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The EmpowerED Initiative

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I don’t even know if I actually have an ED or if I’m just being dramatic because some days I eat fine and other days I eat too much and other days I won’t let myself eat anything at all and I just can't really tell what it is.

My friends keep saying I look healthier lately but that just makes me want to skip meals. I just don’t know how to want to recover without feeling like I’m giving up control I guess? Like I know I should want to be healthy but I just have this weird mindset where looking healthy triggers something in me that makes me want to keep up my disordered eating habits

I was doing okay for a while, but I looked through old pictures of when I was sick and I miss it which is literally insane to say. But I miss how small I looked and I hate that part of me still wants that back.

I don’t know how to explain this but recovery feels like losing a part of my identity. I don’t know who I am without my routines and my rules. Everyone says it gets better but it’s been months and I just feel emptier.

The only time people check on me is when I’m visibly not okay. When I’m trying to get better, everyone just assumes I’m fine and stops asking. It makes me feel like I have to be visibly struggling to deserve support. But thinking about my “condition” like this also makes me feel like I’m just seeking attention

the last few weeks i’ve been accidentally falling back into patterns i thought i had grown out of. i skip meals because i’m “busy,” but i know i could make time if i actually tried. i’m not intentionally restricting, but the end result is similar. part of me keeps insisting that it’s not a big deal because i’m literally functioning fine, but another part of me is nervous because this is how things started last time. i don’t want to wait until it gets serious to acknowledge it.

Some days I feel okay with how I look, but today everything feels wrong again and I don’t know what changed or how to fix things.

I’ve been dating my boyfriend for over a year now and he’s aware of the fact that I have pretty bad body image issues and my eating habits aren’t the best. But I’m too scared, even though we’ve been dating for A YEAR, to let him know how truly bad it is. He’s never seen me without my sucked-in stomach and he thinks I’m this skinny little girl with a flat stomach when in reality I don’t let him pick me up because I’m so scared of weighing too much, and I won’t go to the beach or anything with him because I don’t ever want him to see me in a swimsuit. I know it’s toxic and probably overdramatic but idkkk I don’t want to live like this forever

Some days I’m hungry constantly, and other days I barely feel anything until late in the evening. It’s unpredictable and makes me distrust my own signals. I’ve been trying to eat more normally, but it’s hard when my body feels inconsistent and confusing. I end up overthinking whether I should eat based on hunger or based on a schedule, and either option leaves me feeling like I’m doing something wrong. It would be nice to know if this is something other people deal with too.

I tried telling my mom that I don’t feel okay around food lately and she told me it’s just a phase and I need to stop overthinking. Now I feel embarrassed for even bringing it up. I can’t tell if I’m actually struggling or just being overdramatic like she said.

It isn’t that I hate how I look, it’s more that when I see myself in a photo or mirror, I don’t fully recognize what I’m looking at. I keep comparing myself to old versions of me in my head, and it makes it hard to feel settled. Some days I feel relatively fine and other days I feel completely out of sync, like I’m watching myself from the outside. It’s an uncomfortable feeling that I don’t really know how to describe to anyone in my life without them assuming it’s just insecurity.

My relatives love commenting on how people look, and it’s most definitely not in a cruel way and everything they say is very casual. But even the most neutral comments send me into this spiral of analyzing myself. Someone said I “look healthier lately,” and it stuck with me for days even though it wasn’t meant to be anything more than an observation. I’m frustrated that these little remarks get under my skin because I know logically they don’t matter, but my reaction still feels automatic. And like it gets so annoying because they’re my family and I shouldn’t take anything they say super to heart since I know they love me and everything

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