The Internal Battle - Living with Eating Disorders

This post was published on January 19, 2018 on my old blog, samplesizedwriting.wordpress.com

Hey guys! Doing something a little different from what I've done before on my blog. I wrote a magazine article for a class last semester about a girl I know who struggled with eating disorders. I think her story is inspiring because she struggled with a lot but managed to beat down her demons and be a positive force in the world. That being said, since the article is about eating disorders I will use this as a trigger warning. The article discusses in some detail body dysmorphia, anorexia, and bulimia. I encourage anyone who may read this that has dealt with or is dealing with an eating disorder to seek help from a medical professional or someone you love and trust. You're never alone and you can get better.

I may revisit this article when I have a little more time because I'd love to get quotes from actual medical professionals to include, but for now here's the article, and I hope you guys will enjoy and get something out of it.

 ***************

Wake up. Work out. Weigh yourself. Weigh yourself again.

Try on different outfits. Nothing looks good. Brush your thinning hair. Hide the bags under your eyes with concealer. Measure your food for the day. Exactly. You will not eat more.

Go to school. Try to be perfect. Ignore your stomach. Avoid water. Even water makes you look fat. Go home. Work out again. Don’t eat.

This was Syracuse University student Victoria Berlandi’s reality when she was suffering from anorexia in high school, one of the many eating disorders she has dealt with.

Berlandi grew up an only child in Pembroke, Massachusetts. Her parents separated in April 2008, when she was 9. And she lived with her mother, who was deaf.

“Because my mom is deaf, our relationship is different,” Berlandi said. “Talking takes a lot more effort.”

Because of this communication barrier, Berlandi tends to keep her personal problems quiet. Claire Stocum, close friend and former roommate of Berlandi, noticed this tendency during their freshman year of college.

“Victoria kind of keeps to herself unless you reach out to her when it comes to personal things because she doesn’t want her burdens to become other people’s burdens,” Stocum said. “She’s good about not letting difficult things in her life really affect how she is living and communicating with others.”

And because she lived with her mom, Berlandi started comparing herself to relatives from her side of the family.

“My mom’s small, and my family on my mom’s side are all really beautiful. And their upbringing was so much different than mine,” she said. “My relatives’ parents are married and they all went to Ivy Leagues and my family is just so not that. So that constant comparison between my cousins and I was a huge deal.”

Berlandi was also resented by her grandmother throughout her childhood.

“My nana never really liked me when I was younger, to the point where she’d have my cousins open up Christmas presents in front of me and wouldn’t get me anything just to be spiteful,” she said. “I think she was mean to me because she never liked my dad very much and my parents were never married. She likes to call me a mistake.”

Berlandi began having body image issues before she even hit puberty.

“I remember being 8 years old and finishing a soccer game and being like, ‘Ugh, my thighs are so big,’” Berlandi said. “It started young.”

Berlandi initially suffered from body dysmorphia, a mental disorder that causes you to see a distorted appearance of yourself, typically fatter or thinner than you actually are. While she struggled with it since childhood, the disorder began taking its toll in high school. Berlandi’s participation in dance, cross-country and soccer started to affect her mentally.

“I realized, at one point, I wanted to be in the Boston Ballet, and I was just putting a lot of pressure on myself. With ballet and the styles of dance I did, everyone was like a freaking twig and I wasn’t. I wasn’t large or anything, but I wasn’t a twig,” Berlandi said. “I was certainly not overweight, but body dysmorphia is a real thing.”

The pressure Berlandi was putting on herself in athletics and in her own family came to a head in February 2014, when she was a sophomore in high school.

“One day, I was carrying groceries in from the car. And you know how you look in certain panes of glass and the image is distorted? I knew that, but I still looked at myself and was like, ‘Oh my god, no,’ and I started limiting myself that day to 200 calories a day.”

Realizing that 200 calories per day was not sustainable, Berlandi raised her caloric intake to 300 calories and limited herself to that for almost four months. “That was anorexia territory,” she said.

Berlandi’s anorexia was left unchecked until a gynecologist appointment, where the doctor noticed the weight loss and voiced her concern.

“I started telling her what was going on and she said, ‘If you don’t stop then I’m going to have to send you to treatment.’ So I lied and told her I would eat more, but of course I didn’t,” Berlandi said.

After the confrontation at the gynecologist’s, Berlandi decided not to confide in others about her struggles. And even though she knows how much damage she was doing to her body now, Berlandi reasoned with herself that she didn’t need help and that she wasn’t sick.

“I had one friend who was severely anorexic, like she could have been hospitalized because her body weight was so low she lost muscle. And I wasn’t really at her level, so that was how I justified it. I was like, ‘Oh she’s sick, I’m not,’” she said. “The way your mind works, it’s so calculating. You’re trying to rationalize everything. It’s completely a mind game.”

By the time Berlandi’s junior year began, she realized that her body couldn’t handle such a low caloric intake. But instead of working on healthier eating habits, she began binge-eating and purging, symptoms of bulimia. While it’s more typical to purge by vomiting up the food that was eaten, Berlandi would purge by exercising for hours to work it off.

“My mind was pretty messed up, because I thought that if I never made myself throw up then I wasn’t sick. It would justify all the things I was doing,” Berlandi said.

So Berlandi entered into a vicious cycle of overeating and overworking her body.

“I’d come home and eat everything because I basically starved myself all day. I figured the less I ate during the day the more I could eat later. That would turn into a whole binge-eating ordeal. Like, eating, eating, eating,” Berlandi said. “Then I would try and run 8-10 miles and then dance for several hours. This was honestly even worse than throwing up would have been because I would feel so sick and it just wasn’t fun.”

After months of physical stress, Berlandi’s body hit a breaking point at the beginning of her senior year.

“I started having hip pains because I had stressed my body out so much and I still was not eating well,” she said. One day, the pain became severe. “I felt like I got stabbed,” she said.

After an MRI, Berlandi learned she tore her hip. Even though she didn’t need surgery, Berlandi had to rest and take a few weeks off of her sports teams so the tear could heal. Unable to participate in athletics and feeling down about herself, Berlandi started to binge-eat.

“I had just kind of given up. I had just put my body through so much crap,” Berlandi said. “I got down to 108 pounds after going through my stints with anorexia and bulimia and then I gained like 35 pounds, and I gained all of that in a span of a couple months from binge-eating. I had lost all self-control.”

In April of 2016, Berlandi realized graduating high school meant starting a new chapter in her life. She decided to work on getting healthier, and her road to recovery finally began.

“I figured, ‘I’m graduating and I’m going to college and I have 16 weeks until I was moving in and I’m just going to try my best and work out and set some goals and do my thing,’” Berlandi said. “It was a long period of being down and just slowly picking myself up.”

Sixteen weeks later, Berlandi started school at Syracuse University as a nutrition science and neuroscience double major. With a new school came new friends. In her second week of freshman year she met April Hill while she was playing a pick-up volleyball game.

“We ended up bonding because I was talking to her and I found out she really liked to strength train and lift and I really liked to strength train and lift and exercise and go to the gym. And then I found out she was a nutrition science major, so we just ended up having a lot to talk about,” Hill said. “And she was super nice and friendly and she lived two floors above me so we just ended up spending a lot of time together.”

As Berlandi’s friendship progressed with Hill, they began confiding in each other about their struggles with eating disorders. Hill had struggled with dieting and bouts of bulimia in high school because of a desire to stay thin for her sports teams, and she continued to struggle with it into her freshman year of college.

“It started out totally healthy and being fine but then it turned into something unhealthy,” Hill said. “It became a preoccupation with what I ate and if I was eating too much.”

While Hill was still struggling with bulimia, Berlandi was still tracking everything she was eating and going through stretches of excessive exercise. Stocum, Berlandi’s roommate, noticed her gym habits.

“There were phases where she’d go to the gym for like an hour in the morning and at night every day of the week,” Stocum said. “But she would often go in the mornings while I was still sleeping so it was easy for me to let her do her own thing and not be super mindful of it or aware.”

But even though Berlandi was still battling her own demons, she helped Hill through her issues.

“Being able to talk to her candidly about how, ‘Oh, it’s not just this crazy thing going on in my life, it’s that this crazy thing is going on in my life and I’m having bad thoughts about not wanting to eat or poor body image thoughts,’” Hill said. “Being able to share all of that with her and having her listen to all that and talk me through all of that, like, ‘April you’ve got this test,’ or ‘April this thing that happened is not the end of the world’ and ‘April you are beautiful and this does not affect how you should perceive yourself physically,’ that is what we went through and talked through.”

Even though talking with Hill openly about their shared issues helped Berlandi, it wasn’t until a nutrition class project that she really started getting healthy. Berlandi’s class was asked to fill out personal nutrition profiles to be reviewed by other students. Because of her irregular eating patterns and dramatic weight loss and weight gain over a short span of time, Berlandi’s profile was flagged and she was referred to a campus dietician.

And it was this campus dietician who really helped Berlandi see how far she still had to go to truly be healthy.

“I just went in there and we started talking and she said, ‘You know, you have come so so far all by yourself and that’s really amazing. But you still have so far to go,’” Berlandi said. “That’s been really pivotal for me.”

Realizing she still had to work on getting herself healthy, Berlandi stopped obsessively tracking her food and now sees going to the gym as a fun use of her time rather than a daily requirement to stay thin. “I go to the gym when I can. I don’t get upset with myself if I don’t go six times a week or seven times a week. I’ve been adapting every single week with what I need to do and what I can do,” Berlandi said.

Berlandi is still battling with body dysmorphia, but instead of letting it rule her life and her eating habits, she’s found healthier ways to cope.

“I’ll have a day where I’m like, ‘Oh, I look really good today,’ but then the next day I’ll be like ‘No I don’t.’ But instead of being mad at myself and limiting myself, I’ll remind myself that I literally look exactly the same as I did yesterday,” Berlandi said. “There’s not this huge difference that I think I’m seeing and I just try and be logical with myself.”

After opening up about her battle with eating disorders on social media last spring, Berlandi has embraced a role as an advisor for people who are still struggling.

“I said in my Instagram post, ‘Please just contact me if you need help and you don’t know where to go,’ and I got a lot of DMs after that and I met a lot of people. And I’ll just help them with what they’re going through,” Berlandi said.

“So many people came to her after that post asking her for advice or encouraging her,” Stocum said. “It was so cool seeing her use her past to help others.”

Along with helping others through their own issues, Berlandi takes care to promote individuality and body positivity.

“Everyone should be comfortable in their own skin and they should embrace their bodies and love them and just try to be happy and healthy,” Berlandi said. “And everything I’ve gone through has just made me more grateful for the little things in life and it’s reminded me to just live and be happy and accept myself, too.”