What would you class as serious? I've never been underweight, always had a healthy BMI and have always had my period, so clinically I'm not anorexic.
That saying, I don't agree with clinical diagnoses of anorexia because I have an issue with the concept of EDNOS. Purely because of the three symptoms I listed above, I'm diagnosed as EDNOS even though I exhibit every single other symptom of anorexia. I detest this fact because I believe "EDNOS" isn't taken as seriously as it should be. I laugh at myself when I realise my diagnosis is "unspecified eating disorder". That sounds bullshit to me. I believe it's meant to be a psychological illness, yet it's perceived as a physical one.
Anyway, sorry, just went off on a random tangent. It's unavoidable when the subject of eating disorders comes up because I like to clarify where I stand on my particular diagnosis.
To answer the questions, it started with my fat self. I was a chubby child and a chubby teenager. At my biggest I was around 190lbs. Between the ages of 6 and 16 I was bullied by friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, and strangers. When I was 10 I was actually told by some of my friends "we don't want to be your friend because you're too fat". At 11 I started developing body dysmorphia. I remember on the day it all started I saw a picture of me which was taken the week before and I cried in my sister's car on the way home from school because it hit me for the first time that I'm fat.
So, years and years pass and when I'm 16 and my sister tells me that her friend stopped eating curries (we're South Asian, it's our staple food) and immediately lost about 10lbs in a month. I decided to do that and one random night I decided to count the calories of what I ate that day and the days before. I was averaging on 700. I didn't want to stop. After that night I started counting calories and restricting at 700 calories. That was about 4 years and 1 month ago.
I'm 20 now and I've never learnt to cope. Like a lot of the people with EDs I know, I'm sure that I'll push myself to get better after I reach my goal weight (115lbs, I'm 129lbs at the moment). But at the moment recovering and learning to cope with it isn't a concern for me because I simply don't want to cope. Being the way I am gives me escapism. I almost recovered last year until I started university in September. By mid-October I started realising how stressful it's going to be and that made me anxious (I get easily overwhelmed), at the same time my relationship with my now-fiance was breaking down, while that was going on my home life was becoming difficult (as it usually is) so I looked to my eating disorder for the escapism. I guess I looked to it for control. Now, any time shit hits the fan in my life I know I can turn to my nutrition obsession and exercise addiction to help get my mind out of everything. Eating disorders are like drugs in the this sense. My one is like my own drug of choice.