Everyone has heard of eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia. Bulimia is an impossible to satisfy eating disorder that usually results in binge eating. As for anorexia, it is a loss of appetite for food. Statistically, about 8 million Americans suffers from eating disorders in which 7 million are women and 1 million are men. I have experienced an eating disorder recently. For a short time in April of 2015, I was anorexic for 5 days. I now have episodes of loss of appetite which disrupts my daily routine. In this essay, I will discuss my reasons for disliking solid foods, the lead-up to my decision, and how it affected my loved ones.
As far as I know, everyone eats food to survive and build their body up with the nutrients that are packed inside the tangible objects we refer to as “food”. I do agree that I do eat solid foods normally to survive but I don’t really enjoy the whole idea of eating generally. Eating food results in weight gain, self conscious thoughts, and in some cases damage to parts of your body. On top of all that, food causes people to feel bloated. Even so, from my experience, I do tend to get dizzy and nauseated from those days that I only have 0-2 meals per day. I guess overall, the main reason I dislike solid foods would be because I don’t enjoy the physiological effects that happens after consuming food. The whole weight gain, the pressure to maintain what is considered average weight, and having people constantly judge others are the main reasons I dislike solid food.
There are many factors that was the build-up to my loss of appetite and the reason why I didn’t enjoy eating as much as I used to. Obviously what I did was my choice alone. I wasn’t concerned about my weight and was never really that active as a child. In fact, I was actually considered to be “underweight” according to the BMI scale. Along the lines of my middle school years, I became lazy and less active in my daily activities. I would binge eat without the purging that came after that. But as I mentioned, I never really cared for what my weight was. My weight that I gained each year would range from 20 pounds to 40 pounds. Before I knew it, I was already 185 pounds and was judged by my peers and my family. Of course they did friendly teasing that shouldn’t have been a problem but the idea was already implanted in my brain. I’m fat and that is a problem. Eventually, I just didn’t enjoy the criticism that people gave me and stopped eating altogether. Currently, I am recovering but I do have those bad habits of counting calories, skipping meals, and staying away from junk foods. Other times, I am living what would be considered normal and having a slice of pizza.
The effect that my short-term anorexia had on my family would be that they are constantly worried about me. They would ask me on a regular basis about how much meals I had. They also stress the problems that happens when someone stops eating. I am constantly reminded that I look anorexic. Considering that I am currently 137 pounds, I doubt that is the problem. But that means, I lost about 48 pounds from the start of my 12th grade year to beginning of my freshman college year. About half of that weight loss was in 2-4 weeks. Even my doctors stressed to me the problems of having no consumption of food when I passed out giving blood for an allergy test which was prior to me fainting from not eating for 5 days straight. But again, I am working on resolving my problem.
To sum it all up, I have a problem. I have a loss of appetite and my schedule for eating is out of the norm. But the main reason for all that trouble would be the criticism I received for over the span of 6 years. Overall, I just want to point out it is rude to point out a person’s flaws and you can never know the lengths a person would go to reach their goal.
