Hi there lovely!
Today’s blog post is going to be quite personal but it’s about time I shared this with you. I wanted to make a YouTube video about this, sat down and filmed it 3 times but could never find the correct words to accurately relay ‘my story’. My friend Roxy told me to put it aside until I’m ready, and here I am, 6 months later, ready to tell you my story. If you are sensitive to the topic of weight loss / anorexia, please stop reading. This is so scary for me to write and I don’t even know if ill pull my thoughts together well enough for everything to make sense but, here goes nothing.
Time to grab your mug, make yourself a cup of tea, relax and listen.
My whole life I have never had issues with my body or people making fun of how I look. I have played sport since I started walking and as an athlete, it makes sense that I was more on the fit side, which never bothered me until September 2017. Everything changed. Literally.
I have always been complimented for how I look, my legs especially. I don’t think a day would go by without hearing “oh my gosh, your body is amazing”, “can I please have your legs?”, “do you have a gym workout plan, your body is wow!” And I always accepted these comments so gratefully because I loved my body too, especially my legs, they were my favourite thing about myself. But for some reason and somehow, in September 2017 I started analyzing my body a lot more and the more I scrutinized it, the more I was starting to find small little faults with it. My legs suddenly sickened me and all I wanted to do was to lose weight, that was my focus.
I then googled all these safe ways of losing weight, one of the things I read was to exercise. But with already being fit, the more running I did, the fitter I got which annoyed me. So, I googled some more and somewhere it said to eat 1200 calories or less and I couldn’t – every time I counted my calories I was already sitting on 1200 at like 12pm.
This is where things get embarrassing. I went onto my Tumblr and somehow ended up on a page where this girl posted, and I remember her saying “Who wants to be added to a group where we motivate each other to lose weight” and me at the time was like okay…if I have humans to keep me accountable and help me to eat less, it’ll happen. So, she made this group and we all became such good friends, its insane to think that we all bonded over one thing – wanting to lose weight. We would tag each other in ‘thinspo’ photos and update each other on how little calories we’d managed to eat that day. I knew it was getting bad when I’d see my friends eating certain foods at school and I could mentally calculate how many calories their entire meal was. And I’m so embarrassed to admit this out loud but I would literally sit and say to myself,” I can’t wait for January to come so I can surprise people with how much weight I’ve lost and how nice I look!”
At some point I thought my body was broken because regardless of how little I ate, weighing my food, drinking slimming tablets and all, I was not losing weight and by now it was December 2017, so I sort of gave up. We don’t own a scale at home so I would always weigh myself at the gym at school and I kid you not, I was always either heavier than the week before, or the exact same weight.
I told myself to just forget it and focus on other things like matric coming up and one of my new year’s resolutions was to love my body more and work on being heathier in all aspects – physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally. So, for the first few months of the year I stopped counting calories and I just carried on life as usual. I personally used to eat SO much food and everyone at school would literally give me their food if they didn’t want it and that didn’t change. So, it’s not like anyone ever noticed I had started eating less, except for two of my good friends (I love you with all my heart and I don’t know how I would’ve survived without you).
And then everything changed mid matric (2018) – I was still eating normally, not thinking about food or starving myself but for some reason, I started losing weight. I was very confused because I ate about 6 meals a day and it didn’t make sense to me why I was losing because I was working hard to gain weight, the whole year. I was so disheartened and so confused, so I started eating more and more. My body would get so bloated, but I would force myself to chug down as much food as I could to gain my weight back.
I genuinely thought I was eating way above the RDA for my height and age until one day I decided to count my calories for a week (this is me trying to figure out why I was randomly losing…so I ate as I was eating and just recorded it to see how much I was actually having). At the end of each day I found myself having to make up food I ate just to increase the calorie amount and make myself feel better. I was sitting on 500-600 a day and my weekly average was 560 calories. I was so shocked because it never felt like I was eating that little. My stomach had literally shrunk so I would eat and become bloated and assume I’m eating heaps, but my stomach had just shrunk. And my brain had somehow made me believe that what I was having was enough, because I only ever ate when I was hungry…but with a shrunken stomach, that was like barely eating nothing. My one friend kept telling me I need to admit to having a problem and I was in such denial.
Every time I was doing a bit better, something would happen to take me right back to square one.
September 2018, trials came, and I got sick with a throat infection, a bad flu as well as conjunctivitis. This meant that I was on liquids for two weeks. and this is where my weight really plummeted – I started losing faster than I ever have before and I absolutely hated it. The entire time when I was my normal weight and wanting to lose weight I told myself I would be so happy when I’m thinner and I must keep going and think about the result…but it was the exact opposite. When I was losing, completely out of my own will and not self-inflicted, I was my unhappiest at my lowest weight… I hated my body and I just wanted to cry every day because nothing I was doing was helping me to gain.
We all tend to forget that when you lose weight, you don’t get to choose where you lose it. My coping mechanism became just not looking at myself in the mirror. Not posting any photos of myself and just pretending like everything was fine and my body wasn’t going through the most every day. I entered a competition named Project Scouted which obviously had to do with weekly photos being taken of me and that’s when I started getting messages from friends like, “Are you losing weight?” and I hadn’t even noticed how bad it was getting. It made me so sad and so scared because my whole life people have always looked at my body and complimented it (I would still get complimented by strangers) but those closest to me started realizing that something was genuinely wrong, and I was just distraught. I spent my days googling how to gain weight and did everything I was told to do but nothing…
Finals came and a week later I had to remove my 4 wisdoms, 2 impacted canines and 1 pre-molar. Which meant yet again, liquids for another week-month which heavily affected my weight AGAIN. At this point I had lost almost 5kgs and although to some it may mean nothing, it was drastic for someone who was already underweight to begin with.
I hated how I looked, and I would cry myself to sleep everyday praying for all my muscle to come back and to just be normal again and this is when I became really involved with body positivity and trying so hard to be normal again. Matric was over, my teeth were healing so this was the perfect time to focus on loving myself and teaching my body how to be ‘normal’ again. My BMI was 17.5 and a normal BMI is meant to be 18.5, that’s when I knew that things were bad, and I had to fix myself.
It’s been a long treacherous road, but I am finally happy again. I eat about 6 meals a day and I allow myself to eat any and all the junk food I want because even I know now that your body is meant to be your friend, not your enemy.
Now you’re going to ask – what was the purpose of this story? Basically, I just had to remind myself and others that…there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ body. I realized this when I was at my lowest weight. I completely hated how I looked but some people were STILL calling me body goals. And it just dawned on me that there’s no such thing as perfect – I was crying myself to sleep in my body meanwhile someone else was dying to look like me. And this taught me to appreciate what you have and what you look like…because you are good enough and you are the best version of yourself and you should never change that. Not for social media, or anyone, not even yourself.
I used to laugh when we learnt about anorexia at school like wow, that could never be me! I eat so much food, why would anyone ever starve themselves? And I did. For some crazy reason I let social media and society trick me into thinking that I wasn’t good enough, meanwhile I was everything and more. I was exactly how God made me to be and I didn’t have to change how I looked. Weight gain or loss doesn’t define you…I wasn’t happy. In fact, I hated myself and I regret all the nights I would cry and hurt my body for not listening to me meanwhile it was just trying to do its job – keeping me alive by eating. Food is not the enemy, you need it for nourishment just like the plants need water and soil to live.
There are so many things I’ve learnt that I pray everyone realizes
- Skinny shaming is just as bad as fat shaming. Comments like “do you even eat?”, “wow she looks like a stick” are just as damaging as “wow she looks like an elephant”. Double standards are not okay. You don’t know the reason behind why someone looks the way they do.
- It’s not fair to bring up one body type by bringing down another. It’s not how this works. You are not more beautiful because you’re not skinny like me and I’m not less beautiful because I’m not curvy like you
- So many people go through so many things that you know nothing about, so be kind – always
- Just because you can’t see someone’s pain written on their forehead, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Some people are just better at hiding it than others
- Comments like “real girls have curves” HURT. Confidence should be about building yourself up, not tearing other people down. You’re allowed to love your curves, but please, let me love myself too.
We often hear about ‘fat people’ problems and no one ever realizes that ‘skinny’ people problems are a thing too. Eating too much is just as bad as eating too little. Trying to gain weight is just as hard as trying to lose weight and both are equally damaging. And both are psychological issues.
Something eye opening I learnt was that anorexia is not a body type. It’s an eating disorder, meaning it is psychological. You can be fat and anorexic or skinny and anorexic. I met so many overweight people during my ‘story’ who were literally starving themselves daily. And this is the sad part, no one cares unless you’re deadly skinny. And this is why so many people do not get help and when they do, it’s often too late. This is also part of the reason that made me scared to speak up about how I was literally starving myself, hiding food in the weirdest places, giving it to the cleaners at school. Because I didn’t feel worthy of ‘recovery’. Although my BMI was scary to look at, if you looked at me and if I looked at myself. I would, and you would never call me anorexic because I didn’t ‘look anorexic’ – I did not have the characteristic look of borderline death, and that’s why most people don’t notice or speak up and that’s where the problem is.
You don’t have to look like you are dying to acknowledge that you have a problem much bigger than yourself. Everyone deserves to recover, and everyone deserves to find help. Please check up on your ‘strong’ friends.
I have never spoken about this to more than 5 people, but I felt that if my story could help/save/ enlighten at least one person, then it was worth sharing.
Thank you for allowing me to share such a big part of my life with you. Please feel free to message me if you want to speak or need help or anything – I’m happy to listen.
To my 5ish friends who knew and stood by me and never judged me every step of the way, I appreciate you so much. The world needs more people like you.
With all my love,
Singi xoxo
Singi's Not-So-Secret-Diary 