It wasn't really a one time thing, but my sister was so skinny as a kid because she was just a super picky eater and I was super fat. People would always call her beautiful but they just called me chubby. It was exactly "traumatic", but it stung.

 

I totally get you! I always feel bad that my ED wasn't caused but something super traumatic, like it's less real because of it.

I think a big trigger for me was missing out on a role I really wanted in the school play. I auditioned for the parts of two really beautiful, ethereal schoolgirls in our school's production of Picnic At Hanging Rock. At the end of my audition my teacher asked if I considered auditioning for one of the male roles. I was devastated - I just felt like I wasn't feminine, or delicate enough, or beautiful enough. I ended up being cast in two roles, as the young man Micheal and the old, cruel schoolteacher Ms McCraw. It fucked with me so much every rehearsal when I saw that the really gorgeous girls in my class had been cast as the schoolgirls and wore these amazing white flowy dresses while I had to wear a suit and act manly. I wanted to punish myself by restricting and lose weight so I would be "pretty" too. 4 month's later and I'm underweight, and being forced into recovery for anorexia. Funny how life works like that.

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While I was in gymnastics I started to feel bad abt my body, and then when I quit the thoughts got worse. I'm pretty sure quitting gymnastics was what initially triggered the ED thoughts. Not entirely sure when the ED behaviours came into play or why exactly (it was a huge jumble of things), but the behaviours started within 6 months of the thoughts I think.

 

My mom binging with me...like thousands of calories at once and hiding it from my dad.

I dont even knownif she knew it was binging.

 

I totally get you! I always feel bad that my ED wasn't caused but something super traumatic, like it's less real because of it.

I think a big trigger for me was missing out on a role I really wanted in the school play. I auditioned for the parts of two really beautiful, ethereal schoolgirls in our school's production of Picnic At Hanging Rock. At the end of my audition my teacher asked if I considered auditioning for one of the male roles. I was devastated - I just felt like I wasn't feminine, or delicate enough, or beautiful enough. I ended up being cast in two roles, as the young man Micheal and the old, cruel schoolteacher Ms McCraw. It fucked with me so much every rehearsal when I saw that the really gorgeous girls in my class had been cast as the schoolgirls and wore these amazing white flowy dresses while I had to wear a suit and act manly. I wanted to punish myself by restricting and lose weight so I would be "pretty" too. 4 month's later and I'm underweight, and being forced into recovery for anorexia. Funny how life works like that. Mine really got bad after all my years of abuse from my mom came to a head at 12 and I realized it felt good to control what I ate but I feel you I was always feeling unfeminine because I was one of the tallest girls in my elementary school

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My ballet teacher would take videos of us during class so we could see what we needed to work on and whatever. I remember being horrified at how fat I looked, and that’s what started my interest in losing weight. Never thought I’d end up in this hell, though

 

I had a crush on this super skinny girl, she was everything I wanted appearance wise, legit 80 lbs but 100 % no ED. My friend told her (when i told him not to) and she laughed and was really weirded out. I remember looking in the mirror to try and be like 'why doesn't she want me' and all I could see was how fat I had gotten. I relapsed hard. Even though I've had ED since i was 12 and was 15 at the time, I still think of her when i restrict. I just want to be 80 lb and cute af like her, even still.

The lowest i get is 100 lb and idk why. Something always happens in my life to where there's no room for ED shit and I start gaining. My ED truly started from the abuse of my mother and her ugly body-obsessed personality. She would abuse me and then buy me shit. I rejected all of her gifts and eventually even the food (starving/purging)

 

My "boobs" growing at age 10. (two little and non-visible bumps that I thought were two monstrous evidence that I was becoming big and fat.

 

The actual reasons were probably more traumatic, but the thoughts really started around grade nine/ten for me. The summer between grade eight and grade nine, as a "graduation gift" (lol, it was elementary school but still) my grandparents took my mum and I to Darian Lake. I was always a chubby, fat, horrifically ugly child, and in that way where everyone teases you about it behind your back and even to your face. Anyways I'm so excited to be there and done with elementary school and ready to move on, but this one day I go out and buy myself two Magnum bars because it's hot and I want to try both flavours anyways. When I get back my grandmother sees and says "how do you spell pig?" and then spelt out my first name. She was joking, I know, but it made me cry and she gave me a huge apology later and tried to make it really clear that she hadn't meant to upset me because my mum got mad at her, but nowhere in her apology did she say "you're beautiful" or "you're skinny/not fat". Stuck with me ever since.

 

I was always sort of a young adult. Even though I was underage. By the time I was 12. I was getting 50$ a week for allowance. Which I spent on anime and manga supplies.

Then at 13 I started receiving SSI. My mother was a fairly, fair person so all 700$ I made. Would go into my pocket. Unless she needed 100$ for rent. Generally I always had money to spend on my hobby. But I wasn't like normal kids. I dropped out of school at 14. And had severe agoraphobia so I never liked being outside. Unless I had to pick up merchandise.

I surrounded myself in anime and manga. That was my ideal image. At 17 I discovered that I could buy cosplay outfits. So I did and boy was I upset. Because I didn't look exactly like the character I loved.
My solution was to get thinner. Since there was nothing, I could do about my skin color.

I have no grasp of what actual living is like. I have a tendency to reject reality. So until I look the same as my favorite characters. I will never stop. Now I'm just waiting to die.
It's been seven years since this mess started.

My ED always feels weird to me. Because it's not caused by anyone or anything other than myself. It almost makes me feel like. I choose this for myself. But then when I'm running for 90 minutes straight with heart pains. And crying on my 400th sit-up. I know there's no way in hell I asked for this. Yet there's nothing long lasting like sexual abuse or PTSD related trauma. Keeping me in this state of mind. So technically I should be able to recover right?
.....
I wish it was that simple. I'm honestly just stuck.

 

I've always been frowned upon for not looking like my mom. She was always perfect and pretty like a Barbie, and the only physical characteristic we share is our pale skin. People who knew I was her daughter would always be in utter disbelief, sometimes even telling to my face how strange it was. Once I heard from a f*ckboy that fancies my mom and is three years younger than me how could something like me have come out of such a beautiful woman.

I guess this is rather traumatic. I am just like the ugly duckling; no wonder it's always been my favourite fairytale.

 

I am not sure if this is the *first*, but I remember it being like a turning point for me. And tbh, although I have spent a lot of time analyzing my past for stuff related to depression and executive functioning issues, I never really looked that deep into this side so I'm kinda having a lot of realizations right now lol

It was 8th grade, and I had spent my whole middle school career crushing on my male BFF. He was funny, stood up to my bullies, artistic, and really handsome. But I was like...delusional or something. It seems like I was always confessing my "love" for him and he was always rejecting me, but it's like I'd forget and keep going. So anyway, we had come back from summer break and we were in gym class. I was really looking forward to seeing him! But when he came in, he went to hang out with these other girls that I hated. They were all skinny, pretty, outgoing, and "rich" (as I knew it back then, they were definitely well-to-do but probably not rich). Basically everything I wasn't. That year I felt so ignored, as my friend was suddenly interested in these girls and wasn't with me so much anymore. And this new girl came to our school that year. In my head she was my arch-nemesis, and she was also pretty and skinny and "all that." We had a formal dance planned for the winter, and for some reason I was hoping he'd ask me to go... ofc you know he didn't. He asked the new girl, and they "went together" for a while. I felt so, so, so rejected. He could have rejected me every single day before that, but all of that combined wouldn't hurt as much as seeing my crush with my most hated enemy. I never even really said goodbye to him when we graduated. He was hella popular with everyone, so everyone else got their goodbyes in. I just drifted away. Honestly it still hurts and I still think about him a lot. I wonder if he's the only guy I've ever "loved."

SO yeah, that summer was when I first experienced suicidal thoughts, actually. Because I wasn't skinny or beautiful and so I would always be rejected by the guys I liked. And I mean, that's what always happened. There was a similar guy I liked in high school. I felt like I would never be the girl to get picked, I was just some ugly fat demon that didn't deserve love. It's kind of sick, and I know that neither one is good or better, but I've wished plenty that this sadness made me not eat instead of making me eat literally everything. At least then I could be unloved and skinny.

 

My sisters were always skinnier than me

 

i was a kinda chubby kid, ie cute chubby until i was 13 when i lost all the baby fat. but a bit later i was put on antidepressants which made me gain so so so much weight and i started restricting. idk i cant really pinpoint an exact reason, but i do know that seeing like ED episodes in tv shows really influenced my thinking, an episode of dance academy (BEST aussie tv show ever lmao) where one of the characters develops ED behaviours i watched over and over and over

 

When I was a little kid I was painfully shy. The first time I ate lunch in school I was totally embarrassed.

I didn't like being in front of others while I was eating. The longer I was in public school the more I kept my eating hidden. I eventually stopped eating while I was in school.

OK, the real reason is it was due to trauma and it was real trauma. Nothing minor or important. I should have killed the perpetrator .

 

Probably puberty, I mean I went from the skinniest girl in my class to a "normal" weight in a pretty short period of time.
Also I got pretty interested in diets and after seeing different types of starvation diets I started seeing myself as too lazy to follow those and tried to convince myself that I was strong enough by starving.

 

I totally get you! I always feel bad that my ED wasn't caused but something super traumatic, like it's less real because of it.

I think a big trigger for me was missing out on a role I really wanted in the school play. I auditioned for the parts of two really beautiful, ethereal schoolgirls in our school's production of Picnic At Hanging Rock. At the end of my audition my teacher asked if I considered auditioning for one of the male roles. I was devastated - I just felt like I wasn't feminine, or delicate enough, or beautiful enough. I ended up being cast in two roles, as the young man Micheal and the old, cruel schoolteacher Ms McCraw. It fucked with me so much every rehearsal when I saw that the really gorgeous girls in my class had been cast as the schoolgirls and wore these amazing white flowy dresses while I had to wear a suit and act manly. I wanted to punish myself by restricting and lose weight so I would be "pretty" too. 4 month's later and I'm underweight, and being forced into recovery for anorexia. Funny how life works like that.

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I'm really sorry that happened to you...it's true, it's like we're told from a very very early age that there are two groups of girls--the ethereal, slim, feminine, desirable ones, the ones who are written about in books and who become the romantic leads in movies, and then everybody else. And you feel invisible if you're in the second group. I always feel like if I'm not one of the delicate and pretty girls than I don't exist

 

I don't think it was the first, but it's one of the moments that stands out the most for me. I was in high school and I asked the guy I really liked to this "girls ask guys" dance, and he said yes. But later that day I overheard his older brother say "why are you going with her, she's fat". The guy called me the next day and made up some lame excuse as to why he couldn't go.

 

ah.. this is sort of traumatic but I remember going to the doctors when I was 10 and being really scared to get weighed because I just felt heavy.

It turned out I was 50 kg, and the doctor said I was really fat. In those exact words.

And I just couldn't ever get it out of my head here we are.

 

When I was ten, I remember my dance teacher pushing me to do splits and stuff but eventually giving up. So I used to sit around and watch all the other skinny girls doing it and completely hating myself. But even then I never really thought of restricting. At the age of 13, I had lost most of my weight because I was a picky eater but I wasn't anorexic. My friends tho would tease me and call me fat, whale or pig. I think when I turned 14, something clicked in me and here I am )

 

• as a kid, my best friend was the typical "skinny girl who ate a lot"
• friends would poke my stomach and tell me I'm fat
• had adults ask me "what happened" when I started gaining weight
• mom called me fat
• my friend at school said she didn't like fat people and then she eventually started to bully me
• was weighed at the nurse's office in middle school in front of classmates and they made a big deal about my weight
• mom constantly puts herself down calling herself fat and says how she wants to lose weight (has always done this and continues to do this even knowing I have an eating disorder)

and that's not even the end of the list, I'm just tired of reminding myself why I am the way I am now.

 

I feel for all if you guys ! Alot of my Ed started with traumatic stuff but I do have alot of "little things " like you guys as well

 

I don't really know how my ED started at all, or when I first started exhibiting symptoms. I think the first time it got somewhat intense was when I was 15 (almost 16) and I just started feeling nauseous. I never ate breakfast before school, so that was normal, but I stopped eating/bringing lunch. I normally would have gotten a salad or made a sandwich, as vegetarian options at my school were limited. However, I really reduced my lunch intake. In retrospect, it was A LOT, but it was usually an apple and water or the school's cookies and water. TBH, the school's cookies were amazing because they were barely cooked, so it was like eating chocolate chip cookie dough.

anyways... I may have had a small snack after school (I vaguely remember a handful of chocolate animal crackers or something else fairly bland), and then dinner would be a small serving of white rice, as my mom always said it helped with nausea.

I didn't really notice much, aside from clothes being a tiny bit bigger, but I was mainly focused on the stomach pain I was dealing with. After a few days of increasingly painful side pains, my mom took me to the hospital because she thought I had appendicitis. It wasn't that, but it led to multiple doctor's visits, each time with me being at a lower weight. At one point, my mom got super mad and sort of yelled, asking if I was doing this on purpose. I wasn't at the time, but then it led to me actively restricting. I think I exhibited behaviors long before and was always concerned with my weight and always focused on losing, as I'm a dancer and in theatre, but I think I actively started then, when I Got that weird stomach pain. I think I dropped 10-15 pounds within a couple of weeks, and I don't think I gained it all back until I had surgery.

sorry, hope this makes sense... my mind is just... blah right now.

 

It's kinda weird but I watched earthlings and decided to go vego, it all started fro there.

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yo so weird to find this because I was literally writing an essay length stream of consciousness recollection type thing identifying the major points of my ed, including what I think started it:

I think I know how it started. Or, I suppose not how it started but around about when it started. I'd never been able to put my finger on it until now.

I was at an appointment with the paediatrician for a routine checkup, perhaps six years old? I think I'd only just begun primary school at the time. I remember everything about the place was brown. The carpets were brown and the walls and desks were wood paneling and the doctor wore a suit of brown wool. He reminded me of Frasier Crane.

He checked my breathing, he checked my glands, he measured my height, and he took my weight. I stood there, shoeless, on the scales that were larger than I was. The doctor frowned and checked his chart and then the scale again.

"Perhaps a little underweight," he said, but then moved on as though the comment held no significance. I, on the other hand, replayed his words over and over in my head, an odd sense of pride clouding them. I didn't know what had provoked this smug feeling of accomplishment, why my brain had positive associations with the term 'underweight'.

I thought about it a lot when I went to school. I was proud to be 'underweight'. I thought it was cool and glamorous, though I never thought to do anything to worsen or maintain it. I decided to bask in the glamour and revel in the glory of being 'underweight'.

I was thinking of posting the full piece when it's done. Or at least taking it to a therapist so I don't have to try and explain myself lmao