I Finally Wasn’t Lying to Myself

When I said I didn’t want to be like the stars in magazines, I finally wasn’t lying to myself.

This teen testimony was submitted by Jen from Canada

Since I was in grade six, I had been throwing up anything I ate.

This all started because my mother would call me fat.

In grade eight it got worse. I began to just not eat at all. And anything I did eat I threw up anyway. When I grade eight came to an end, I was 68 pounds, hospitalized and tube fed.

I think my eating disordered past has something to do with the emotional abuse I suffered from my mother and the physical abuse I endured from her boyfriend.

In grade ten I had gained weight. I was up to around 90 pounds. I was still throwing up. Near the middle of the school year I started hanging out with a friend who I told everything to. She begged me to stop. At some point in those few weeks of her trying to convince me to stop it, I listened.

I finally realized what I was doing was stupid.

Even though I thought I was better, I wasn’t.

At the end of grade ten I started starving myself and throwing up again. During the first couple weeks of summer I told people about what was going on in my family life. I was finally out. I was living with my friend who I mentioned before and her mom accepted me as her own daughter.

For once in my life I felt loved.

I felt like I didn’t need to stop eating to control my life.

I still look in the mirror and see a fat person looking back at me. I still pick apart myself and find everything wrong. I still see the pudgy areas on my body. But the difference now is that I’m really not sure they’re there. It may be my distorted body image, it may not.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy with the way I look, but my friends mom said it gets better as you get older. You just have to get past it now, rather than later.

I’m in grade eleven now.

I have hopes and dreams. I think about school work and where I wanna go when I’m done high school. Its amazing how a family you don’t know can change your life and make it ten times better.

I would love to say that all of you girls who are struggling will have the chances I have, but you may not. I still do stupid teenage things like smoking weed, or well my dirty habit of smoking cigarettes, but I also eat like I should be. There are still some days when I think I’m slipping back into my old patterns, but I keep my head up and think about how proud I was to overcome that horrible mental illness. I will never let that demon take me over again.