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Edit avatar · 11:59 PM

I've always been a binger. Always. I can remember being as young as 7 and raiding cupboards looking for cookies and other things to binge on. But, it was never a great concern for me as I was a ball of energy and subsequently worked off all the calories I consumed. Being able to eat a lot of food and maintain my trim figure became a source of pride for me from a young age, due to the emphasis that my family put on it. They would often comment on my weight, saying how they envied it and wished they could eat that much and remain thin. I reveled in the attention.

I continued to binge until one day, when I was 13, I discovered that my binging was causing me to gain weight. I panicked and decided to join a gym and start eating right. I would go and work out, only to be unable to resist the urge to binge later. I was always highly impulsive and binging had just become part of my routine. But I was more scared of gaining weight. To deal with this in high school, I would try to restrict my food intake during the day, only to come home so famished that I would inevitably binge. As my weight fluctuated, the more and more hopeless I felt. I decided to make myself throw up as a way to "have my cake and eat it too." However, throwing up has never been my favorite thing in the world, and so I turned to laxatives. I abused laxatives all throughout high school and sometimes still have slip-ups, although I'm in recovery now.

It's a lot more complicated than that, of course, but that's basically how my bulimia developed.