I decided I'd had it back in January, maybe a little before then. January was when I actually did something about my anorexia, but I probably decided I needed to fix my problem.
I decided I had it when I took dancing back up. I took a 4-month break because of my struggle. When I got back to dance, I was out of breath and sore after the FIRST DANCE WE DID. Dancing requires energy and stamina, but the fact that I could barely last one dance was pathetic to me. I was used to dancing 3+ routines without getting this bad. I made a decision that would change my life, as melodramatic as it sounds. I decided I needed to eat healthy, work on my stamina, build up muscle, and work on my flexibility.
Gaining 10lbs is something that would've made me starve myself even more only last year. I recently checked my weight, and when I saw it, I said "good, I'm gaining it back".
I barely had fat to lose when I began starving myself. Instead, I lost water weight and muscle mass from dancing for a decade. This deeply impacted my ability to perform and kept me from improving.
The pictures below also changed my opinion of myself:
These pictures are horrifying. It looks like they live in third-world countries, when they have plenty of access to food. I decided I didn't want to look like those women. I'm not going to let society tell me what I'm supposed to look like. I'm not going to let other people's opinions about women trick me into doing this to myself. It's not like I had some novel idea to starve myself so I could be stick-thin already in my head. Magazines put it there. Looking at pictures of thin women did this to me. I was exposed to this at a very young age, and I don't want any other young girl to have to go through what I did. I want young girls to see pictures of healthy women in magazines, pictures of women who work out, eat healthy, exercise, get enough sleep, oh... and also pictures of women who don't show off 80% of their bodies. Society is also teaching young women that we have to show off a ton of skin to be attractive, and if we don't we aren't attractive, and if we aren't attractive, we're worthless. That's all what women are good for, right? Looking good and being sexually attractive. Mhm, sure. I find this to be problematic, but that's a tad off-topic.
Now, recovering from anorexia is incredibly difficult, so I'll talk about how I did this in the next chapter. Thanks for reading!!!