*Gulp*

Disclaimer: This is a long, heavyhearted post. May be a trigger.

This is my 50th post (yay) and I am tired of being vague. I started this blog to keep me busy over the summer but the community has turned into so much more for me. I will be continuing the blog through my school year that begins in a month.

I can't believe I'm doing this....alright then. Well, I'm sitting in a Starbucks...about to post the most telling secrets of myself...also, I'm posting from IE rather than my usual Firefox because the damned wifi is being a dick. I'm slightly frusterated. Luckily most of this was already typed up and edited. (Edited to death.)

Okay, I've spent a very long time thinking of whether or not I should bring a certain aspect of myself to the blog. There is a side of me that I'm sure is obvious to some of you but I certainly don't come out and say it. I've battled the idea of including it in the blog for a very long time. As a matter of fact, I've been working on this post for about a week (or more.)

Ultimately, this is a food blog and it is my food blog. That means that what I discuss is what I eat, cook, or bake. I've been changing lately and it's affecting my eating, therefore I feel it's time.

I don't want an entire page on this to be sitting there at the top of my blog forever so even though it's long, I'm making it a post not a page.

There are lots of reasons I haven't gone here before:
1. People I know (roommate, dad, friends) know about this blog
2. Fear of judgment
3. Fear of influencing or triggering others
4. Before this year I never addressed it.
5. Lastly, I don't believe it myself.

This post is painful but I've never laid it out like this. I have never told the whole story...why did I pick a blog as the time and place to do it? I don't know, it feels right.

I have decided that I want this to be known in my blog because I have to sugar coat things and when I don't they seem sort of random. Let's just jump right in.

I have struggled with disordered eating since I was 10 years old. I stopped eating meat and lunch at school, never ate breakfast, and narrowed it down to half of dinner. No one knew. No one noticed. I went back and forth between restricting and binging so no significant weight loss was noted. Through adolescence I lost weight slowly so it looked like a healthy weight loss but my mind wasn't healthy.

I found the online community of pro ED sites. Now pro ED does not mean "hey, you should have an eating disorder" it means that people with eating disorders can continue in their state while talking to others who aren't fighting it either. As you can imagine this only increased my tendencies.

I was the worst my sophomore year of high school. My father heard me purging one night and there was an organized intervention that I talked my way out of. (Saying "Oh, you know. I'm bipolar so I'm impulsive." to a shrink is apparently a good enough reason to say you aren't bulimic.)

My body was very sick. I was weak and tired constantly. Walking down the hallway would take the breath out of me. I shook and found it difficult to control my muscles for small tasks. My sight would go black when I stood up. I was dizzy and as you can see my skin sort of had a gross sallowness and I always had circles under my eyes. Even though all these things were happening, I was not underweight because I ate enough not to be. To me, not underweight meant not sick.

During my senior year of high school I went through a horrible roller coaster of traumatic events. I started off strong. During the early fall I was the happiest and probably the healthiest I had ever been.
My skin was less dull and I could actually put a real smile on but then I noticed slight weight gain and I went to what I knew best.

In the late fall and winter I slowly made myself incredibly ill. I was happy because of a certain situation I was in. I felt supported and accepted for once. I had a healthier mindset than I did during times before so I did not feel like anything was wrong.
This picture was taken in December of my Senior year. At this point my body was just coasting. I can see that now but at the time it felt right. My hair was falling out and frizzing, my nails started to split, my gums bled and were swollen, my skin began to have a greyish tinge, and my hormones were insanely out of whack. In this photo I hadn't had a period in six months and if you can see, I was actually developing some...."whiskers." (Yes, this picture is extremely shameful and embarrassing.) I also started retaining water in my face and getting swollen.

I was so struck by my ailments this time that I was able to correct some of them but not without complete shame at the prospect.

Fast forward to last winter. I had been in a somewhat healthy mindset but then I gained weight during my first semester in college and couldn't figure out why. I wasn't binging, I was eating lunch and dinner, not many snacks. I guess it was the cafeteria food but I wanted to fix it. Just fix it, that's fine, right?
December of last year, the biggest I have ever been in my life. I wasn't overweight but I felt like a monster. I was so ashamed of myself I wouldn't go out. I still wasn't healthy because my eating was sporadic.

I started working out three days a week and eating tons of vegetables. Then I went to five days a week and salads, just being healthy. Then I noticed weight loss and BAM! It was back. Oh, she* was there whispering in my ear every damned second of the day. I had to speed it up. More weight loss! More! It was all I could think of once again.
*It helps me to personify 'her,' I don't mean to be weird.

200 calories a day, cardio workout for at least 1.5 hours, 7 days a week. I revolved my weekends around the gym hours but I wasn't going anywhere anyways. She doesn't like you to have other friends. Pride came with a stomach burning with hunger and a head dizzy from too much cardio.

That wasn't enough, oh no. One night, alone in my dorm room, and old friend came to visit. She's even worse because she allows you to feel "guiltless." I was sitting in the dark with the glow of some reality TV show flickering in the corner. I was starving, I just wanted to TASTE. A diet of celery, iceberg lettuce, fat free cottage cheese and cucumbers isn't exactly foodie-friendly. I needed food so badly I was shaking. I knew it was there. It had been there for weeks, probably months. My mom had brought it to me. A "care" package. A bag of Doritos and home made cookies. I leapt to the stash. Sobbing, I downed them in a matter of minutes but not without structure. I knew a liter of water was required to get it back up. That was when I went back to the pro ED message boards. I never left my dorm room for anything but class or the gym. I surrounded myself with it.
March 2010 Status: 200 calories a day, 2 hours cardio, 7 days a week. Six binges and purges a day.

Let's go to this past Easter. I purged three times in one hour. I took the five hour drive back to campus and upon arriving ate an entire grocery bag of Easter candy, a sandwich, and half a bag of pretzels that I did not keep down. Later that night I was in the hospital. Why? Really, really horrible UTI and panic attack. My bad panic attacks go down like this: so dizzy I can't stand, so painful I cry, I can't breathe and entire body tingles and hurts, my vision blurs, goes dark, and has little light specks and I puke when I stand. These happen only when there is the perfect combination of anxiety, little food, and laying on my back. Well, I was out for a few days. I was so dizzy that I couldn't get up. I didn't eat but a cup of soup in two days. Keep in mind I hadn't kept anything down before that.

You'd think this would be a wake up call, huh? It wasn't.
I had plus dollars to use up and could only use them on campus. Let the binging begin. I bought junk and ate and ate and ate until it hurt and then let it all go. Guilt was beginning to creep into me at all times.

Soon, I was back home for summer and one afternoon after a binge I was crouched on the floor in the bathroom when I hear the garage door. Dad's home. The panic of knowing you have to make a choice between having food in your stomach and someone possibly knowing what you're doing is so painful. She had such a strong hold on me that I kept at it. I know that he knew. He did what we do: ignore it.

But that was my wake up call. It was about a week after I started this blog. I knew I had to stop doing that to myself. I could hurt him. I had previously tried to stop but it is not an easy task. Such restraint is required. Well, somewhere I found the strength. I stopped that....but I have another friend hanging around.

I count my calories. I started this so I would stop rapidly losing weight, so I could gain some control over what I ate. To make myself eat more. It morphed. It's an obsession now. I'm here, eating about 850 calories a day. A week ago I found out that under 1,000 a day constitutes as Anorexia. Well then...that's a word I've never associated myself with....nope. I'm not. I can't be. I'm not skinny enough.

Here's a fact Kittie: you're underweight now. You've lost over 50 pounds since February. Your best friend's step dad, your old youth minister, saw you for the first time in six months and asked if you had an eating disorder. Your best friend said you looked like you were underweight. Your dad said you were a twig. Your ob/gyn informed you that you will feel your ribs when doing a self breast exam because there isn't enough tissue there. You're tearing up now because one of you knows the truth and the other can't see it. She says: "You aren't underweight enough."

Yeah bitch, well I get bruises in the night because my ribs crush my skin. I actually woke up this morning with a cry of pain because my hip bone pinched a nerve. I literally need a new wardrobe because even my clothes from sophomore year fall off of me. Clothes I bought a month ago fall off. I need to fight you and I will.

Current:

I don't know where I am right now but I know that this community has helped me go from 200 calories to 850 and want to go to 2,000. This community has replaced my pro ED boards completely. I haven't gone back in moths. I'm not letting it consume me.

I want all of you to know that this blog is so much more to me than it may seem. It isn't just something to keep me busy like I thought it would be. I want to see food in a healthy way. I want to eat it without crying or punishing myself.

A huge reason that calorie counting has become so important to me is because I fear that if I don't, I'll binge. There is this feeling that I cannot describe that comes upon me during a binge. It takes all of my mind away and gorging is all that it feels but there is no guilt because it knows that it won't stay down. A binge is always followed by a purge. This is why I measure and eat pre-packaged bars. To stop the monster.

Wow....well, there it is.
I feel naked.

This does not at all mean that the blog is taking a turn in any manner. I'm keeping the blog up just as it has been going but now I'm not lying. I have a genuine interest in health but I'm not fully there quite yet.

I hate that I'm preparing for hater comments...but I am so if it's what you've got, give it.