What scared me into recovery: the reality of eating disorders

I am often asked what was it that made you get help? What was it that made you want to recover? 

Sitting in my dimly-lit study room at my parents house in 2004, I scrolled the internet for pro-eating disorder content. I was looking for inspiration on how to become thinner faster—how to overcome a weight loss plateau. At that time, Google was not yet popular. I believe I used Ask Jeeves and typed in “eating disorder weight loss.” I suspected that I had an eating disorder, but I didn’t think that I was actually thin enough to be diagnosed with one. 

In the early to mid 2000s, celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins and Nichole Richie were the It-Girls. Everyone was absolutely obsessed with them, their shrinking bodies and their partying ways. I wanted to be just like them, but I was built with thicker bones. That didn’t stop me from trying as hard as I possibly could to look more like them.

I had already completed three weeks in a dual-diagnosis intensive outpatient day hospital program in 2003 in Towson, MD, but because I was over 18, I remember signing myself out because I adopted a kitten and thought that I had solved all of my problems. Sure, that kitten made me temporarily happy, but when he slept, my thoughts ruminated worse than ever. I had to enter that program because I had lost a best friend to a drunk driving accident, and my grief was taking over my life. That incident lead to my losing a significant amount of weight in a very short period of time. I suffered from eating disorders from the age of five after moving to Baltimore, Maryland from Kyiv, Ukraine in 1989. I had undiagnosed ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) that kept morphing as I got older and discovered my body.

So that night in the late winter of 2004, instead of being directed to the typical content that I used to try and find ways of losing weight faster, I clicked on a website called Scales Are For Fish. You could tell that it wasn’t the same kind of website that I was used to frequenting. It was a community for those that were suffering from eating disorders, and wanted to get better. This was an absolute shock to my system. People want to get better? They want to stop losing weight? 

As I clicked on the different links, I remember feeling like my jaw was on the floor. Finally, the last link available on the website menu was a memorial page. A memorial to all those who lost their lives because of eating disorders. As I write this guest blog, I feel the body chills that I felt when I saw that page 18 years ago. The background of the page was dark, each person’s name was listed with a glowing candle next to it. The page scrolled and scrolled and seemed to be never ending. 

It never occurred to me that people died from eating disorders, other than Karen Carpenter, whom I felt pretty disconnected from because she passed the year before I was born. As I watched the names move up the page to make room for more names of those who died directly from their eating disorder, I felt frozen. While I couldn’t see any pictures of those who left this earth, I began imagining what they looked like. For whatever reason, I wasn’t picturing them as skeletal and frail. Instead, they looked just like me. A lightbulb went off in my very foggy brain that made me call my psychiatrist the following day. 

“I think I need to come see you again.” That week, I was admitted to an inpatient hospitalization program. My parents were incredibly confused when I called them from the hospital. I asked my mom to pack me a bag of clothing and my make-up because I didn’t know how long my stay would be. I remember my mom being very confused about what I was even saying over the phone. She couldn’t understand how I hadn’t even gotten to the hospital and why I was there. “What do you mean eating disorder?” Mental health wasn’t even a thing in the Soviet Union, let alone knowing about eating disorders. Her confusion aside, my mom ran to the hospital with my bag of stuff. It was there. She learned how long I had been suffering and that my being picky wasn’t my fault. 

To this day, I will never forget how I felt when seeing the seemingly never ending list of lives lost to eating disorders and how it propelled me to get help. It breaks my heart regularly that they had to perish but I am eternally grateful for their stories. I could have ended up on that list.