Just a little announcement that eating disorders are in no way ‘fun’ or a ‘quirk’ or make you more special than anyone else. They don’t make you skinny, they make you sick. You don’t get that ‘cute summer body’, you get hospitals and doctors appointments and IV’s and feeding tubes. "But everyone with eating disorders have bones and are so skinny!!" No, everyone with eating disorders are sick. You aren’t going to gain confidence when you lose weight, you’re going to gain self loathing.
You think you are able to control this, but you’re wrong. It gets to a point after being able to starve yourself for a period of time, being able to throw up everything you eat, telling yourself that you will stop when you are thin… that you don’t have any control over it anymore. You don’t control your disorder, your disorder controls you. We can’t stop listening to what our disorder is making us believe. No amount of compliments or persuasion will make us feel like we are worth what you want us to think. Anorexia is not a lifestyle, bulimia is not a diet, ednos is not a phase. You can’t wake up one morning and say that you are all better. That’s not how eating disorders work.
You aren’t going to be ‘lovely’ and you certainly aren’t going to be ‘tragically beautiful’. You’re going to be living in doctors offices. You won’t have your skinny cute body and be super popular with lots of friends. You are going to have rotting teeth, dry skin no matter how much lotion you put on, you’ll lose your hair and it will fall out in clumps just from touching it. You’ll be throwing up blood, crying at the sight of food, and passing out when you try to stand up.
“But I can stop when i want to!!” Nope. You’re wrong again. An eating disorder doesn’t go away when you tell it to. It can take years upon years to fully recover from one, and even then there is still a chance on relapse. It’s not a fun summer diet, it’s a lifetime of disease and mental torture.
I just want all of you to think: When you tell someone they don’t look sick enough to have an eating disorder, do you really know what ‘sick’ is? It’s not the weight. It’s the side effects. You can’t tell by looking at someone that their heart is failing, that their bones are crumbling, that their will to live is completely shattered. When you tell someone they aren’t sick enough, what do you think that person is thinking.. That they are fake? That they are pathetic? What does that in turn make that person do. It makes them want to get sicker, and sicker. You are encouraging someone to kill and torture their souls and their bodies. Before clicking that little send button, do you really want to be responsible for someone’s relapse? Do you want to be responsible for someone throwing up blood on their bathroom floor after eating a piece of fruit because “they aren’t sick enough”.
I’ve spent way too much of my life in and out of hospitals, sitting in doctors offices, being poked and pried by needles and heart monitors. No one should have to go through this. Ever. Think before you say something that could encourage a terminal disease.
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