Personal Experience
An eating disorder can be a very difficult thing to overcome. Everyone has their own experience and trials that come with having an eating disorder. To start off, an eating disorder is defined as “any of a range of psychological disorders characterized by abnormal or disturbed eating habits”. any of a range of psychological disorders characterized by abnormal or disturbed eating habits. Everyone’s narrative with eating disorders are going to be different as well. The idea of uncertainty and struggle however is always going to be present.
Here are two different stories about two women who experienced challenges and negative outcomes but were able to overcome those challenges by recognizing that they needed help. Karin Davis and Gabi Mischel both encountered rather life-threatening experiences that made them realize that they both needed to make a change in order to save their lives. On the road to recovery, these women also begin to learn to accept themselves and love themselves for who they are.
Karin was a happy and content person but once puberty hit, around the first year of middle school, “it felt as if the game had changed but no one had explained the rules to me” (Eating Disorders and Depression: A Story of Survival). She didn’t understand what was happening to her and thought her only option was to start dieting. Her main concern was to control her body. Suffering from anorexia nervosa, Karin’s family doctor never understood why she was losing so much weight instead of gaining. After a few years, Karin started to eat a bit normally and eventually returned to a healthy weight, but this resulted in even more self-hatred. After tearing the lining of her esophagus and failing almost every class at University, Karin dropped out because her eating disorder was completely out of control. Because of the years she spent suffering in silence, she eventually admitted that she needed help.
At 15 years old, Gabi Mischel never thought that she was good enough and therefore set ridiculously high standards for herself. So, she obsessed on counting calories and how much weight she would gain from that. “Mental illness is often misunderstood, and I was scared of being labeled a certain way”, Mischel explains in How I Told the World About My Eating Disorder. In the beginning of the video, Mischel begins explaining an argument she had with her dad at the dinner table over her refusing to eat a pickle. Her dad exclaims to her “What are you doing?? Don’t you value your life?”. This consuming illness made her hate her mind and body too. She eventually stopped eating in front of people. As time went on, at 18 years old, one day she was walking up two flights of stairs and her body completely gave out. Trembling and heart racing, this was a moment of clarity for Mischel, and was a start in realizing that she needed help and recovery.
Both of these women fell victim to self-blame and self-hatred, believing that what they were experiencing was all of their own fault. They both desired control and found that in maintaining a certain body weight because it was harder to control what was going on in their mind. It wasn’t until they both experienced moments of clarity after both their bodies were at extreme risk that they realized that what was happening was toxic for their lives. Uncertainty is the big issue here. Even though uncertainty does not stop with successful treatment, however, both of the women go through it in their struggles.
Citations:
Eating Disorders and Depression: A Story of Survival. (n/a). National Eating Disorder Information Centre. Retrieved December 18, 2018.
Mischel, G. (2017, November 11). How I Told the World About My Eating Disorder. Retrieved December 18, 2018, from https://themighty.com/2017/11/tell-others-about-eating-disorder/
Health blog: Eating Disorders 