How It All Started

It is hard to pinpoint when and where my eating disorder started. It was the summer before my 2nd year of college, and I was living in St. George with some friends. The semester before, I had taken a health class and had fallen in love with the nutrition portion of the course. My sister had just recently become a health guru, and I lived with a roommate who was into eating super healthy as well. I had never been interested in working out or eating healthy before, but once I left high school and my daily, vigorous, dance schedule, I knew I wanted to lose a little bit of weight. I tried not eating, eating very little, but I hadn't learned enough about the combination of working out and eating healthy. I wanted to lose weight the right way, so I purchased a gym pass and started making a food plan. After sticking to my goal, I started to see results. I was losing weight and people were noticing. Everyone was telling me how good I looked and I was loving it! This pushed me to keep working hard. My sister and I made the goal to run a half marathon and I began training. I was either running, biking, or swimming everyday, and I was eating mainly fruits and vegetables. The weight was coming off and I was so happy with the way my body was feeling. I soon cut out all sweets, and if I indulged one night with a cookie or a milk shake, the next morning I was running or swimming double the distance. I had caught the "health bug", and I was addicted. Once I completed my first half marathon at the end of the Summer and had moved back to Provo to start Fall semester, I continued to train for more races and found myself at the gym everyday. I was no longer dancing and I didn't have very many friends, so healthy food and the gym became my friend... which would soon turn into my worst enemy. The weight kept sloughing off, my menstrual cycle had stopped, and my face broke out into horrible acne. I never wanted to go out to eat with peers, in fear of overeating, and my mind became completely consumed. It didn't matter what I ate--vegetables, or a burger and fries--if I ate what I thought was "too much", I would have a nervous breakdown full of tears and get to the gym as fast as possible. I soon started to hate myself, but I couldn't stop. My weight was low, my thighs didn't touch, and I thought my body looked the best it ever had. I didn't know it at the time that I had most definitely developed a type of Bulimia Nervosa (the non-purging type).