Kelsi: Free from My Eating Disorder

My story begins on March 8, 1988 in Florida; I was born a Southern Belle. At the time, my dad was playing baseball for the Chicago White Sox and was down south for spring training.

A child of the sun and a baseball fan for life, my childhood was nearly perfect. Larsen, my younger brother, came along four years later in 1992 when we were living in my dad’s hometown in Michigan.

My childhood was pretty awesome. I grew up running around a ball park; whether I was watching my dad or my brother play or I was playing myself, there was always a game to go to.

As the years past, I began to put more and more pressure on myself to be just as good of a ball player as my dad was, which obviously never happened. Not understanding why, I couldn’t be perfect at everything, I quickly developed nasty habit of being extremely hard on myself…

Nothing ever seemed to be good enough for my ridiculously high standards.

Until one day, I discovered something called weight loss. It was simple: burn more calories than you consume and the number on the scale would automatically go down. No questions asked.

This was something I knew I could be the best at and that’s exactly what I strived to do.

Looking back, I can’t pinpoint an exact day or time period in my life when the eating disorder started. Sometimes I feel like I was born with calorie counts and fat grams programmed into my brain.

I had a pretty impressive collection of Shape and Fitness magazines that I read like the bible during most of my childhood and teenage years. The women on those pages were perfect, unlike me.

My early dieting days consisted of a highly restrictive diet, which started every single Monday. My willpower only seemed to last until the end of the week, which led to weekends of binging on everything I could get my hands on, then, feeling miserable, fat, and guilty, I began my restrictive diet once again on Monday morning.

It was a vicious cycle I couldn’t seem to break and it was ruining my life.

After a few months of this, I became fed up and figured out how to purge.

At the time, it seemed like the perfect answer to all of my problems. I could eat whatever I wanted as long as I found a way to get rid of it.

Initially, I was still busy playing three sports and doing things with friends like a normal teenager, but like with any addiction, it turned into something much more and eventually took over my life.

For a good ten years, I was completely consumed in my eating disorder.

My diet became highly restrictive and during the worst of it, there were only three foods that I felt safe eating. My weight was extremely low during the final five years of my disorder, but I never saw it.

Due to my extreme state of starvation, I would find myself binging on everything I could get my hands on, followed by a purge. My days were either spent completely restrictive, or binging and purging up to 12 times in a day.

During the final three years of my eating disorder, ironically, I attended and graduated culinary school. It seemed like a smart choice at the time; I was already so obsessed with food, so why not study it?

I spent time after every class throwing up in the bathroom and spitting out food in the trash. Everyone knew I was very sick, but it still didn’t stop me.

A decade went by before I finally hit my own personal rock bottom and decided to get help.

I was sick and tired of lying, stealing, manipulating, losing trust, ruining relationships, internships, job opportunities and simply missing out on life. My health was so bad at this point that my parents were beginning to fear for my life. At the time, however, I still didn’t truly believe I was sick enough to get help.

Today, I can happily say I am doing really well in my recovery after spending six months and gaining 50 pounds in a treatment facility in 2012.

I am nowhere near being fully recovered and I still have days where I struggle, but I am grateful every single day to finally have a second chance at life.

My worst days in recovery are nowhere near as bad as my best days during my eating disorder.

No matter how difficult recovery might seem, staying sick is much worse and it quickly becomes clear that there is so much more to life than an eating disorder.