So much more

An eating disorder isn’t only about wanting to be thinner and weigh as little as possible, it is so much more than that. It is about control, about getting hold of something in your life again. You feel like everything is slipping away from you, and you search for control. Unfortunately, food becomes a scapegoat.

 All of a sudden, like a thunder from a clear sky, it turns into an intense fear of food, to be more specific: calories. Calories become monsters, monsters that will hunt you every minute of every hour of every day, when in fact they are just a measurement of energy. Energy that is necessary for every living thing on the planet. No energy = no life. What will keep our bodies going if we don’t get any energy?

We humans do not photosynthesize, so the only way to get energy is through food. But when having an ED, you do not care about that. You don’t care if you are dead or alive. You feel dead, and you wouldn’t care if you were in fact dead. You don’t see any point in living, you do not have any energy, you do not have any social life because well, the ED took that away as well, and your health is shitty, because guess what! The lack of nourishment is eating you up, inside out. It is a slow process to suicide.

But what happens when you’ve been stuck in this pattern for a long long time and you’ve decided to want to change it? Maybe it is too late. Maybe your body is about to give up. Even though you mentally are ready to fight off those demons, your body might be worn out. The earlier you decide to fight, the better.

1 in every 5 of those suffering from Anorexia Nervosa dies. That is 20%. There is a bigger possibility to survive cancer than Anorexia; that is unbelievable, right? To me it isn’t. I, like other anorexics, know how powerful and destructive this disorder can be. The thoughts that hunt you down and drag you down with them. That drown you and mentally kill you. People, who haven’t experienced it, don’t know. They don’t understand.  And I guess they never will. And that is probably for the best.