Eating_Disorders

Imagine waking up every morning, struggling to get out of bed. The room spins. Stumbling over to the mirror, you study and criticize every last inch of your body as the words “fat, ugly, worthless” echo in your head. You then stagger to the bathroom, using the wall to hold you up. You don’t remember the last time you ate a “normal” meal. Stepping on the scale will determine your mood for the day. If it has decreased since yesterday, you have succeeded; if it has stayed the same, or worse, gone up, those voices inside your head become stronger, telling you how useless you are. Throughout your day, you skip meals and avoid food at all costs, or binge on whatever food is in sight and secretly purge in bathrooms where nobody can hear you. Or like many women in this country, you flip-flop between both of these behaviors. For approximately seven million American women, this is their reality. This is the life of a woman with an eating disorder. “I needed to lose weight…fast,” said 18-year-old Liss of Boston. “So I started count... Eating disorder defined her at one point in her life as well. However, she then went on to learn that all it caused was “excruciating pain.” “Treating my eating disorder like relationship, not a condition or an illness, really worked for me,” Schaefer said. Schaefer also suggests journal writing and being surrounded with good supports. “In recovery, it was difficult to connect with Jenni at first,” Schaefer said. “But with lots of patience and persistence, I eventually found her, and I am thrilled to now be living a life without Ed.”