“I knew that they were dying from this, but it seemed to me that it would not affect me”: 3 stories of people who almost died due to anorexia

Anorexia is not just a loss of appetite. Pop culture, social networks with perfect pictures, the social construct that a thin body means beautiful and healthy, as well as caustic comments from loved ones and their own psychological problems make people not just refuse food, but bring themselves to extreme thinness. As long as life does not become unbearable, all thoughts do not begin to occupy food, and physical health does not deteriorate.

We talked to girls who faced this problem, almost lost their health and even life, but found the strength to get out.

“The doctors told my parents that if I wasn’t urgently hospitalized, they would lose me.”

When I was 14, I put on a few kilos during quarantine. And so I looked at the photos on social networks, which were thin girls, and abruptly made a decision lose weight. I don’t know what it was: the desire to have at least one of the same photograph or something else. At that time, I weighed about 53-55 kg.

It all started harmlessly enough. At first, I allowed myself to eat everything for breakfast, then I skipped lunch and didn’t have a snack until dinner, and in the evening I drank tea and ate a protein bar. Of course, the weight began to go away quickly, and I really liked my new body, but I wanted to speed up the process even more. So I started to reduce the amount of food I eat at breakfast.

I eventually got to the point where I could only eat porridge and a protein bar all day.

Every day I weighed myself. Skateboarding was replaced by a 20-minute workout, which took a lot of effort. I remember that sometimes it became so difficult for me that from impotence I started cry. But I always finished the training, otherwise I would not have forgiven myself for missing it. Then I started running up and down the stairs of the house from the 18th floor.

I began to cry more and more. I seemed to have lost some weight, but something told me that I was still not good enough. Sometimes I dreamed that I was eating chips, and then I woke up in a cold sweat from fear.

I didn't want to get up every morning. I fell asleep and woke up with thoughts about food. Wrote in the notes of the phone about the food that I would like to eat. I watched videos of food being prepared, I watched others eat, I cooked myself. I dreamed about food and smelled it everywhere.

When I got up, my eyes darkened. I constantly felt apathy, fatigue, I had no strength at all.

The family saw what was happening to me, my mother was worried about me, and I promised her that I would starve only until September 1, so that I could come to school beautiful. But she continued to lose weight. Quarrels and trips to doctors began. My friends said that I already looked ugly, many avoided talking to me because something was wrong with me. But I was fine with that, because my social battery was at zero.

I lost 15-16 kg, I started having health problems: my menstrual cycle disappeared, my skin became dry, my hair fell out, I was constantly terribly cold. I remember one day on the way home in a taxi, I cried, because for the first time I felt all my helplessness. As if it wasn’t I myself who couldn’t eat, but something didn’t allow me to do it. That evening, I looked at the bowl of soup and cried.

From that day on, my attempts to recover began. I started to eat three times a day, but at the hours strictly appointed by me. First, in small portions of 160–180 grams, because I was afraid to eat more. Mom tried to cook for me low calorie food. I ate, but often after eating I had a tantrum.

Eating has become harder than starving. Life has become a kind of torture.

My parents could no longer endure all my antics and tantrums, and I did not understand why they were forcing me to eat, if it only made it worse.

I thought that when I start eating three times, I will put on weight, but it was not so. Every time I stepped on the scale, I saw a plumb line. Then I allowed myself to eat in portions of 200-250 grams. Sometimes I even ate fruit. But the process was already started, and I continued to lose weight.

The weight became very low, I was taken to the hospital, where the doctors told my parents that if I was not urgently hospitalized, then "they would lose me." Hospitalization was the bottom for me, I was scared for myself.

In the hospital, I recovered by 4 kg, but when I got out, I threw them off again.

However, it was necessary to take up the mind, so as not to die. At some point I started compulsive overeating - I couldn't eat. Thanks to these attacks, I managed to gain normal weight. They began to happen so often that anorexia faded into the background.

Slowly I regained nutrition and weight. Now my health is not in danger.

But I regularly have tremors that start if I don't eat for a long time. In addition, my eyesight has deteriorated.

It is worth remembering that eating disorders are primarily in the head, so now I treat myself carefully and carefully monitor my psychological state. Today, I can say that my relationship with food is healthy.

“Sometimes I vomited immediately undigested food, and I could eat it again”

I started having problems with food at the age of 16, when I moved from Australia back to Russia. Abroad, it seems to me, more and more positive attitude towards body imagethan ours. And in Russia, it was as if I had a replacement of optics, it suddenly began to seem to me that I was ugly. I started to hate myself.

This coincided with the fact that I went to university. I wanted to start all over again: get into a new company and be super cool. That is, thin.

Since then, I have no photos at all. Therefore, now I can’t even adequately assess what kind of figure I had. Most likely, normal, I just saw myself through a distorted prism.

My mom used to tell me that I don't look good at my weight.

They gave me a gym membership. It all started with training. But I wanted to lose weight as soon as possible, so in addition to the gym, I began to eat very limited food. My diet became very mean. I could eat cottage cheese, buckwheat, some fruit in a day - that's all. And when I realized that this strict system works, there was a feeling that I had everything under control and I tamed my body.

I don’t know exactly how much I weighed then, probably around 45 kilograms, but it always seemed to me that I weigh a lot.

By that time I was in my first year, and my day looked something like this: I woke up, went to jog, then I had a study, and after that I went to training again. And all this time I controlled what I eat.

I deliberately didn't eat anything. delicious. I usually didn't eat out or carry food with me in a container.

I was glad that I was losing weight, I was very pleased with myself. But at the same time, I often could not fall asleep, because I was very hungry and thought that I would eat tomorrow, how I would avoid temptations.

This feeling of discomfort and hunger, in which I spent every day, made me very happy. It seemed to me that this meant that I was on the right track.

I took all the advice from the VKontakte public pages about thinness, which were then popular. There I found advice to drink coffee before training and several different drugs so that I don’t eat anything, but have the strength to train. I drank such cocktails in the morning and in the evening.

After about a year and a half, I ran out of inspiration from losing weight. The diet no longer brought such results, and I was tired of starving and constantly wanting to eat. And she started to break down. This is how mine started bulimia.

I pounced on food, crammed into myself everything that was at hand. After that I felt disgusting. It's like an obsession: it's hard for the body, because it's already used to small portions, but you can't stop eating. And you start to train several times stronger, and in your head you have a constant balance of how much you ate and how much you have to work out.

And then you resort to another method - you call vomit. I want to get rid of food as soon as possible and rewind this attack back.

At some point, vomiting became my normal way to get rid of food: I ate, diluted a bottle of water with potassium permanganate, and this made me sick.

When my parents went somewhere for the weekend, I ordered food delivery, ate me sick, I ate again, and so on in a circle. There were some very scary episodes. When you eat uncontrollably, the food ends sooner or later, but you still want to eat, and many times more. Sometimes I vomited immediately with undigested food, and I could eat it again.

After such parties with food, I became very swollen, blood vessels burst in my eyes, because I stood upside down over the toilet. But on the Internet there was a recipe for this case: I drank diuretics, from which puffiness disappeared. True, after them you feel disgusting: weakness, dizziness. But I managed to erase the external consequences of these binges with food, to pretend that nothing happened.

I was so ashamed to admit that I had a problem that sometimes I ate and, so that my parents would not notice anything, I went to clean myself in the toilet in the gym. Or she went to the mall, bought a mountain of food, locked herself in the toilet there, ate it all, and then made herself vomit.

I didn’t feel beautiful, I didn’t feel in control of my body, I was constantly ashamed. I stopped looking in the mirror.

I started having problems with my teeth, my throat was sore and terribly had a stomach ache. The end point was the words of a doctor who, during a gastroscopy, told me that my esophagus and stomach had turned into one reservoir - the esophageal sphincter no longer worked. That was the first time I had the idea that I needed to take care of myself. I became afraid for myself, and I began to try to eat normally. I stopped overeating.

I think I was very lucky that I formed a group of friends with whom I spent a lot of time and did not overeat in this supportive environment. And then a guy fell in love with me, I fell in love with him, and this is his radical acceptance helped me a lot too.

Now I have a healthy relationship with food, but I still feel the need to go to the gym if I'm going through some difficult period in my life. And I still don’t understand if this is a healthy habit or an attempt to take control of your body.

“I couldn’t move and stand up, as if a concrete slab had been placed on me”

I made my first attempts to lose weight at the age of 12-13. I studied at the children's art school in the choreographic department. The teachers there constantly commented on the weight and physique of the students. They could scold everyone for the fact that you are “fat” and you need to lose weight.

Then I started to refuse some food. This did not seriously affect the weight, but mental restrictions appeared that affect the psyche: the body image suffers. I was afraid that I won't achieve anything at that weight. Over the years, these thoughts have become more intrusive.

The situation worsened in the 11th grade, because eating disorders, among other things, are caused by anxiety and stress. On the stress of what I needed pass the exam and enter the choreographic school, there was a move and a change of teacher. But the process of losing weight had already been launched, and I wanted my new teacher not to be disappointed in me, although she did not comment on my weight in any way.

It was the most difficult period in my life, then I lost about 20 kg and began to weigh 46 kg with a height of 172 cm. At the same time, I felt terrible.

Interestingly, in choreographic schools there is a table of correspondence between height and weight, and with my height, a weight of about 47 kg was considered the norm there.

I counted calories and weighed every gram of food. In my diet there were chicken breast, cottage cheese, some broccoli, eggs, nuts, bread - mostly proteins, a little fat and fiber. Using a special application, I calculated what ratio of KBJU should be with my height and physical activity, and it seemed to me that I was doing everything right. But at the same time, the condition was so severe that I felt “broken”: “Everyone is losing weight, but for some reason I feel bad.” Before I developed this system, I practiced fruitarianism, low-calorie ready-meal delivery, and other methods.

I constantly measured the parameters: I always weighed myself in the morning and in the evening. If by night the weight exceeded the limit set by me, I began to panicI was shaking, I did not understand what I did wrong.

No one knew what was happening to me, I was ashamed to tell about it. In social networks, it was possible to create a prosperous image, at school, many even liked my thinness. The family noticed that something was happening, but they did not know the whole picture. We quarreled, I was persuaded to eat. But in general, it was infrequent: it seemed to them that since I go to training and eat something, it means that everything is not so bad.

I constantly felt very weak, I could be thrown into a cold sweat, my ears were ringing, I was out of breath during some physical activity, I had a tremor, and menstrual cycle disappeared for about six months. The emotional state was very unstable: tearfulness, aggressiveness, increased anxiety.

I continued to dance, go to training, but I only had enough strength for classes.

The rest of the time I just lay there and thought about where I took a wrong turn and why my life is like hell.

But the worst thing happened when I realized that I can’t even concentrate on ballet and think only about food, about how bad I feel.

I have appeared suicidal thoughts. I woke up and dreamed of falling asleep as soon as possible. And when I went to bed, I wanted not to wake up, so as not to relive those groundhog days from time to time. I didn't have the strength. I was always hungry, could not eat what I wanted, measured every bite of food and concentrated on not getting better.

Communication was also lacking. I constantly felt loneliness, because I could not share my problem with anyone - I was afraid that they would not understand me.

The last straw was the episode when I was lying on the couch and could not move and stand up, as if a concrete slab had been laid on me. It lasted maybe half an hour. I couldn't call anyone, I was just crushed, and I had no strength. Then I realized: “Man is mortal, but that's not so bad. The bad news is that sometimes he suddenly dies.”

At that moment, I realized that this was not a game. After all, I knew stories that there are very serious health problems from anorexia, that people die from it, but it seemed to me that this would not affect me.

And then I realized that the worst thing could happen to me.

From that moment I gradually began my recovery. The main principle that I began to adhere to is no restrictions on food at all. I had terrible famine, because before that my body drew energy from itself, and now it had to be returned to it. I ate probably thousands of calories a day. Of course, food was bad at first, but I convinced myself that this was a recovery process and that I had to continue.

I could not completely remove the training, but left only those classes that were aimed at maintaining professional skills. And I've always been honest with myself and asked myself if I really need ballet training or if I just want to burn calories.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to contact psychologist, but I myself worked through my problems, explained some points to myself, formed literally new thinking.

I felt the changes quite quickly: my physical condition recovered in 2–3 months, my moral condition also began to rapidly return to normal.

It did not affect my professional activity. We are afraid that weight gain our knees will fly, there will be injuries. But when a person is healthy, he can concentrate on the dance, control everything, try not to make mistakes. And when a person is sick, his attention is scattered and the chances of getting injured are much greater.

Yes, maybe some comments are sent to me, but I don’t pay attention to them anymore, I’m so sure that I’m doing everything right.

I don’t know how this will affect my employment in the future, because while I’m still studying, but I’m sure I won’t be left without a job.

Now my activity in social networks, and in life, is aimed at combating the stigma “exhaustion = ballet”. I strive to organize my own movement, which would prevent the development of ED in dancers and athletes on the background of professional activities.