Melz’s Story

I suffered from an eating disorder for over 29 years before reaching full recovery. I was 11 years old the first time someone commented on my body in a way that made me feel embarrassed and aware of how others saw me. My older cousin made a comment about how big my butt was in front of his friends and they all laughed about it. I felt ashamed. It made me think that’s how the whole world saw me. It made me feel like it was wrong to have a big butt or a bigger body. In that moment I laughed with them, I laughed so they wouldn’t see the shame I felt, so they wouldn’t see that all I wanted to do in that moment was to disappear. I carried that shame for 2 years before my ed first developed.

Being on a diet in my household was a normal thing. My parents were always on the latest fad diet out at the time. So it was easy and acceptable for me to diet too. My parents were always trying to change their weight and I also wanted to change my body to get rid of the shame I was still carrying from my cousin’s comment. My eating disorder started out with dieting. I was a thin kid who had no reason to diet, yet because of my cousin’s lingering comment, I thought I wasn’t thin enough to be liked. I had a really rough childhood and my self esteem was already really low. It felt like the only thing I had of worth to give to the world was my appearance. I was often complimented on how pretty I was and told I could be a model. So that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up, I aspired to be a model. I constantly compared myself to the models in magazines and on tv. I knew if I wanted to be like them then I needed to look like them. This began a cycle of constant dieting for me. I became obsessed with trying to be model sized. Diets always failed which made me feel even worse about myself. I felt like I had no will power. At the time there were a lot of tv shows and movies on about eating disorders. This is actually where I got ideas about different ed behaviors. The media seemed to be telling a lie though. Every actor or actress on film were in thin bodies. And if someone in a larger body was portrayed, they were either made fun of and looked down upon, or they were the comedian. The media made it very clear that the only way to be accepted in society was to be in a thin body. So even though the media was trying to spread awareness about eating disorders through tv shows, it sent mixed signals and it actually taught me about behaviors I wasn’t even aware of. A few years into my ed my parents discovered what I was doing in the bathroom after meals. My mom heard me purging and got really mad at me, yelled at me and made me sit with her for 30 minutes after meals. This was her way of solving the problem. But this didn’t solve anything. All it did was make my ed more strong and intense and taught me how to be even more sneaky. What I wish she had done was to have compassion for me and taken me to a therapist to get help. I still found ways to compensate. . One day my dad found out. . Once again my mom screamed and yelled at me as well as my dad this time. But this time my mom did take me to a therapist. The only catch was she said she was going to sit in the room with me and the therapist. SO I told her that I wasn’t going to say a word then and it would be a waste of time. And it was. I refused to speak and sat silent during the entire session. Mom never took me back again. I would have talked to the therapist if my mom wasn’t there too. I really wished my mom would have let me see the therapist by myself. I could have talked to them about a lot of things I needed help with. But no way could I talk to my mom about any of it, because of the way she reacted. I hated myself and my life. My parents were super controlling, and the ed gave me the illusion of being in control. I was not about to give up what little control I did feel I had. By the time I was 16 the ed had full control of me though. I was miserable all the time. I went to modeling school and was told I needed to lose a specific amount of weight. I dropped out a week before finishing because I couldn’t find something to wear that I looked thin enough in. I spent over an hour trying on every outfit I had only ending up in a complete meltdown sobbing and screaming. I was so embarrassed about how I looked that I decided to just not go back to the school. My life took a drastic turn when I was told about a certain street drug that would take away my appetite. I actually blame my drug addiction on my eating disorder. I started out as using drugs to help me not eat, but when I felt how good I felt for the first time in my life, the first time I felt like life was worth living. I had been wanting to die since I was 10 and was actively suicidal since age 13. The drugs made me forget about wanting to die. That took control of my life for the better part of a decade. By my mid 20’s I was finally able to get clean and sober through the help of a 12 step program. I was trying to focus on turning my life around and by working on myself I started to feel better and even my ed seemed to disappear for a quick minute. I wasnt even suicidal anymore. But it didn’t take long for my ed to creep back in again. I felt it was manageable for me though. In comparison to how it was in my teens, I felt like it wasn’t too bad. Thats the thing about an eating disorder though. It is always trying to convince you that it’s not that bad. It likes to compare what you do to what other people do. And from what I had seen on tv shows that portrayed eating disorders, I thought I didn’t really have an eating disorder, because things were not nearly as bad as what I saw on them. That’s the thing about the media though. They only show you worst case scenarios. But that is only a fraction of what eating disorders really look like. It doesn’t have to look a certain way before you seek help. Then things took a turn for the worse in my mid 30’s. I blew out my acl snowboarding and had to have surgery. I was a pro level athlete at the time for snowboarding and skateboarding. So I made it my mission to come back stronger than before my injury. This was the kindling my ed needed to start a raging inferno. I engaged in unhealthy amounts of exercise to make a comeback. But instead the focus also turned to my appearance and how my body was changing. So instead of focusing on my acl recovery, I began to become obsessed about what I ate or did not eat and what the number on the scale read. I got really into what was called clean eating. What a fancy way to label just a different kind of diet. No food is dirty. But there I was getting obsessed about counting my macros and restricting more and more. This actually hindered the recovery of my knee as my body wasn’t getting the proper amounts of nutrients to help it heal. It didn’t take long for my ed to get out of control and for me to lose my mind. I was so miserable I had thoughts of wanting to die. And that was the red flag for me to reach out for help.

I live in a remote rural town and was working a full time job at the time. There was no help for ed’s in my area. I did some research and saw some programs offered some support groups at night. I was hoping to be able to drive the long distance after work for treatment, which would have been about a 2 hour drive one way. I made a call to see about getting into one of these programs. I had to have an assessment over the phone. When they called me back they told me their team recommended that I needed a higher level of care. They said I needed to be in a residential, which is a live in program. I couldn’t imagine taking time off work to get help. I begged to be let into their outpatient program. But they insisted I needed more help than the outpatient program could offer. My first thoughts were that I was not sick enough for that level of care. Of course this was just the ed’s way of trying to keep control. Also I had so many worries about that, like would I lose my job? How would I afford taking time off work? How could I afford treatment? I thought to myself about how miserable I was and how I wanted to get better so I decided I was going to have to take a leap of faith and put my trust in the professionals. So I decided to go. I was privileged in the fact that I had access to care, as my health insurance covered the cost of most of my treatment. Not everyone has access to care. The hardest part of being in treatment was how hungry I was all the time, no matter how much I ate. It took a really long time for my body to realize it was getting enough food finally. I learned a lot about diet culture and the lies it tells us. I was introduced to the all foods fit philosophy and HAES(health at every size). I learned to differentiate my own voice from the ed’s voice. This was super helpful because once I was able to recognize what the ed was trying to tell me versus what I wanted, that’s when I was able to take some of my power back. The eds voice told me lies, it fed me diet culture propaganda. Once I recognized its voice I was able to challenge what it said to me. I learned coping skills through the use of DBT and CBT. It was really hard for me to accept my changing body though.. When I left residential, I was filled with knowledge and tools to fight my ed. But I still held on to the belief that there was a safe way to change the way my body looked. And it was because of this belief that I relapsed into ed behaviors within a week of returning home. And since I live in a rural area, I wasn’t able to step down to php (which stands for partial hospitalization program) and iop (which stands for intensive outpatient program. which is what was recommended for further treatment. I did get set up with a dietitian who I saw virtually and a therapist who supposedly could treat ed’s. The dietitian was amazing and I am forever grateful to her for all her help. The therapist however caused more harm than good. I can’t stress enough the importance of finding a therapist who is properly trained to treat eating disorders. The therapist I was seeing was trying to tell me the diets she was on and recommended for me to try. She was clueless about any of the info I had learned from the true professionals in regards to how to treat an ed.

Some of things that I did find helpful however were to unfollow all the social media accounts that promoted diet culture, weight loss, changing bodies “etc”. And to follow all the social media accounts that were recovery focused. This helped me out when I scrolled my instagram by filling my feed with helpful reminders. I also was linked up with an online ed support group that met once a week via zoom. This group was a big help too as it was peer support led by a therapist who was an ed specialist. I did struggle to attain full recovery though because I still held onto the idea that I could change my body to look the way I wanted it to.

Then covid hit. That’s when things got really bad for me again. Having to work in a fast paced job wearing a mask put my anxiety through the roof. This is when I learned that I even struggled with anxiety on a day to day basis. I was just so high functioning that I didn’t know how high my anxiety actually was until it became unmanageable. This is a big reason why I relapsed into my ed big time. It was an old coping mechanism that I relied on to keep my sanity. I was also diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder at this time. It didn’t take long before my dietitian told me that if I didn’t go back to residential, she was no longer ethically going to be able to see me. One thing Im grateful to myself for was my honesty to my treatment team. No matter how bad things got for me with my ed, I was always honest with my team about how things were. This helped me the most throughout my recovery. I had a choice to make, either go back to treatment or lose my dietician and give up on getting recovered and let my ed take over full control again. I chose to not give up on myself and once again put my trust in my treatment team to know what’s ‘best” for me. So I went back to residential. This time I realized that I was going to have to make another choice. If I wanted any hope of achieving full recovery, I was going to have to let go of the idea of changing my body and accept my body wherever it was going to end up at its set point. I learned all bodies have their own set point for weight, that is where it lands ideally. I realized if I wanted full recovery, then I was going to have to accept my body may never be what I want it to look like. This was a scary realization. But I realized that this is what held me back from full recovery the last time. So I took a leap of faith and made the choice. I chose to chase full recovery. And that’s when insurance decided for me that I didn’t need to be in residential anymore. I was not ready to leave. I felt like I just finally was getting somewhere. I was afraid I wasn’t ready to be on my own. But I was sent home 2 days later. I knew I needed more support than what I was able to get at home. So I asked my Aunt if I could live with her for a while so that I could attend a PHP program. Thankfully she said yes. So, a week after being sent home from residential, I was able to start a php program. I did well for a while but whenever trauma was addressed I would fall backwards and my ed would quickly spiral out of control. Trauma, remember how I said I had a rough childhood? Trauma, remember how I said I had a rough childhood? There was a whole lot of trauma sprinkled throughout my life. From finding out during a fight between my parents that my “dad” was not my biological father and that he had actually been killed when I was an infant, to witnessing domestic violence between my parents and their eventual divorce leading to separation from my siblings, to prolonged childhood sexual abuse to multiple sexual assaults to tragically losing my aunt and even more as an adult…there was just a lot. The experts say abuse is a significant risk factor in the development of ed’s.

I finally stepped down to IOP but then again I was like playing a game of whack a mole. Whenever trauma was addressed my ed got worse and I ended up needing a higher level of care. I then had to return to PHP. Then at some point I again needed residential. It was brought to my attention that I needed a place suited to address trauma and the ed simultaneously. Whenever trauma was worked on, it triggered my ed and trauma was at the root of why I had my ed. So off I went to another state to a program that was supposedly able to treat both simultaneously. However that was not the case. Each time trauma was addressed, the ed spiraled and we had to start over getting the ed stabilized before trauma work could be done. Again, another game of whack a mole.

What made it so challenging to address the ed and the trauma simultaneously is that it was triggering other parts of me when trauma was brought up. 2 years prior to seeking help for my ed, I started seeing a therapist on my own and was diagnosed with DID, which stands for dissociative identity disorder. DID, formerly called multiple personality disorder, develops as a childhood coping mechanism. To escape pain and trauma in childhood, the mind splits off feelings, personality traits, characteristics and memories, into separate compartments which then develop into unique personality states. Each identity can have its own name and personal history. These personality states take control of the individual’s behavior, accompanied by an inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. So I had these other parts of that were so traumatized that it seemed impossible to recover from the ed without working with those parts specifically. Also I wasn’t the only one in my system that struggled with the ed. When I say my “system”, I am referring to all the parts who collectively make up the whole of Melissa, the bodies name. So I had to find a way to work with these other parts and get us all on the same page for recovery to stick. One of the parts would revert back to engaging in ed behaviors when we talked about trauma. One of the parts got so triggered in this out of state program, that they expressed being suicidal and then they ran away from the facility. This automatically gets you kicked out of the program. The police ended up finding me and sent me back to the facility. They wouldn’t allow me back into the program and made me go to a psych ward. I just about gave up on the idea that I was ever going to get the help I needed to recover from my ed. So, instead I realized I needed to seek the proper help for my DID. I found a program specialized to treat DID and across the country I went yet again. I would like to say this helped….but I found myself getting kicked out of this program too, due to breaking one of their rules. Still, I didn’t want to give up on myself…not after all I had been through to get help. So, I found another residential facility that dealt with trauma and off to another state I went again. It helped some, but another part got triggered and came out there….and had a suicide attempt. This got us put in another psych ward. And the program wouldn’t let me back in because they said they were not equipped to help. By this time I found another facility to take me…..but at this point my insurance wasn’t willing to help me anymore and kicked me out the same day I arrived. I felt hopeless. I didn’t know what to do at that point. Feeling defeated I came back home to California. I was still struggling with my ed but it was feeling sort of manageable. I felt I had done so much for so long and I wasn’t ready to give up on myself. I decided to go back to a PHP. I started emdr which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, with my therapist. It’s a type of therapy to address trauma. I did well enough to drop down to iop and eventually completed the program! I continued to see my therapist and my dietitian weekly. I worked with one of my parts who was still struggling with certain ed behaviors. Eventually I was able to get her on the same page with me and she was able to practice the things learned in treatment. The biggest help was my dietitian. Each week she would set goals for me that challenged the ed thoughts that still remained. Each time I met these goals it made me stronger and the ed weaker. There was one goal in particular that was the turning point for me and marked the start of full recovery for me. I had been eating and not engaging in any ed behaviors for a while at this point. But I was still held captive by the ed in regards to what I wanted others to see me as. I would suck my stomach in every time I was in public so no one would see my newly recovered body. My goal was to stop this behavior. This also ended up being my final goal I worked with my dietitian. After that week was over I felt like a new person. It felt freeing to be able to be in my body and let it be the way it was. I had to continue to make a conscious effort to not suck my stomach in for awhile after that week had passed. I combated any ed thoughts by telling myself how proud I was of my new body because it showed all the hard work I did to recover. Whenever I noticed I was body checking, I would say “this is my recovery body and it took a lot of hard work to get here.” Over time this helped me to accept my body as it was. I reached a point where I no longer needed to see my dietitian or my ed therapist. I was able to continue seeing a therapist for help with the DID. It has been 2 years now since then and I can say that I am still fully recovered! What does fully recovered mean to me? Well, for me it means that I no longer engage in any ed behaviors. It means I am no longer afraid of any food. It means I don’t follow any food rules. It means I have freedom and the ed no longer controls any part of my life. I remember when I thought this was an impossible task to achieve. Yet here I am enjoying the freedom that comes with living life without an ed! It still takes work on my part since diet culture is everywhere. I also consider myself to still be in recovery as I always have to use the skills I have learned to combat any diet culture thoughts that pop into mind. I just don’t participate in diet culture talk anymore. Most of my friends know how I feel about it and respect the boundaries I have made in regards to that kind of talk. Sometimes I try to educate people around me who use that language and other times I just stay quiet. I also spread a lot of ed awareness on my Instagram account. I always want people to know that full recovery from an eating disorder is possible and I am living proof.

What helped me the most in treatment was learning about all the lies diet culture had fed me, no pun intended! Also, learning that the size of your body has nothing to do with your health was a big eye opener. Learning all the truths behind the lies made a big impact. Oh, also finding out that BMI is bullshit and why. What helped me stay motivated to keep trying to recover is that the professionals told me it was possible! Also, my dietician and therapist both shared with me that they too once had an eating disorder and they were living proof that recovery is possible! But the most important thing that helped me recover was my own decision to be completely honest with my treatment team and myself about where I was in the recovery process, honest about all behaviors and thoughts, no matter how dark it got.