500 Or Below – How Dieting Led To My Eating Disorder

By Torie Price
Opinion Page Editor
IG: torielprice

I was 8-years old when I went on my first diet.

I remember trying to navigate to PBSKIDS.org to play the Caillou game on my sister’s laptop when an article popped up claiming to know the secrets of how to lose 10 lbs in 3 days. The author wrote about only drinking black coffee and staying under 500 calories per day. Underneath were dozens of comments from others about how this diet changed their lives and how everyone should try it out.

Being a third grader who just learned all the ways I should be hating myself, I was hooked.

After a while, I hated feeling full. I craved to feel hungry, because I knew if I was, I was on track. 500 or less—that was my guide. MyFitnessPal became my fitness friend as I meticulously tracked my caloric intake in order to not fule by body.

As by body ate itself, I found stolace in the face that I was never full. The benchmark for sucess was catapolted further and further down the road as my view of my body and the world at large deteriorawted.

By sixth grade, I didn’t know what I looked like. I could not recodnize myslef form one day to another. I looked in the mirror and saw a moster rathter than the little girl I truly was. My view of myslef compared to that of my classmates worsened as time went on.

I didn’t understand why they didn’t have to pretend to be eating the same peanut butter sandwich, broken into smaller and smaller pieces until they were easy to throw away? Why were they able to relax after school rather than doing secret workouts in their bedrooms? Why were they able to just be kids?

It must have been me; I was doing something wrong. I was wrong.

Around the eighth grade is when I started water fasting. This is another term for starving yourself for days for the sake of “health” and “detoxification.” Family members complimented me on how good I was at drinking enough water, not knowing the darkness beneath my hydration.

I don’t know when I “recovered” or how, but I did. Throughout my teenage years, I struggled with restrictive eating habits, binge eating, and self-hatred. I wanted control. Control over how I looked and how others saw me and how they treated me.

My story is not unique. An estimated 9% of Americans have struggled with an eating disorder within their lifetime.

These statistics are no surprise. Our reality is warped. Decades of photoshopping models until they are unrecognizable and new ways of teaching the public to hate themselves have created the perfect environment for millions of young people to have the same experiences as myself.

There is a saying that you either live to eat or eat to live. Just don’t forget that you need to do both.

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