I knew that they would not fit me the same way. It was always a thought in the back of my mind, but it didn’t really start to bother me until high school.

I first attempted restricting sometime around sophomore year. I would skip a meal here and there, and it felt great. I finally felt like I was able to do something about my body. I would try different weight loss diets, where I would only eat about 600 or 700 calories a day. When I told one of my friends about it, she mentioned that she already had an inkling, since she “saw my legs getting smaller each week.” That felt like a major win in my eyes – the fact that other people were noticing the “improvements” in my body. After a few weeks, though, I gave up and returned to my normal eating habits.

Things didn’t really get bad until senior year. I don’t know whether it was the stress of applying to college, or the pressure to fit in with the rest of my grade, but I started skipping meals again. It began by skipping breakfast because I was rushing to school, but then I started missing lunch on top of that. By the second half of senior year, it had become almost a contest with myself – to see how long I could stand before I had to eat again. If I could go the whole school day without eating, I felt accomplished. I had won. People don’t realize that the ability to not eat for hours at a time involves “training.” Once your stomach gets used to not eating until 6 p.m., you barely feel hungry throughout the day. You just have to endure the first few weeks of hunger, and then you stop feeling the hunger pains as much. It got to the point where I only ate one meal a day for a few months – I wouldn’t eat any kind of solid food until I got home from school and ate dinner with my family. My friends at school didn’t notice because I would use dance rehearsals as an excuse for not being at lunch. Instead of dealing with the temptation of being in a dining hall with different kinds of food around me, I would spend my lunch hour in the dance studio, exercising and practicing. I weighed myself every morning, and if my weight had gone up (even by 0.1 lbs), I would allow myself even less food for that day. By the end of senior year, I had dropped down to a weight that I hadn’t weighed since maybe seventh or eighth grade – but yet no one noticed.

I didn’t even realize that I had an eating disorder until the second semester of my freshman year of college – months after I had stopped my restrictive eating habits. Although I had stopped restricting, I was still constantly in turmoil over my decisions to eat food. I had gained an unusual amount of weight in a short time, and I wanted nothing more than to lose it all by restricting again. My days were spent meticulously deciding which meals to eat, and hating myself when I ate more than I had planned to allow myself. This led me to seek help in a nutritionist on campus. He set me up with CHEP (Cornell Healthy Eating Program), where I had weekly, or biweekly, appointments with a nutritionist, a counselor and a doctor. The job of the nutritionist was to help me attain a healthy lifestyle – eating three meals a day that gave me all of the necessary nutrients. The counselor was there to get me out of the weight-loss mindset, and to help me learn to accept my body no matter what form it was in. The doctor was there to see if my previous eating habits had any serious health repercussions, and she was actually the one who first helped me realize that I had an eating disorder.

Prior to my meeting with the doctor, I had almost never said the words “eating disorder.” Even when I confided in one of my friends about it, I had called them “eating problems.” You see, I never saw myself as skinny, and I never was skinny, so there was no way I could have an eating disorder. Even though I had only eaten a meal a day for a few months, someone wouldn’t necessarily look at me call me skinny. I was muscular, and therefore still felt bigger than all of my friends.

But how can an anorexic girl not be skinny?

Two of my best friends were tiny without barely trying. I constantly compared myself to them, and how they could wear anything they wanted to and look amazing in it. I wore loose clothes that hid my body, pretending like I did it because I liked that style. Oversized flannels became my signature look, but no one realized that it was because I felt vulnerable without them. I doubt anyone would have imagined that the girl who bragged about her love of food was the same girl who carefully counted her calories and food intake. No one approached me about a possible eating disorder because I simply didn’t look like someone who would have it. I wasn’t skinny.

I also kept telling myself that it wasn’t anorexia if I was still eating a meal a day. “Anorexic girls don’t eat at all, right?” Wrong. The doctor helped me see everything in a whole new light. She explained to me that even though I was still eating a meal a day, I was also going 22 – 23 hours of the day without eating. That’s not natural. My body had turned into “starvation mode,” which is why I gained so much weight once I started to eat a normal amount again – because my body wasn’t used to consuming so many calories.

Although my personal battle with an eating disorder wasn’t the dramatic kind that you see on TV, it was still just as much of a struggle. The mental energy it took for me to fight the temptation to eat subtracted from my ability to have a good time with my friends. The self-hatred I felt after eating made me want to scream on a daily basis.

The road to recovery is just that – a road. I’m still battling my desires to restrict and binge, for some days I want nothing more than to go back to my old habits. I would be lying if I told you that I was confident in my body now, because that would be an outright lie. I would even say that I have just as much insecurity as I did before, but now I’ve seen the repercussions of restricting. By restricting, it just made me gain more weight once I started eating again, so my new plan is to eat healthier and exercise more – something I should have done to begin with.

I know that every person who has suffered from an eating disorder has a unique experience, so I urge anyone who has dealt with this to share their stories. Before writing this, only my mom and one of my friends knew this secret, but I wanted to share my story to the other girls out there who are struggling with eating disorders. Let’s fight the stigma that society has created, and we can all learn to be healthy, eat delicious food, and love our bodies together.