The second chapter of the Story of me and my Eating Disorder...

And so that's how it all began, really. My eating disorder was first triggered by my loneliness and low-self esteem, and my desire to become thinner...a desire fueled mainly be the flimsy hope that, by becoming the skinny one, that others would look at me in a different way, with new eyes...that they would want to be my friend. An intense fear of weight gain, of becoming obese or overweight, implanted itself in my brain. My textbooks claimed that abbout 15% of the population were obese...what was to stop me from becoming part of that fifteen percent?

I was blind to the fact that I was nowhere even near being overweight, let alone obese. I felt compelled to remove every single miniscule possibility of letting such a terrible fate happen to me. Sickeningly, on the bus home one rainy afternoon in October, I sat and "planned" what I was going to do in order to lose weight. No more chocolate or cakes or desserts, I decided firmly. That was bound to help me in my goal, since these were foods that I frequently indulged in, and hence had to be removed from my diet at all costs. And so instead of going to the chocolate basket when I stepped into the pantry that afternoon when I got home - usually the first thing I would go to do before I commenced with my homework - I poured myself a glass of water instead and had nothing. An odd sense of triumphant satisfaction accompanied this single action.

After a few weeks, my obsession with losing weight began to spread to other aspects of my diet. I sbegan to insist on making my own packed lunches for school. I stopped eating toast and cereal at breakfast time, opting for just a small bowl of cereal instead, under the pretension that I wasn't hungry in the morning. The sandwiches I made became ever the more frugal. Sometimes I would take out the filling when at school and throw it away. My weight began to drop, steadily but surely. By the spring of next year, Mam had picked up on this, and the fact that I always seemed to act a little oddly around the dinner table.

This summer we went together as a family on a trip of a lifetime, to the sunny coastline of California. It was an amazing holiday, but my memory of it is tainted as this was the first holiday which I shared with my eating disorder. And that ever-present, heartless little voice did, in a way, ruin what I had looked towards as a dream holiday with the people I loved. I couldn't eat ice cream in the 45c heat and not feel a desperate, edgy sense of panic. I couldn't eat out with my family and enjoy myself; enjoy a delicious meal and the company of the people around me...because I would just be so, so stressed about the size and calorie content of the food which I was about to consume; and, if when it did come and it did seem a little too generous for my ED's liking...I couldn't help myself. I would get upset, and I would spoil the whole evening. Mam began to get upset, too. She threatened to bring me to the doctors when we got back home, saying that my weird behaviour around food had not escaped her attention, as neither had the fact that I had lost alot of weight over the past year.

I begged her not to bring me to the doctor's, and made the first of the many false promises I would make over the course of my eating disorder.

I won't do this again, Mam. I'll be good from now on. I will try really, really hard to gain weight.

I'm sorry, Mam.

Me and Mam, together in Mallorca 8 years later.