I did not know I was anything less than okay, anything less than normal, anything less than beautiful, until someone told me.  When I was ten years old, the person who told me was my father.  And when he told me I was chubby, it sent my life onto a painful path that would last for sixteen years.

By the time I was a freshman in high school, I was binging and purging four to six times a day.  I thought if I could just lose weight, and fit the mold of what my father saw as an acceptable body type for a woman, that he would accept me fully, he would love me more.  All of a sudden I was not composed of my sense of humor, intellect or thoughtfulness; I was defined by one thing, my weight.

By the time I reached college, I developed more eating disorders behaviors. At that time I was stuck in a cycle of binging, purging, restricting and exercising excessively.  It had become apparent to my family and friends that school had taken the back seat in my life.  I was entirely consumed with my eating disorder, and did not have enough strength to participate in my classes, as I had enjoyed doing throughout grade school.   I was dropping classes and eventually had to withdraw for a quarter on medical leave.  However, that quarter I took off from my sophomore year was a turning point in my life, and the beginning of the end of the difficult journey I had started as a ten-year-old girl.

I began recovery, and for the first time I went to a therapist.  In my family therapists were not real doctors, so I never imagined I would ever go to one.  I had a lot of shame when it came to the fact that I needed help in order to get healthy.  But by working with a therapist and a nutritionist, I was able to return to school, and graduated just one quarter behind my class.  In college I was able to reduce how active I was in my behaviors, but I did not realize how much work was left.

When I returned to San Francisco after college I began to see a new treatment team. Over three years I worked with a nutritionist to start listening to what my body wanted to eat and drink. I was able to do something I never thought possible - get rid of the idea of “bad foods.” My biggest struggle was calorie counting, and that was the toughest hurdle I worked to overcome with the help of my nutritionist and therapist just this year. When I finally stopped counting calories it was like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders, I really felt so much more freedom in my body and in my life.

The other behavior I worked arduously on was my exercise bulimia. Changing my relationship with exercise from a “must” to a “want” was life changing for me. Learning to redefine the word exercise was the first part, and it was not easy to do. I used to only think a work out counted if I was in the gym for a certain time period, burning a minimum number of calories. But the problem with that is that you can always work out longer and harder. Plus, all the things I loved did not count as exercise so I denied myself that pleasure. Now I enjoy being active when I walk, dance and surf. I don’t worry about how long I do it for or how many calories I am burning, and for years I didn’t really know if I would ever get to that place.

Beyond the eating disorder behaviors, my relationships changed through my recovery process. Once I started to break up with my eating disorder I had all this new room in my head and heart to be present in my relationships with my family and friends. This also came with its own set of struggles, as I had to learn again how to be vulnerable and honest after hiding for so many years in my eating disorder.  In fact, I am still working on this. Even though it is scary and difficult at times, I am so appreciative that I am feeling these emotions instead of feeling numb.

I did not realize when I started treatment that it would be another six years before I had my life back.  But that six-year process of making peace with my family, my body and myself changed the way I viewed my difficult journey, and now it has become a strange blessing.  If I had the power to go back and erase the day my father made me feel less than, and in turn the day I started to believe I was less than, I would not. This process made me the person I am today.  It gave me a new kind of strength and the power to believe in myself, and that I would not trade for anything.

As I continue this journey, especially now working on my body image issues, I feel really proud of how far I have come. And I know I will get there, to that place that is different for everyone, recovered.

KJS