"For every diet, there's an equal and opposite binge."

It's funny, relatable and true. It's also the harsh reality of an eating disorder. When your weakness manifests itself into an illness which is based around the control of your food intake, exercise and calories, the binge part doesn't just last for a cheeky night with a packet of oreos. It lasts for months. Months of binging just to return your body to the state it was in before. No one should ever experience true mental and physical hunger after eating a full meal or a full packet of cereal or...the list goes on.

I guess this is why when my eating disorder recovery led to me gaining five stone in two months, no one really understood. For the first stone or two, people said they were proud of me and that I was doing so well and looking so much better. By the third and fourth stone people stopped talking about my weight and it was as if the eating disorder had never happened. By the fifth stone I was fed up of hating food yet being obsessed with it, eating tens of thousands of calories in one day, thousands in just one sitting.

I was scared. A lot of having an eating disorder is about fear. I was scared people would think I had become lazy - as in my eating disorder I went to the gym every single day. Worse, people could think I stopped caring about the way I looked or simply decided one day that I wanted to be fat. That obviously was not the case. Even after hours of reading articles, books and watching youtube videos about the dreaded 'eating disorder recovery', the simple fact stayed the same. My body had been so starved of calories, nutrients and love, that it simply would not stop the hunger until I got the message. The message was "turns out you actually need to eat food to survive, and it doesn't count if you throw it up afterwards or make sure you burn more calories at the gym than you have eaten". And so the numbers game ended for me, as I realised it just wasn't worth it.

See, there's more to eating disorders than you think, and there's a hell of a lot more to recovery than you think. Low and behold, its not just deciding not to be skinny anymore one day. Back to eating disorders at their core - I can only speak for myself. Through the ages of 15 and 16, I was dealing with anorexia nervosa. Although this illness manifests itself in different people in different ways, mine focused around an obsession with numbers - calories - to be precise. I overexercised, underate and made myself the most ill I have ever been. 

I do feel like having an eating disorder is something you will never understand until you, you know, have an eating disorder. However, there are a few key things from my experience that I will never forget. The first of which is the coldness. You notice it when your friends complain that they are too warm but you are freezing cold. You notice it when after hours of being inside, you felt the same coldness you did when you were standing in the snow or in a dark night. You notice it when just getting out of the bathtub was something you dreaded, knowing that, although just for a few seconds, you would be stood in the bathroom completely uncovered, allowing your skin to be bitten by the steamed up bathroom air which was an iced wind compared to the boiling, steaming water that was your bath.  This might not sound so bad, but wherever you're sitting right now, wearing whatever you're wearing, imagine sitting outside in the snow. Imagine sitting outside in the snow for hours, days, weeks, months. The only time I can recall being warm from the entirety of my eating disorder was when in the boiling baths I mentioned. Living a life frozen to the bone, my warm baths were the only parts of the day I looked forward to, as they were the only escape from the literal and physical coldness my body had become a victim to.

Aside from the coldness, I became a victim to obsession. Considering how little I ate, it's kind of insane how much I actually thought about food. As in, I thought about food all the time. On my bus journeys to school I'd analyse everything I'd eaten for breakfast - mainly tracking how many calories were in it - and thought about how I'd burn those calories. I'd think about what else I'd eat that day - needless to say, it wasn't much. I'd constantly be asking my friends and family what they had eaten, living vicariously through them. I lived in a state of confusion, wondering how they could eat so much without living in the cycle of guilt and regret I had been consumed by. This meant that my friends became alien to me. I could no longer understand the way they would act around food or talk about food, and inevitably they could not understand me either. Retrospectively, I can see that they couldn't understand why their friend would want to torture herself, starve herself, turn herself into nothing.

So nothing I became. This only grew worse as I became further isolated from the people I cared about and the people who cared about me, as the pain I was going through reflected on them. It's never easy to watch someone you love suffer. And it's never easy to watch someone you love turn into someone they're not. See, when you're hungry, your body turns to survival mode. When you're in survival mode, you don't particularly want to hug your friend or give them compliments or laugh at their jokes. When you're in survival mode, you're snappy and short-tempered and holy crap you're miserable! When you don't eat, you're not only starving your body, but you're starving your brain. Therefore, your brain can no longer allow you to make up jokes or chat to your friends in the same way you used to. Your brain and your body cannot run on an empty tank. To put this as bluntly as I would have during my eating disorder, you lose your friends. They lose a friend too, as the person they once knew and loved simply didn't exist anymore. I was smart, witty and hopeful, but someone smart wouldn't have done to themselves what I did to my body.

There are a million other equally difficult things I experienced during my eating disorder, and there are a million bad ways I dealt with them. Whilst I've always been open about the fact that I have had an eating disorder, I've never been able to discuss it in detail with anybody. It is now a year and a half since I entered recovery and although I am now a healthy weight, have wonderful friends and eat a hell of a lot of food, I'm still far from recovered. This is a journey, which I refuse to do on my own.

Early December 2016. I entered recovery in February 2017.

April 2016 (healthy) - November 2016 (unhealthy)

December 2016

December 2016.

This is the week before I entered recovery, and so when I was at my lowest weight. To me, I look lifeless in this picture. Also where the hell did my boobs go?!

April 2018. Much happier and healthier.