First moment you realized you may have anorexia?

What I thought was happening: Stood up too fast, ate something bad, not enough water, allergies, etc.

What was actually happening: I was just not eating. I would forget to eat. I would avoid food. It didn't interest me. I played it off as "I just forgot to eat / I must have eaten something bad"

A friend of mine pointed out that I'd used those excuses several days a week for at least a year. I had to accept the idea that there was a problem.

I think it was in summer school- I would only bring a cereal bar to eat and school was from 8:00-1:00. I would have trouble waking from my classroom to the cafeteria and all I would think about was food. That's when I started becoming lightheaded all the time.

@Laura hi laura I'm Jessica. I've been dealing with anorexia and bulimia since 2010. The moment I realized I had a problem was the day I couldn't drink a smoothie because I was afraid it would give me a double chin. I was at work and my cousin brought it for me. I stared at it for an hour so it would get warm on purpose so I wouldn't drink it. She was catching on to my patterns so I knew she did it on purpose. It made me mad. I poured it down the drain and "punished" myself the rest of the day for wasting her money. That moment on ive had a "voice" in my head that tells me I'm no good or an ungrateful person. I know my eating disorder enough that she's a mean manipulative thing that doesn't care about me at all. It's sucks cause it's apart of me I'm some weird twisted way. I feel like I get "better" sometimes and then small things trigger me and I'm bad to my old sneaky ways.

My eating disorder's name is "Marg" she stands for "Money. Anger. Rage. Guilt."

i've been struggling with eating disorders on and off since i was 12 so i've always kinda known.

but in this relapse, i think i realize just how serious it was when i started falling asleep all the time. not eating enough to even keep my body awake, and i really got scared when seeing how much weight i'd lost : (

I'm currently in recovery, but I'm sharing my story so others might learn and not feel so alone.

My anorexia fight started in 2005/2006. I was a freshman in college, and I commuted to a community college an hour or so away from home. I also did ballet 3-5 nights a week. At that time I still ate three meals a day with a good snack in between lunch and dinner. On ballet days the snack was usually a little bigger, as I would be in class/rehearsal for several hours that evening, so I would need plenty of energy to burn.

A few months into school, my mother and older sister started teasing me and constantly talking about my weight. "Oh, you'll gain the freshman fifteen if you keep snacking like that," they'd say. "You'll get fat." And at first I thought they were wrong and ignored them. I was running full speed with classes and travelling and homework and projects and ballet classes, so who had time to get fat?

At this point I should add that my ballet master had something of a personality change. He was always driven, pushing us beyond our abilities and leading to improvement, but he got downright nasty. While we would be at the barre doing exercises, he would always have some snotty comment to say. "Y'all eat too much junk food! Your thighs are so big! The girls at Pennsylvania Youth Ballet don't have thighs like yours!" Never mind that we were usually dancing several nights a week with Saturday morning rehearsals and our big thighs might be the result of barrework, center work and rehearsals. Fatsos, the lot of us. And I absolutely adored him up til this point. He always had a nice word for me after class, always pushed me to improve, and was the best teacher I'd ever had.

So...yeah. Combination of Mom, sis, and dance teacher, along with getting into the groove of college, AND feeling like I had no control over my own life at times, led me down the path of cutting back meal portions. Then snacks. Then skipping snacks. Then reducing my meals to Slim Fast bars. Then getting home late at night after class/rehearsal, and holding a pillow to my stomach to ignore the growling. But even then, during all this, I didn't realize what was going on. I simply saw it as a means of appeasing everyone, staying slim to win approval, and feeling like I had a say over something in my life. The sad irony of this is I had to read a nonfiction piece about an anorexic girl in recovery for a composition class, and I can remember thinking, "What an idiot. Tearing up lettuce into shreds 'cause she'll get fat? No way. How dumb is that."

Anyhow...I want to say the moment I actually realized I was anorexic, it wasn't just something I was doing to make my life better, was when I was taking a bath. And my older sister walked in the bathroom and caught sight of how thin I was. She asked me what was going on, and I denied losing weight on purpose. It was my secret, my possession to keep. Not hers. And why did she care? She said I'd get fat.

So my sister listened to this sad denial, walked out of the bathroom, and found our mom. I believe she said something like, "you need to go look at (my name). I just walked in the bathroom and I can see all of her ribs."

And that was the beginning of things. The 'eureka' moment for me.

Hey guys. This is so hard to actually write about. My friends have been trying to tell me for a long time that I'm anorexic. My response was always that I just wasn't hungry. I get dizzy when I stand up often and the symptoms keep getting worse. I'm cold all of the time for no reason but I thought that was just me. Lately, I'll start shaking really badly. The other day I was shaking too badly to stand and I had to lean on a wall for support and my friend eventually had to help me walk. I also found out that my dry and peeling skin could be a result of my refusal to eat. My friends kept telling me I was anorexic but I refused to believe them. My family makes me eat when meals are eaten at home which I hate because they eat extremely unhealthy so whenever they're not watching me I don't eat. I'm scared to tell anyone because threats have already been made to put me in a mental hospital. I'm the lightest I've been since 2014 and I don't necessarily want to go back but my friends seem to see this as a huge problem. After I about passed out on my friend, I started to think that maybe I had a problem, but I have no idea what to do about it. I'm sorry this is so long but I just really needed to get this all out.

I just realized within the last few weeks that I have a problem. Since coming to university and being away from my family, I've become more obsessive about my intake. I've lost a significant amount of weight and feel faint/floaty and cold most of the time. However, I'm not "technically" underweight, so I feel like my concerns aren't really legitimate... Which is silly, I know. But I don't know what to do or how to break this cycle...

I realized I had anorexia when people started commenting on how thin I was getting and I couldn't see it. Someone took a picture of me and I didn't think it was me... I thought they were lying. And the moment I realized I couldn't stop.

I first realised I had annorexia when my mum told me that's what the doctors had diagnosed me with when I was 5! I'd been struggling with my eating all my life and was diagnosed with EDNOS at about 20 years old but it was only when I was about 25 when my mum revealed I'd been diagnosed with an eating disorder much earlier in my life and then the memories of all the appointments and special meal plans came back to me.

I knew for a while that I had issues with my body, but it was really in college when I noticed more. I started a "lemonade cleanse," where that was all I consumed for 10 days. My friends had to sit me down to talk about it. It was then that I realized the years of restricting, of stomach pains, of pretending I ate- these were all part of it