A few years ago I struggled with anorexia, but God healed me and now I am content with my physical form; though I may not fit Babylon's ideal of beauty, I have my own unique, God given beauty that I wouldn't trade for Babylon's counterfeit.
After my dad passed away, depression and the spirit of rejection departed from me. After that I became more confident and emotionally stable...and I recovered from anorexia, which is rooted in self rejection. Compared to who I was then, I hardly recognize myself.
Last night I revisited anorexia, researching the psychology of eating disorders, and I was a textbook case: a young woman in a demanding graduate school program who experienced childhood trauma...anxious, with OCD tendencies...a slightly autistic perfectionist. One article described anorexia as a fat phobia of sorts. That was true in my case. If I ate a normal amount, I feared I would become fat overnight...which is very irrational in retrospect.
Looking at pictures of malnourished people is almost physically painful for me now. Indeed, anorexia was painful. When I was anorexic, somehow I thought being underweight looked good, but now that illusion is gone.
No doubt I damaged my body after two years of that nonsense. Is that why I have an arrhythmia now? Though I didn't look like the stereotypical skeletal anorexic -- because people look like that only in extreme cases -- some of my symptoms were quite severe, such as anemia, low blood sugar, and hair loss. Anorexia aged my body.
Compliments on my thinness solidified the disorder. But those compliments were mostly in the beginning, before I started to look sickly. At that point I actually received less attention from men, but I desired the sickly look. Inside I felt so sad and fragile, and I wanted to manifest that to the world.
