index yesterday tomorrow Most Recent Entries A pound a day - 2006-04-08 Back in black - well in fat anyway - 2006-04-05 Too stupid for my own good - 2004-10-27 The debate - 2004-10-27 To lie or not to lie, that is the question - 2004-10-26 leave me a note

Question from an ed community forum: "do u think we work at it for years, realise we r stuck with it, and accept it- reaching a medium by which we can live a semi-normal life?" My answer: My history is a bit different. I honestly think that I have been eating disordered, not anorexic/bulimic or COE, but sick about food and weight for much of my life. As a child my family always made a big deal about how little I ate and always tried to force me to eat more. I was always a sickly skinny kid that got picked on because of my weight. I think that food, weight and eating became a way to control people and myself, and therefore disordered long before I could have been clinically described as anorexic or bulimic. That being said, I can remember a period in my life where my weight became an issue that was bigger then life, more important then anything else and it was during that time that I developed classic anorexia. The difference is, when I was at that age, 13/14ish, I didn't have the exposure to media that young teens do now. The only anorexic I knew of at that time was Karen Carpenter and I knew nothing of what anorexia and bulimia was then. I thought that anorexics ate nothing and bulimics threw up without trying, without wanting to... that it was just something that happened to them. So the first time I was taken to the doctor about my dramatic weight loss and refusal to eat "normal" sized meals, I thought my mother and the doctor were out of their minds. It was many years later that I even began to consider that I truly might be sick in regards to food. 14/15 years later I have no doubt (well, most of the time) that I am a strange combination of anorexic and bulimic. So to answer the question, no, I don't feel that I tried or purposely fostered my eating disorder. It had me hook, line and sinker long before I consciously had any awareness that it was there. My inner thoughts on this: I feel a little irritated by young girls that are trying to be anorexic or "ana". I guess I feel jealous because they have a choice. And if you are a young girl who is "working at your eating disorder" and you feel irritated by that comment, well, good. Its true. If you are working at it, then you have a choice. And I am jealous because I didn't get to "work at it". Christ! I didn't even know or believe I had an eating disorder then! I was 5'7" 90 something pounds and really honestly thought I was fat and that I was just trying to be healthy, to improve myself. I WISH I had the knowledge then that I have now. The ability to hop on the web and see what tortured souls are out there feeling trapped and controlled by food. By FUCKING food! Why would you want this? Really. I want to know because its beyond me....