Eating Disorder: Explained.

As I sit here on MY COUCH at home in Arkansas with my little brother laying on the floor with his feet on the piano bench and my mother sewing on her sewing machine while we listen to I could hold you in my arms by Ray Lamontagne it is the perfect environment for writing. lol :)

I decided I need to make another blog so that I can write about things that aren't as intense as the explanation of what this blog is supposed to be.

So I am really excited because today I am going to write about what my eating disorder was. What contributed to it and whyyyyy I would turn to behavior which seems so odd to so many people. It really makes complete sense when you lay it all out. I AM SO EXCITED!!!!! because I think if more people understood what eating disorders really are then they could take preventative action for themselves, their friends, their children etc and help those who are struggling!

Ooooookay here we go. One of the main aspects which contributed to the eating disorder was the mentality that in order to have self worth/be good enough/AND be lovable by anyone else I had to be perfect. Not just perfect in certain areas but in EVERYTHING. And an 98% was just as bad as a 15% because NOTHING but perfection was okay. Even the sliiightest weakness that caused me to be assessed as a fraction off of perfect was failure. (I have discovered through the help of an amazing friend why I developed that mentality and it is utterly fascinating. I will write about it at a later date.) So imagine (many of you don't have to imagine because you feel the exact same way), but imagine or remember what it feels like to feel like your most dire need, to feel self worth and self love and to feel loved by others is CONSTANTLY out of reach because none of us can be perfect at anything let alone in every area of our life. And imagine how it feels to be constantly attempting to reach this ideal which is literally impossible. So yeah that was really stressful. ENTER: The ideal body image/role of women mentalities. Now this next part is a little difficult to explain because I have not discovered the causes of this mentality although I have contemplated potential sources/influences so for the sake of a shorter post I will for now say that from somewhere, somehow I developed the mentality that women had a role and that role was to be attractive to men and only through magnifying that role could a woman receive all the things she really wanted. She could feel valued and loved. Somehow that morphed into not only being lovable to men but being lovable as a person in general, even to women. Related to the previous topic, from some source, which I have theories to its specific identification, I attained the belief that what was most attractive in women was a very thin body type. (This link is to an amazingly fascinating documentary that talks about how this women thinks that the media paints the role of women)

These two mentalities of exact perfectionism and a woman's worth coming from attraction and perfection in physical form combined to be the PERFECT environment for a terrible miserable addiction.

I am about to post the follow up to this post :)