Laura Halse Anderson stated: “There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn’t matter anymore.” Anderson is trying to explain that gaining weight shouldn’t be a problem that people should be worried about and someday, people will learn to accept themselves. But of course it isn’t easy to do that. Statistically, about eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders of which seven million are women and one million are men. I have experienced an eating disorder recently. For a short time in April of 2015, I was anorexic for five days. I now have episodes of loss of appetite which disrupts my daily routine. My eating condition involves my reasons for disliking solid foods, the loss of my appetite on a daily basis, and how it affected my loved ones.
For a couple of months, as of April 2015, I disliked solid foods. 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 zero to two meals per day. I guess overall, the main reason I dislike solid foods is that I don’t enjoy the physiological effects that happens after consuming food. The weight gain, pressure to maintain what is considered average weight, and constantly judged by others are the main reasons I dislike solid food.
There are many factors that were the lead-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 Body Mass Index (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 twenty pounds to forty 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 felt I was fat and that was a problem. Eventually, I just didn’t enjoy the criticism that people gave me and stopped eating altogether.
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 many meals I had. They also stressed the problems that happen when someone stops eating. I am currently 122 pounds. That means I lost about sixty pounds from the start of my twelfth grade year to beginning of my college freshman year. About half of that weight loss was in two to four weeks. Even my doctors stressed to me the problems of consuming no food when I passed out giving blood for an allergy test which was prior to me fainting from not eating for five days straight.
To sum it all up, I have a problem. I have a loss of appetite and my schedule for eating is not normal. This said, the main reason for all that trouble would be the criticism I received for over the span of six years. Overall, I just want to point out it is rude to comment on  a person’s flaws, and you can never know the lengths a person will go to reach their goal of a target weight. One of the serious lengths would be anorexia. And I know one day, like Laura Halse Anderson said, I would be fully recovered and I wouldn’t feel the need to lose weight.
