I was never abused as a child or anything like that. Like yes sure I got a few smacks on the bum here and there but that’s only because I deserved it. I’ve never been stick thin but I’ve never been really fat either I’ve always been ‘healthy’. I remember comparing myself to my peers even at the ages of like 9/10. I had an obsession of just staring at peoples legs to see how thin they were in comparison to mine.. I still do it now and I’m 17. As a child I suppose I felt neglected at times. I am one of 4 children and for 3 years of my life we lived in a country pub which my parents ran meaning they were downstairs in the bar a lot of the time so me and my brothers and sisters had to be independent with feeding ourselves and getting ourselves ready for bed. As I said I never suffered from abuse but my dad was very abusive to my mum and I remember I walked in on an occasion when my dad had a gun and all this crap started with the police and I wasn’t allowed to see my Dad for a short period of time. Maybe that has something to do with this..but maybe not.

Self harming came first at the age of 11, my obsession with food started at secondary school. It started off with the refusal to eat lunch when I was about 12/13 my friends used to do anything to make me eat it even to the point where they would shove it in my face or buy it for me so I would feel guilty if I didn’t. Later on at the age of 14 I started to count the calories I ate. I meant for it to just monitor what I was eating but once I saw all the calories piling up 400, 500, 800 it made me panic so I started to restrict to nothing more then 900 and if there was a day when I only ate around 500 I would feel better about myself. I remember my mum buying me chocolate during this stage and I felt so guilty eating it I purged. This is when my purging started. I would purge everything, this is before I was even aware of binge eating. I would just purge because I knew I could. I started to excessively exercise but as I had no access to Gym equipment I bought myself a pedometer and used to pace back and forward between mine and my sisters room till I burnt of everything, as you can imagine this took hours. I used to do a number of sit ups and step ups and then spend the rest of the evening adding up the calories I ate and then working how many I burnt and then seeing what else I could do to burn more. I remember there was a time that i was even too scared too drink water but I knew I had to so I used to add 5 calories too my intake for every glass. This went on for a few months and I was at my lowest weight of around 90 pounds. I then chose self recovery and recovered for a short space of time and relapsed again in the summer when on holiday with my friends. This is when even my friends could see that I was noticably thin and when I look back at the pictures with them they just say my sunken face looks scary. I then chose self recovery again but this time I started to binge and since then it’s been a roller coaster of binge periods and restricting periods. It’s been 6 years since this has all started and if I’m honest I feel this has taken my teenage years away from me. I don’t feel like I’ve enjoyed half as much because I feel like my mind was always somewhere else. If I could rewind time I would change everything but it’s too late now. If you read all of this I love you x