The fat-shaming hurt, but the eating disorder could have killed me

How do you eat?

If you are like most people, you think about what you want, and then you make it, or you buy it, or you reheat it. You chew, you savor, you swallow. A bite is just a bite; a meal is just a meal.

I can’t remember the last time I ate that way.

That’s what an eating disorder does to you. It makes what’s normal feel weird, and that makes you feel like an alien. It makes you feel so lonely that it isolates you from your own self-worth.

Many people associate eating disorders with the image of a rail-thin, malnourished young woman, but any person in any kind of body can suffer from one. In fact, a 2016 study that looked at nearly 10,000 U.S. college students found that overweight students were at a higher risk of showing eating disorder symptoms than other students. And while millions of Americans embrace risky eating habits to shed pounds, research shows that disordered eating can actually put a person at a higher risk of weight gain.

Fat-shaming might seem like a trivial thing when you’re not on the receiving end of the taunts. When you are, it looms over every day and feeds unhealthy expectations and destructive behaviors.

My relationship with food turned radioactive.

In elementary school, I would ask every person at my lunch table for a little portion of whatever looked appetizing. In middle school, I treated the mozzarella sticks and bags of chips in the lunch line as prizes. In high school, I viewed the campus convenience store as my refuge, the place where I would go to make myself feel better. Food was both a hit of serotonin and a painkiller, and I became obsessed.

If there was a shared bowl of popcorn, I made sure I ate the biggest portion. If my mother wouldn’t let me add pretzels to the grocery list, I maneuvered to get my hands on something else behind her back. If there was pasta within a five-mile radius, I would find it.

My body changed, and it happened without me noticing. My clothes stopped fitting, and I stopped looking at myself in the mirror because I was disgusted. I stopped going to pool parties, and I began wearing jeans year-round, even when it was 100 degrees outside. I stopped liking myself.

Eventually, I stopped eating.

The first time, I made it to three weeks without a full meal. What’s surprising about starving yourself after years and years of binge-eating is that, initially, it feels amazing. Finally, control. My body was slimming in ways that eating healthy never achieved for me. And while I was distinctly aware that I was killing myself, I chose to keep going so I would feel worthy enough of a glance in the mirror.

I wish I could go back in time and take it back. Starving myself made things even worse because when I started eating light, my metabolism had slowed, and I regained the weight even though I wasn’t binge-eating anymore. What sat in the pit of my stomach was guilt and shame.

These are wounds that years later I’m still trying to heal.

What amplified my eating disorder was the pressure to gain my peers’ approval, the longing to feel beautiful. Boys at school called me a “fat cow” and girls withheld compliments reserved for classmates with tiny waists. My posts on social media invited criticism about my weight. What if people hadn’t judged me for the way I looked? I might have considered a healthier path toward the body I wanted rather than trying to speedrun my weight-loss journey.

I’m not going to pretend it’s easy to recover from an eating disorder or to undo the damage to your mind and body. I don’t have the answers. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with, but I’ve learned that healing comes in steps.

If you’ve struggled like me, and cheery body positivity feels unreachable, try body neutrality, or acceptance. Start with gratitude toward your body for keeping you alive. Start by listening to medical experts about health and nutrition because the body that will make you happy doesn’t require a fatal sacrifice.

I didn’t believe this before, but I do now: Whatever body I have is enough.

Camila Villarreal is a student at the University of Texas at Arlington. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Got an opinion about this issue? Send a letter to the editor and you just might get published.