Let’s set the scene, shall we? I grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was a dream: Room to explore, horses, cows, chickens, home-cooked meals every night, the works. And I was happy growing up in that environment. I had a big family who loved me and treated me well.
Unlike many young people in today’s world, my disordered thoughts about my body didn’t start until high school. You remember high school. We all have this wild drive to “fit in”, or at least be accepted by our classmates. If you were like me, you probably had a peer you looked up to, and wished you could be just like them. Maybe it was their confidence, their personality, their body, etc. In any case, high school is the idyllic scene for comparing yourself to your fellow students.
For me, it was all about looks. Was my hair as shiny as hers? Was I as skinny? Were my jeans in style like hers? Was I confident and cool like she was? And it goes on and on. What I didn’t realize was these thoughts would soon turn to obsession about my body. I didn’t recognize their harmful nature at the time, so I simply let them slowly dominate more and more of my mind.
Now let’s fast forward a bit—past starting college at BYU and serving a full-time mission for my church in Africa for 18 months. I went through these life events without any serious eating issues, but my thoughts about my body continued to morph further and further into disordered territory. I had an incredible, life-altering experience in Africa, spiritually. But I also did not have much control of my life during those 18 months. We were put on a very strict schedule every day. When I got home, I was beyond anxious to control my life again. And this is where my perfectionistic side really took over.
I became excessively obsessive about my weight, my body, my schedule, my school work, my eating, and my exercise. Ironically, I chose to study Dietetics, where we learn how to treat our bodies well through proper nutrition, not abuse them through restriction and overexercise. But restriction and overexercise are the practices that my obsessive thoughts naturally led me to. From April 2016 to December 2016, I lost a significant amount of weight. I was absolutely consumed by thoughts about attaining a “perfect” body. You know, the one that all the movie stars and models have. And I truly believed this could be attained by eating less and exercising more. Interestingly, I couldn’t see how disordered my thoughts and behaviors were—I truly believed I was being “healthy”. Except for one little thing...
My period. It disappeared around May of 2016. It concerned me, sure, but not enough to stop eating so little and exercising so much. However, I knew something must be wrong. I had always wanted to have kids someday and I knew that wouldn’t happen without a period. So I made mental plans to see a doctor sometime soon. In December of 2016, two events acted as hinge points in my journey. I went home for Christmas—back to those beautiful foothills and the comfort and warmth of home.
The first event that opened my eyes to my disorder was when I stepped on the scale. I didn’t own a scale in college, so I had not weighed myself in a long time. I was 80 pounds, folks. 80 pounds. I couldn’t believe it…
Because I still thought I was fat.
At 80 pounds! I still had a constant urge to lose more weight and look better. So now I was confused. I had been trying so hard to attain a “better” body—a “healthier” body! But in that pursuit, I had reached a weight that I knew deep down was much too low, and the inklings that something had to change began to emerge.
The second event that opened my eyes to my disorder was, big shocker, being diagnosed with an eating disorder! My mom took me to a doctor to work out why my period had hit the hills. The first appointment, they simply did a check up, took some blood and told us they would get back to us. A few days later, out of the blue, they called me and asked me to come back in for another blood sample. My mom was unavailable, so I went by myself. They drew my blood and then, to my surprise, I met with the doctor again.
“You have Anorexia Nervosa”, she said. The strange, yet fascinating, thing was, I was truly surprised. My eating disorder had done an excellent job of blinding me to the damage it was doing. But now it was official. I had an eating disorder. And as much as I didn’t want to believe it, it was true.
They say denial is the first stage of mourning. As funny as it may sound, a person 100% has to mourn the loss of an eating disorder. So, in denial, I kept my diagnosis a secret. I told no one. But I determined to eat a little bit more every day and hopefully gain enough weight to restore my period. Remember, though, I was still a serious perfectionist! So, of course I didn’t just randomly eat an extra spontaneous snack each day. I started calorie counting.
Using a food tracking app, I religiously recorded every single thing that went into my mouth. Every. Single. Day. I set a calorie limit for myself, and followed that number like my life depended on it. If I ate more than the allotted calorie amount, I compensated the next day so that the two days would even out perfectly. I was merciless. And the tracking was toxic. But again, I couldn’t see it. It was a new, sneaky way my eating disorder controlled me.
On the bright side, my period returned just three months after adding more food to my diet (March, 2017). Woohoo! “So now what do I do?”, I thought. Well, if I couldn’t be as skinny as I wanted and maintain my period, I could at least not get any heavier than the weight I was at right now. So I kept tracking. Meticulously. I didn’t miss a day for a year. And that was a rough year, ladies and gentlemen. I was obsessive about maintaining my weight, and still obsessed with exercising and school work. Eventually, but not surprisingly, I started getting worn out! I started getting tired of this constant and exhausting obsession.
I got so tired that I finally broke and told somebody... Heaven forbid I ever ask for help. I came home after my Spring semester in 2018 and told my parents the whole story up to this point. I had avoided telling anybody thus far because I didn’t want them to judge me. When someone hears “eating disorder” or “anorexia”, they have very specific thoughts about what an eating disorder looks like. The truth is, they have no idea what it’s like or how it feels! So, understandably, I didn’t want mom and dad to judge. I also feared my dad would react with a, “just get over it” or “you just have to tough it out” attitude, which I heard a lot growing up in the country. But my parents reacted better than I expected, and I felt a sense of freedom from telling them.
Did it solve all my problems? Absolutely not. But eventually, it led to additional key hinge points in my story. The first was I stopped tracking, thanks to some loving convincing from my mom. And stopping that was more freeing than I can ever express. It was terrifying; but once I took the leap, I never went back—and I am beyond grateful I didn’t. The second was therapy. In the back of my head, I knew therapy was important in order to recover from my eating disorder. The issue was money. I was a broke college kid! How was I supposed to afford therapy? Thankfully, my wonderful and generous parents offered to help. So I went, and it changed everything.
Up to this point, I had changed my eating behaviors on my own. I was eating enough to maintain a healthy weight, even without tracking. My period was alive and well, and I recognized that I felt better, physically, than I had at my lowest weight. But my mind was still in a very dark place. I was engulfed, 24/7, by a longing to have a body I simply didn’t have.
Therapy taught me that my happiness and worth as a human does not depend on my body—that there is so much more to me than my body. It taught me that the thought, “When I have this body, then I will be happy, accepted, wanted, fill in the blank…” was a lie! I could be happy and accepted and wanted right now, no matter what body shape I had! I came to understand that a “perfect” body is one that I feel good in. So, I actually already had a perfect body! I didn’t need to change it at all. This mindset helped me let go of my perfectionism.
I also learned to reflect on my past, and I saw that my eating disorder had been developing for years before my actual diagnosis. I realized that it had all started back in high school—those seemingly innocent thoughts of comparison were actually molding into my eating disorder. These disordered thoughts had been around for a good, long time, I just hadn’t done anything about them. Well now it was time to do something about them! It was time to take a stand, to fight back, to fight for myself! Therapy was where I shifted from my denial stage and got angry at my eating disorder and all the wasted time I had spent obsessing over something so trivial and out of my control. I was finally able to recognize my negative, disordered thoughts and replace them with truth, and thoughts of self-love and care.
My therapist also recommended reading books about eating disorder recovery, which I did. This also made a huge difference for my recovery. One of these books was Intuitive Eating, which teaches you how to listen to your body’s internal cues to tell you what, when and how much to eat, instead of letting external cues like diet culture and media’s portrayal of an “ideal” body tell you what, when and how much to eat.
Now, years after completing therapy, I have the best relationship with my body and with food that I’ve ever had. And it just keeps getting better and better. This is largely thanks to Intuitive Eating, which I still practice to this day, because it completely changed the way I ate, viewed my body, and viewed food.
I graduated BYU with my Dietetics degree, went on to successfully complete my dietetic internship and passed the national dietetics exam, granting me the official title of Registered Dietitian. As proud as I am of this academic accomplishment, I’m even more proud of myself for overcoming my eating disorder.
Today, I have both the credential and the passion to help others overcome their eating and body-image struggles. I love helping people overcome their food fears because I know what it feels like to loath yourself because you don’t have a “perfect” body. I know what it feels like to experience overwhelming fear and guilt when you eat...But I also know how it feels to climb out of that dark, cold pit of dieting and feel the beautiful warmth of food freedom again. And I want to help you climb out of that pit too! I hope you’ll let me help you liberate yourself from the toxicity of diet culture, reconnect with your body, discover lasting self-love, and learn how to eat in a way that’s truly healthy for both your mind and body.