Sept Choses de Moi
by Terra Atrill
I was tagged by Bryan, so here’s where I start to open up…and since this is Eating Disorder Talk, I’ll let you know seven odd things about me, in appropriate reference.
- The sterotype of the perfectionistic anorexic has never fit me. Well, not really, since I’d just as soon quit something that I couldn’t do perfectly than fail at perfection. Apparently, quitters never win.
- I actively sought out my eating disorder, pooring through diet and fitness magazines and reading The Golden Cage at seven years old. I was a chubby kid who got picked on a lot, being raised by a father who used to get picked on for being too skinny. I was caught between wanting attention and wanting to disappear.
- I’ve only resorted to bulimic behaviour when I felt cornered. If I had to eat a meal with someone who would be aware that I had an eating disorder and it would be rude, untoward or just generally too attention-getting to skip it, out came the pills, laxatives, running water and me being trapped either on or over the porcelain bowl.
- I can think, in the time it took me to wrote those first three words, of at least eight people who have or currently are suffering from one of the eating disorders or an EDNOS. Four of those eight are family.
- I am torn between wanting the best for my daughter, namely for her to not have to sit back after 20 years and ask herself what she’s gotten, and wanting what will be easiest. I know it’s in my family’s genes to be a little…rotund during childhood. But the simple facts that kids are mean and little girls are being diagnosed with eating disorders earlier and in larger numbers scares me almost to death. So what? Do I keep her healthy and slim, so she can bypass the whole corrective diet leading to disorder thing that I have gone through? Or do I simply try to teach her to love herself, regardless of size or weight and cross my fingers?
- I have always measured my success based on how far my hipbones protruded and how close to a nervous breakdown I was. Right now, I’m not very successful.
- The day I was diagnosed as hypoglycemic due to long-term anorexia, I ate chocolate mousse and strawberries and then passed out 20 minutes later while cutting across a highway. The drivers…they honked.
- I was not supposed to be able to have my daughter, in large part due to my history of rapidly cycling through weights, having and then not having periods and an apparently ridiculously low estrogen level. I think of her as my miracle baby.
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June 20th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
thank you for sharing. My wife is not what the media would call slim. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is the most remarkable when she is happy with herself.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
[...] I’ve written in the past of my concern over my eating disorder, whether teetering in recovery or not, having such an affect on my daughter [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am
ohh…nice post but really?/?