I have namechanged because I am going to be referring to me, here. I suffer from an eating disorder. I have done so for over twenty years and I am still trying to crack it. It started off as anorexia, although never got "serious" there was a point where I got very thin as a result of seriously restricting what I ate. At any rate, I've maintained a normal-ish weight, sometimes on the heavy side of normal and sometimes not, but the point is I suppose no one would look at me in the street and conclude I have an ED, whether anorexia or compulsive eating.
Actually every day is awful. I can't eat like a "normal" person at all: I binge eat and gain weight and after a bit restrict to near starvation, then after s bit can't stand that, cycle repeats itself.
I've already had to have a serious conversation with one of my children to try to explain why I do it and that they are gorgeous and beautiful and must NOT follow my example. But I do think mine was made not born if you like. In other words if I'd been brought up in another family I would have been all right.
Food was always an issue and to be fair my parents did the right things with me as a fussy eater and my dad grew his own vegetables and sometimes we would go on holiday with families with older children who would try to encourage me to eat things like melon and oranges and French bread which I just found hard to chew. But sometimes they would lose it a bit and I had to do the "clear your plate" thing (I remember stuffing food in my sock to flush down the toilet) and one time they forced a tomato into me and I was sick. I still don't eat tomatoes!
My mum was terrified of me getting fat and she used to get really angry/upset if I had a friend who was thinner than me. I think it kicked off when I started at secondary school, although I remember a few isolated incidents before that where she would either call me fat or allude to it. I looked a normal size on my year 7 school photograph but that year I won an award for playing the piano and appeared in the local paper with some other girls who were playing other instruments. The photographer positioned us standing in a diagonal row if that makes sense and I was at the front and looked bigger than the others. In my mind I looked huge but it was the angle of the photograph as we'd all been 'stretched' if you see what I mean and I also looked taller and generally more strapping than the other girls and I wasn't.
Both my parents acted like I'd come home with drugs, and my dad made me name all the other girls and then I had to repeat after him, "I am fatter than Katie. I am fatter than poppy."
I couldn't do anything growing up without my weight coming into it. If I did something good it didn't matter because I was fat. If I did something bad, I would be insulted for it alongside 'fat.' I remember dropping and smashing a plate once (not on purpose!) and my mum looked at me with contempt and said 'you stupid fat bitch' as if being fat made me drop a plate somehow? The weird thing was I wasn't fat, really. I was a little bit plump about when I was 13, I think. Looking back at old photos I had a bit of a protruding tummy and my face looks a bit heavy but nothing remarkable.
It's hard to know what to say! I was never allowed to snack. So whenever I was in the house alone I would binge eat on loads of cereal and toast. I grew when I was fourteen a bit after years of being smaller than everyone else and I definitely look a perfectly normal size on those pictures. My brother was 3 years older than me, and he'd started going to a gym and started taking me with him and I discovered I liked it.
My mum was so odd with me about my appearance and weight though. I think she was proud of my looks, although I'm honestly nothing special at all. Just an averagely prettyish sort of person. But them constantly going on about how fat I was, I don't know. I think it really fucked up my whole relationship with food in a way. We had a lot of long holidays and I couldn't get away from her especially in the car driving to France or Spain, she'd go on and on and on about my brothers faults and mine.
She died when I was 15 (she was an alcoholic although I didn't know it at the time)
I still don't really know what a 'normal' diet is, still binge eat, and then starve.