How I Healed My Eating Disorder
I never actually realised that I had an eating disorder. While I didn’t receive an official diagnosis, was never hospitalised, and seemed healthy enough that no one really knew about it, my eating patterns were disordered nonetheless. As were my body image issues.
I don’t feel like a diagnosis or a title is necessary. I may not have become severely underweight or suffered life-threatening illnesses from my eating patterns, but I consider myself lucky. Lucky that it never escalated that far.
I feel it is important to shed light on this. Because upon first glance, I did not “look the part”. I wasn’t frail. No worn-down teeth. I didn’t have brittle hair or nails. I didn’t refuse to eat. I wouldn’t run to the bathroom after a meal. No unusually pale skin or dark circles under my eyes. I was also considered to be an active and fit teen and young adult. But I did restrict my food. I would skip meals. I did diet. I did count every single one of my calories and macronutrients. I did obsess about food. I did obsess about my body image and wanted so badly to look like fitness models and bikini models. And I did punish myself through workouts to burn off calories, or to “get toned”.
I remember as a teen, I would mark off on my calendar, how many “good food days” I had a month. I could never quite make it to a full “good week”. It crushed me. I was so obsessed that it consumed every waking moment. I would scour through magazines and stare at celeb bikini photos. Read the nutrition and dieting articles, especially the “what I eat in a day to look like this” ones. I would also research fitness magazines about diet pills I could take, which exercises and workout methods to do so that I could look like the model being interviewed.
Then, instagram came along. All the “fit” pages cropped up, and the #IfItFitsYourMacros #iifym trends came up. I of course, followed them all. Then I decided that I COULD eat whatever I wanted, as long as I stayed within said about of ridiculously low calories and met my macronutrient profile. I paid zero attention to micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. All of which are essential to my body’s functioning, and being able to actually utilise the carbs, fats and proteins that I was consuming.
I would take “progress” photos, only to hate what I saw. I was never fat, or even slightly overweight as a teenager or adult. But it wasn’t good enough to me that I was a healthy weight. I was “too soft”. That version of me NEEDED to have a 6-pack abs, thigh gap, toned legs and arms. Otherwise, she was worthless. My self-esteem was so low, that I always felt insecure and envious of other women who fit that description. Even ones who didn’t fit that description and who carried a little extra weight, but were obviously confident and attractive, I would feel jealous if they chatted to my then-boyfriend. I felt a need to tear them down, and would make snide comments about them to my friends and to my boyfriend in private. I was a very unhappy person.
My mother and stepmother were both heavily influenced by diet and exercise culture. I followed in their footsteps. There was always a heavy focus on physical appearances, especially physique and how other women dressed. Sometimes comments were positive, mostly they were negative. I could sense jealousy and envy, and I absorbed this and modelled this from my primary school years all the way through my early to mid-20’s.
As a child, I would feel conscious that I carried extra “baby fat”. I would wonder why my stomach had rolls when I was sitting in a relaxed position, but my fitter, slimmer friends, didn’t. That changed when I got my braces. I put myself on a strict diet, under the guise of not wanting to stain my teeth with sugary, dyed foods. I lost a lot of weight and finally felt secure in myself. As an 11 and 12yo, I loved how thin I was from a side-on view, how you could see my ribs more easily. This obsession carried on into my high school years.
Puberty hit — my hips widened slightly, and stretch marks appeared on my breasts, lower back and butt. I tried all the stretch mark serums you could find, and it never made them disappear as claimed. I was thoroughly ashamed of this. I also rejected any trace of body hair, no matter how faint it may have been (nothing wrong with choosing to remove body hair, I still do. But my obsession with it was all-consuming). Comments about my appearance made by my father and male peers would crush my self-esteem further. Until years later, where comments by male peers would inflate it; I had moulded myself away from the prior criticisms, and towards what appeared to be the “standard”.
My love of exercise was born out of self-hate. I learned how to train myself at home, eventually joining a gym and training only for aesthetics. I did this for years until I was introduced to the sport of Olympic Weightlifting by a mutual friend, who became my coach. I did this sport for around 4 years and competed. I became obsessed with staying within a certain weight class and getting as strong as I could, despite my body wanting to naturally put on 1kg or 2 (mostly muscle). I worked with a couple of sports dieticians and learned how to fuel myself from a performance perspective. I also loved that my body was strong and muscly. But I eventually got to a point where I started to feel uncomfortable in my skin, because I had put on a 7kg from when I first started. Sure, I was the strongest I’ve ever been, and I had made SOME improvements in how I felt about my body image, but I didn’t feel comfortable in my everyday clothes outside of the gym.
I decided to do HMI Nutritions Heal Candida Now cleanse to get started on healing my gut issues. My disordered eating patterns and body image issues came to a head. While I incidentally lost weight and finally got the “body of my dreams” as a result (according to my teen self), I became so obsessed by my weight and would worry about “getting fat” and putting the weight back on.
During that time, I also discovered that I had adrenal fatigue. There were signs of this all along, but I ignored them in the name of pushing myself in the sport and ignoring my bodily cues. To heal, I needed to stop training this way, which crushed me. One, because it was all I knew. Two, I loved the body that it gave me. Slowly, I did wind my training down. To my surprise I did not get “fat”, but I did have to adjust to my changing body. Which to others, would not have been very noticeable, but to me it was. During this time, I also decided to study and become a certified Health Coach through HMI Nutrition.
I moved from my home country, Australia to Europe in March 2022, through which time, I encountered a lot of stress. I still had not set foot into a gym for around 3-4 months. Once we found a permanent place to live in May 2022, I decided to pick up where I left off with my candida cleanse, as I did not complete this properly and in its entirety due to the stress I was under. This again, brought me face to face with my core wounds and inner children that were holding onto these disordered patterns of eating and body image. All in the name of feeling worthy, validated, wanted, and in control.
By leaning into the pain and facing it head on, I finally managed to heal this. I came into right relationship with my food. It didn’t happen over night. There were lots of tears, long periods of discomfort, working through my core wounds, and killing off my ego that tried to rationalise re-entering into toxic behaviour patterns around working out and eating.
Another detail I haven’t touched on just yet, was that I was doing core wound healing programs of Liana Shanti’s: Mother Wound, Father Wound, Healing from Narcissistic Relationships and Life Path Manifesting Program. I started with Father Wound first, in July of 2020 as my father was abusive. From there, I began to work through the other programs. I have had, and continue to have life-changing, profound breakthroughs with all of these programs.
You see, therapy (which I have tried too, btw) and learning to instil new, healthy habits, while drowning out the toxic ones, only gets you so far. It’s a bandaid. The work in Liana Shanti’s programs are like nothing you’ll ever experience in your life. The core of eating disorders and negative body image can be found in your Mother and Father Wounds — yes, even if your parents are still loving and supportive to this day. I know that sounds wrong, and you likely got irritated or defensive as you read that. But that is always a clue — when you are triggered by something — that you need to look deeper, because there is truth to it. Your parents didn’t have to outright starve you, or make comments about your weight. It can be the small and insidious ways that you did not receive unconditional love as a child, which can manifest in your need to control what you eat and how you look.
Doing the core wound healing work is an integral part of how I healed my eating disorder. For good. I am no longer triggered by seeing “hot women”, or women with the body types that I used to strive for. I also have an amazing relationship with my body and food now. Having studied as a Health Coach, I look at food for what they can do for my and my body. If it will nurture it, or make it sick (don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy foods that aren’t high on the healthy list. But I do it without guilt or without needing to brag about it on my social media to show people that I am “hot and still eat what I want”).
I didn’t dive into every single avenue that helped me to heal my disordered eating patterns and negative body image. But I can distill them into three pillars:
Healing my core wounds. Which is a work in progress. But the amount I have cleared so far has released me of my eating and body image issues.
Cleansing my body of candida overgrowth and parasites. Eating a whole-food, plant-based diet with proper supplementation for optimal functioning. These cleanses helped me clear myself of my binge-eating patterns and cravings, which was also a big issue for me.
Educating myself about how freaking amazing our bodies actually are, and eating to SUPPORT that, rather than to punish.\
Bonus one — engaging in sports/physical activities that were performance or skill-based. I.e. olympic weightlifting (minus the weight class situation), netball, swimming, pole-dancing (not as glamorous and sexy as you think, but super fun!), and so on. Vs. bodybuilding to get thicc/slim/big butt, or whatever is the trendiest instagram hashtag at the time. (Moment of irony, when I did all 4 of these things, I ended up getting the “body of my dreams” effortlessly. Though I am past the point of caring only about aesthetics now. Still, I’ll take it!).
There is so much more I could say, but I’ll save that for another time. I’ve already said so much!
For anyone reading this who can relate: Who doesn’t neatly fit into the “eating disorder” label, who thinks way too much about food, who exercises to look a certain way (and is sick of it), who doesn’t want to constantly compare themselves to women anymore, who want to finally LOVE themselves and their bodies, who wants to learn how to properly care for their bodies…
This is for you. And I am so glad you found your way here.
I have a range of FREE resources to get you started on your journey. My DM’s are also open. And if you want to jump on a FREE 30min call with me to chat, that is available to you too.
Lots of love to you. Thinks can only get better from here. You get to decide.
— Amya