As sick as it sounds, at one point I took eating disorders as a joke. I didn't get how one person could see themselves as something they're not and I really didn't get how people could just not eat or puke all the time.

 About two years ago during my freshman year of college I looked in the mirror and saw how heavy I was. I was 260 lbs. The heaviest I had ever been. I had always been heavy and I got bullied a lot in middle school, which I had managed to stop by making fun of myself and my weight constantly. In highschool I played football and so I bulked up for that, but the summer after I graduated I gained 10 lbs.

 It was at this point something snapped. I stood in my mirror and pinched every single bit of fat on my body. I did this for about an hour before breaking down and crying. After that, I stopped eating. If I ate at all, I ate very little. Everytime I ate, I would look at how fat I was and would curl up into a ball for the rest of the night. 

After a while I stopped feeling hunger and could go days without even thinking about food. And on top of this, I ran constantly to stay in shape for lacrosse (I play club lax at my college). So at the end of the year I had dropped almost 50 lbs. 

  When I came home for the summer so thin, my mom became suspicious and started watching me and making sure I ate. I ate begrudgingly, but ate very little. 

 My sophomore year, I went back and started up the same routine, losing more weight until a girl I had started dating over the semester, broke up with me and told me to go to therapy. I went for a month to the school counseling center and felt a ton better and started eating relatively normally. 

For the rest of the semester I ate normally and gained a little weight which immediately freaked me out and I stopped again. When I got back home my mom basically made me eat even though she knew I had a problem with food and so I gained a lot of weight because I was eating 3 meals a day everyday and I didn't have the easy access to work out equipment that I do at school.

When I came back this summer, I was extremely upset by the weight gain so I stopped eating. Not entirely, I had days where I would and other days where I wouldn't. This time, some days anything I ate I would immediately purge. Normally after stretches of not eating.

 The worst part is definitely the mindset and the constant self bullying. I always see this fat monster every time I look in the mirror. I'm currently seeing an actual psychologist so we'll see how it goes. My weight fluctuates a lot because I'm forced to eat when I come home, so it a constant battle, but I'm trying to get a steady healthy diet and a regular work out schedule.