The Story of My Eating Disorder

When I was 13 I got it in my head that I wanted to lose weight.

So in 7th grade, I started swapping out my lunches for SlimFast. What a name. What a promise. After consistently undereating, I got really hungry, so I would go home and eat enough calories worth of Hostess snacks to make up for my week’s worth of missed lunches.

Throughout my teenage years, I tried drinking only juice for a week, I tried eating only raw foods, and I tried diet pills. I went vegetarian. I ate for my optimal blood pH (this is not a thing, don’t try it).

By some miracle, in my early 20s, I stuck to the Master Cleanse (drinking lemon water with maple syrup) for a whole two weeks. It was under the guise of "detoxing" but really I was thrilled to drop 10 lbs. so quickly....which I promptly gained back as soon as I started eating food again.

As I got older, I continued putting on weight. Each time I restricted my food, I would successively eat more to fill the hole I created. I filled the hole not just with food, but with a growing pile of disappointment, frustration, and anger for not having the willpower to stick to insane diets. And for not losing weight.

Eventually, I stopped the weird diets and just started eating less. I started tracking my food. A popular food-tracking app told me to eat 1200 calories, so I did that. Just like every other diet, a few days passed and I got ravenously hungry. So I ate an entire box of pasta in one sitting. Then I felt awful, so I forced myself to run for as long as I could to burn off the calories.

I continued to keep up this pattern. Running made me hungrier, and when I would go on those long runs, my appetite would kick up. So I ate more food, and I felt worse. I started taking laxatives to purge my body of the food. Eventually, I was full-on binge eating, and laxatives turned into forcing myself to throw up.

And still, I continued gaining weight.

Realizing I Had an Eating Disorder

It wasn’t until I started throwing up that I realized I had a problem, because I knew forcing yourself to vomit after you overate had a name: bulimia nervosa. But I didn’t see until much later that the entire pattern of restriction and overeating I’d developed over the course of years was disordered. 

All I wanted was to lose weight, and I failed over and over again.

Magazines were no help. Books were no help. The internet was no help. From the time I started trying to lose weight to my heaviest, I gained nearly 50 lbs.

I cried over the way my body looked, and the way my clothes fit. I cried over how I searched for years and never found the answer. I cried because I felt trapped in a body that I hated.

I cannot tell you how miserable I felt in my skin. 

From scouring the internet for information, the single most valuable piece of advice I found was to lift weights. This gave me a new, positive area to focus on: getting stronger rather than getting thinner.

I joined an online community to begin tracking my lifting progress, and soon after noticed that they offered weight loss coaching. I was dead broke, but absolutely desperate.

I made a few sacrifices to sign up for group exercise and nutrition coaching, and learned how to track macros. To my surprise, it worked for me…but it wasn’t the happy ending to the story I was expecting. 

Instead, things were still to get worse before they got better.

From Bad to Worse

Drunk on my initial weight loss success, I decided to enter a bikini competition. What better way to lock yourself into sticking to a diet than committing to appear on stage nearly naked?

The extreme restriction required to lean out enough for the show cracked the delicate veneer of my relationship with food. In the weeks leading into the event, my binging and purging tendencies returned.

Afterwards, having been released from the pressure of dropping weight, I continued to binge, but without competition looming over me, I stopped purging, and began rapidly gaining weight. 

Out of sheer panic, I knew what I had to do: another bikini show.

**facepalm**

Looking back, deciding to do a second show was exactly what I needed to NOT do. But the truth of my story is, it was the only thing that had “successfully” helped me to lose weight—if you consider eating solely out of tupperware, binging and purging, and rapidly regaining to be successful. 

The second competition was even worse. I was binging and purging multiple times a week, feeling restricted by everything I ate on-plan and guilty for everything that was off, and panicked that the weight wasn’t coming off this time. 

Against my better judgment, I forced myself to stay committed. I felt embarrassed when I stepped on stage, because I knew I wasn’t ready. I felt embarrassed that the hundreds of onlookers could see that too. 

And I felt embarrassed afterwards, when AGAIN, the pressure of the competition had lifted, but I still couldn’t stop binging. I continued binge eating for months afterward. I have no idea how much weight I gained because I stopped weighing myself after I surpassed my previously highest weight. It hurt too much to know.

This is My Brain on Drugs

I eventually sought out therapy when I found myself at the bottom of the worst depressive episode I’ve ever experienced. Alas, being broke and uninsured meant in-person psychotherapy was out of my financial reach. Contemplating suicide, a 6-week wait—the soonest any provider could see me—also did not feel doable. 

I tried online therapy. One company turned me away for being suicidal, and said I needed to seek in-person therapy—the help that wasn't there. The second paired me with a therapist who I found out was on vacation when I reached out. I called suicide hotlines. One was no longer in service. One had no answer. One put me on hold. I tried the suicide hotline online chat. After waiting in the queue for nearly an hour, I gave up.

I was on my own. And it was only thanks to a chance sequence of events that I made it out alive.

My decision to heal from depression, anxiety and panic disorder, and binge eating was solidified with the help of a drug called MDMA. MDMA, commonly known as molly or ecstasy, is known for producing feelings of euphoria, well-being, happiness, and closeness with others. It’s a literal happy pill. I had taken it a few times before, and because of the flood of serotonin and dopamine in your brain, I was under the impression that you could not be sad on this drug. 

That night I took MDMA with my now-partner Alexander, we started talking about my depression and I started crying. To my complete surprise, I started crying. “No,” I thought, “…this isn’t possible.” If my brain was flooded with happy chemicals, how was I still able to feel sad? Why was this happening to me? I finally put it together. It was not the chemicals in my brain alone that were making me sad. 

It was my thoughts.

What gave me additional hope that I might get better were these 5 words I read in a book: 

“Binge eating is a habit.”

I knew that because habits are formed, not permanent features, I would find a way to recover. After realizing that my depression, anxiety, and eating disorder were NOT due solely to faulty brain chemistry, I had a choice to make. But the months after I decided to get better were a long crawl out of a dark hole.

Perhaps most importantly, I made the decision to stop dieting and end all my efforts to lose weight. I decided instead to focus on lifting weights to get stronger and for my mental health. In addition to meditations, journaling, and talking to my partner, I came up with some exercises on my own to start counteracting my negative thoughts and moods. 

Later on, I realized that what I was doing alone and with Alexander incorporated many techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy—mindfulness, journaling, breathing, counteracting and reframing negative thoughts, and visualization. 

And a part of what helped facilitate these changes were magic mushrooms. Under the influence of psilocybin, Alexander and I were able to dig into the trauma of my past to address hurt that begged for attention, and to ask my past and present selves what no one else did: What do you need?

These drug experiences were not cures in themselves; they were windows into what was possible. Seeing what was there, what needed attention, and what was possible allowed me to address problems in my day-to-day life that were necessary to achieve a deeper level of psychological wellness. 

NB: To be clear, psychedelic drugs were not THE cure for my depression, but they were an integral part of the healing process for me. Additionally, I want to be clear that I am still an advocate for therapy; it simply was not an accessible tool for me. Thirdly, I am not at all implying depression is all in your head or that it is in any way simple or easy to fix. And finally, no part of this is intended to be advice. This is my story.

Passing it On

Perhaps most important to my staying alive was reading what others wrote about their depression and eating disorders. Through the power of words, I had proof that others were in dark places, and that they were able to escape them. Deep down, I think I knew that I wasn’t special, that there was hope for me too. That’s why I find it so important to write about this now.

It’s also the reason I started helping others with their relationships with food, body image, and self-worth through Food Body Self coaching: because all around me, I saw others falling into a similar trap of restriction and loss of control. And I knew that dieting longer and harder wasn’t the answer—and will never be.

Please note, I am not a doctor, dietitian, or mental health professional and again, none of this is intended to be advice or to replace the services of trained medical professionals. This is my story. Eating disorders can have serious health consequences, and you are advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health and, in particular, matters that may require diagnosis or treatment. 

Additionally, if you are actively struggling with an eating disorder, although Food Body Self coaching can be an addition to a treatment team, it is not to be considered a substitute for clinical treatment or therapy.

If you would like to discuss options or share your story with me, you can write to me here: alicia@ritualco.co

There were many times in my life that I felt beyond help. But if there’s one thing I want you to take away from my story, it’s this:

Wherever you are in your journey, there is hope. 

This article was originally published on January 30, 2019 and was revised on February 7, 2022.