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Katherine Walraven

Oct 8, 2010 at 1:26 PM

I hadn't planned on sharing my story, but the courage that I witnessed in the video conference today has inspired me to share my personal experience with disordered eating.

When I was in grade 12, I became a vegetarian and consequently lost some weight. At the same time, having returned from an overseas exchange which boosted my confidence, I also became more outgoing. When people started being more friendly with me, I chocked it up to my weight loss and not to be being friendlier in the first place. I thought at the time that people took more of an interest in me because I was thinner. While this may have been true to a certain extent, I don't think it was the sole cause of why people were treating me differently. But, at the time, it seemed black and white. I started becoming really pre-occupied with food and my weight. I ate well, but was very restrictive with the foods that I would eat, and started losing more and more weight, to the point that my 5'6 frame just over 100 pounds before graduation.

The summer after graduation I suffered from depression, disillusioned with the way that the world seems to operate, having experienced people treating me differently because of my new shape, and overwhelmed by the life choices in front of me. I felt lost, not knowing what I wanted to study and pursue, and frustrated with the shallowness of people. Subconsciously, I think, I rebelled against the body image issues I had developed and put on weight. By September, I had put on about 15 pounds and was close to 120 pounds. I was not overweight, of course, and could actually stand to gain more weight, but with my distorted body image, I was terrified to go to university weighing as much as I did.

Shortly into my first semester, I shared my frustrations and concerns with my brother's girlfriend, who was also my friend. She confessed that she was a bulimic and, instead of helping me to get positive help for what I was going through, took it upon herself to teach me how to be bulimic too. I think that she was looking for company, and for someone to help justify what she was doing. This was the start almost 5 years of anorexia (not eating) combined with bulimia (when I finally succumbed to my need for food and ate).

People who suffer from eating disorders are not always thin, as you might expect. Having both anorexic and bulimic tendencies, while also wanting to eat normally, my weight fluctuated and was never as low as it had been in high school. Very few people knew about what was going on inside my head, and my disordered approach to food and eating. In my 4th year, I traveled to Japan as an exchange student. There, my eating disorder got much worse and, without friends or family around, my weight lower than ever.

When I returned home after a year away, my family urged me to get help. I had tried counseling and anti-depressants before, and hadn't had any luck changing my behaviour. Finally, I decided to make a commitment to myself to make a change and stick with it, despite the anxiety that I would inevitably feel. I made it a New Year's resolution and never looked back. Committing to change was what worked for me, though I'm sure the group and individual counseling that came first really helped lay the foundation for that change.

I never thought my life would be normal again, but here I am, almost 10 years later, feeling like a completely different person. It is surreal for me to think of what I went through, what I put myself through, and the time that I lost. It makes me so sad to see so many men and women today facing similar problems, whether they be not eating, overeating, or purging either through vomiting or excessive exercise. I want to help make a difference and once spoke to my counselor about talking to other girls to help prevent their going through what I did. Unfortunately, I was told that studies show that young women typically do not take the right message away from such interventions, and leave with ideas of how to lose weight, rather than heeding the warming of what can happen if you get too obsessed with food, eating, and body image.

There is no one answer for what causes disordered eating. I think that for most, it starts with a desire for a different body shape, but that it then morphs into a desire to maintain control. I remember feeling like I had little control over much in my life, and the only thing that I could control was what I ate and the numbers on the scale. Even when I knew that I was too skinny, I still wanted the numbers to go down. Sometimes I think that I was looking to disappear.

I hope that sharing my story might help some of you to realize that being skinny is simply not worth risking your mental and physical health, and that taking a balanced approach is the best way to maintain a healthy body. I encourage any of you who are going through body image and eating issues, to talk to a friend and seek professional help. I can never get the years I lost back. Eating disorders can be crippling, and really hard to overcome. I've been in group therapy with people who've been battling them for decades, and who cannot envision a life without their eating disorders. It can come to be the only thing they know. I really hope that you all use all resources available to you to ensure a healthy, balanced lifestyle, and talk to friends who you see walking down the path of disordered eating. After I recovered, a lot of people admitted to knowing something was wrong but not knowing how to talk to me about it. I really encourage you all to reach out to your friends, and help them to get the help that they need, and to be a friend to yourself.

Here are a few websites that might help:
http://www.nedic.ca/
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/eating_disorder_treatment.htm
http://www.whatseatingyou.com/