My 10 Year Battle with Bulimia, Anorexia, and Disordered Eating

Feeling alone in the struggle with an eating disorder is a profound isolation many face, but it's a journey I know all too well. At 15, bulimia knocked on my door, bringing with it the shame and secrecy that so often accompanies such battles. Join me as I unravel the layers of my own experiences, from the complexities of a turbulent family life to the evolution of disordered eating patterns. This episode isn't just my story—it's an outstretched hand to anyone walking a similar path, a reminder that while our struggles are unique, our resilience binds us together.

Society often dictates a narrow definition of beauty, but the cost of adhering to these standards can be devastating. I take you through the maze of societal pressures and personal insecurities that led to an obsession with body image and weight that began in my youth. It's a candid reflection on the impact of seeking approval through appearance and the extreme lengths one goes to maintain it. But more than that, it's a testament to the transformative power of rejecting diet culture and embracing self-acceptance. As we navigate these topics, remember that growth and self-discovery are processes that demand patience and kindness—towards ourselves and others.

Healing is a journey marked by both setbacks and victories, and the road to self-discovery is no exception. I share the poignant exploration of my past, the search for love in the midst of family chaos, and the continuous challenge of listening to my body's signals. This chapter of my life's story is offered as a beacon of hope, a narrative that echoes the possibilities of finding peace within oneself. And as we wrap up this episode, I encourage you to carry the spirit of this conversation forward. Reach out, connect on Instagram, and let's foster a community where our stories of vulnerability and strength can intertwine.

If you struggle with an eating disorder or someone you love does, the resources below can help you connect with someone on your path to healing. Peace does exist ❤️


National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders:
https://anad.org/get-help/eating-disorders-helpline/

National Alliance for Eating Disorders:
https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com/

Instagram: @jacendamarie

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hi, loves, welcome to the Journey to the Soul podcast. I am your host, jacinda Villa, a spiritual life coach and holistic health coach. Every week, we will be diving deep into all things purpose, wellness, spirituality and creating the life that you dream of. This space is meant to be safe and transformative for you to dive into the deepest parts of yourself. I will share what I have learned from my journey along this path years of research and mentors along the way. Having spent many years living life out of alignment and afraid to go after my dreams, I know firsthand what it means to take the first step down, living a life authentic to you. We are on this road of self-discovery together. It is time for you to live the life you imagined. Hello, my loves, welcome to another episode. I hope that your day is going beautifully wherever you are in the world.

Speaker 1: 1:08

On today's episode, I wanted to do a little bit of a story time with you. I wanted to give a little bit more reference and backing to my eating disorder journey, which I touched on in my first episode and in a couple of other episodes, but I really wanted to share just the evolution of it with you and how it started, why it kind of came about in my life, and this is something that I've never really shared with anyone, to be honest with you, to this depth, to this degree, so I wanted to put it out there into the world. That way, if, for whatever reason, someone is going through something similar or in a similar situation, perhaps they can find some solace and understanding by listening to this. Or if you've never experienced anything like this at all, it at least allows you to see a little bit more deeply as to why I am here and doing this with you all. Because this is part of a series of episodes that I want to be doing over time, touching on some of the biggest lessons that I learned from healing my eating disorder my eating disorder and continue to learn to this point. Because so far, this has been one of the most pivotal things on my path that I have experienced. It was a part of myself that I had so much shame about and kept to myself from the outside world, so no one could see what I was experiencing or how greatly it was actually affecting me. But in my short blip of being on this earth, it definitely was one of the biggest catalysts in my journey so far into who I've become and what I have learned, because it opened the door to so many other areas of my life that I needed to take a closer look at and that I had neglected for so long.

Speaker 1: 3:41

I call it my Achilles heel. You know, it's one of those things that we all have. It's a very vulnerable part of us. It's kind of like our own demon, something that most people perhaps don't explicitly see right away when they have a first impression of us, or even people who know you may not see what your Achilles heel is because we tend to hide it very well and it's typically a part of us that we don't want to share with the world. It's kind of like our shadow, and we all have something to that regard, something in that realm, and this was mine. This was my Achilles heel for many years and it just evolved into so many different things over 10 years essentially, and I tried so many things to try to figure this out on my own and it wasn't working. I definitely have that mentality where I feel like I can do it by myself a lot of the time, or that I can learn and apply certain things on my own, and I never wanted to also impose anything on anyone else. So I think that definitely inhibited me from getting help sooner because of that. So we all have our own things.

Speaker 1: 5:22

But I definitely want to dive into the story with you, take you back to my 15-year-old self and kind of what was going on in my life and just showing you how it evolves, because eating disorders are all so different what we experience and how they can evolve. They are all just so, so different, and in the course of the 10 plus years that I struggled with this, this was definitely very different in my life. It became bulimia, anorexia, and then there was a lot of denial in it all, and then there was other measures that I would take to make sure that I was adhering to my perception of how I needed to be essentially, years of disordered eating after a period of time as well, years of trying everything. So it just showed up in so many different ways. So we'll dive right in, but I want to start when I was 15. This is really when I started struggling with bulimia and I feel like this is such a vulnerable age in our lives. So many changes are going on internally and externally. We are still learning how we fit into the world, how the world sees us.

Speaker 1: 7:02

I definitely felt like, leading up to this, I was lacking greatly. Before the age of 15 is what I am referring to. I didn't have any friends, I kept to myself, so the sense of lacking in some way within myself was already there before this started happening. There were also many big changes going on in my life that people were unaware of. I kept these things very close-knit to me. Really, no one outside of my family knew what else was going on, and for me at the time, this was trying to learn how to be without my dad and trying to understand the greater mysteries of the world.

Speaker 1: 7:58

The last four years before this so when I was about 12, years before this, so when I was about 12, my dad was deported and leading up to his deportation, I spent some time visiting him while he was incarcerated and my dad had been in and out of jail for a large portion of my life. I knew that my dad was not the best person. I just didn't know what the scope of his actions were up until this point, and it was largely due to my age and my mom not wanting to be forthcoming of a lot of the things that he had done. So there were these two parts of me that were struggling to understand and grasp my relationship with my dad. Still, him getting deported took him out of my life completely, though I haven't seen him since his stay.

Speaker 1: 9:02

I was about 13, 12, going on 13, when this happened and I went from believing that there was a way for us to have a healthy relationship. Despite everything he had done, he was an unreliable presence when he was in my life and brought chaos with him where he went my life and brought chaos with him where he went, chaos and hurt. And this had really been my childhood, my experience with my father and I know I shared a little bit about some of those things in my first episode and in another episode that I recorded about healing your trauma and loving those in your life that you love. And my dad's presence in my life always instilled a great deal of fear in me, and it took my mom weeks to tell me why I wasn't seeing him anymore. He had been deported due to his criminal record and the last thing that he had done was apparently the last straw for them. Within the year, my mom and my sisters began to open up to me more about why my dad had really been in jail. I knew some of the things that he had done, but not everything.

Speaker 1: 10:30

And my relationship with my mom wasn't any better. My entire life, up until that age, I had always felt inadequate for her. I was always trying to earn her love, and this is things that me and my mom were meant to work through in this lifetime. I was always trying to earn her love by being a good student or doing anything she wanted me to do, but it never did much for our relationship other than always making me feel like I wasn't good enough. And this wound with my mom was even deeper than my dad's, because my dad had always been an erratic presence in my life. He had another family, so he wasn't always there, but when he was there he was all of these things. And my mom was always there in my life, but from the moment that I came onto this earth, she did not want me. That was not her plan. That was not what was meant to happen. So this feeling of not being good enough was something that I felt with both of them my mom and our very erratic relationship, and my dad, with him having another family and children and then the chaos and the hurt that he would bring to our family. I had known for years that he had a family outside of us that he spent time with.

Speaker 1: 12:30

My biggest wound was my not-enoughness, as I call it. It was echoed in so many aspects of my life since a child. In my relationship with both of my parents. It was something that I always felt through their actions indirectly. It just echoed that in me. So I began to really struggle after my dad left.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Looking back, I know that I was struggling with a deep depression. I didn't know what it was then because I was a preteen I was 14, going on 15, but I was definitely struggling with depression. I was trying to understand how I fit into this cold world, because that was the perception of the world that I had, and my relationship with my mom was only getting worse. I started gaining weight. I began to emotionally eat, not being conscious of what it was or how much. People at school and at our church began to notice. I would get comments from the people. My mom and I rented a small room with one of the women we went to church with, and this was just one of the many places I lived throughout my upbringing. I think I've probably between the age of being a child and 18, gone to about 10 different schools or so, but we were always moving somewhere new. My mom couldn't keep a job or support us, so we were always moving around. In my head, nothing was wrong until people started commenting on my weight. I didn't think that there was anything out of the ordinary. Then I started looking in the mirror and seeing what they saw. This was something that I did all the time. After I started looking in the mirror long enough, and before this I had been more or less at peace with my body, then I started seeing all the other places I was simply inadequate to this world. Places I was simply inadequate to this world. All the other places that people saw that I was inadequate to this world.

Speaker 1: 15:33

The woman that we lived with sold Herbalife. If anyone remembers what that is, I'm pretty sure they still sell it. I have no idea, but it was a nutritional company and they sold different shakes and supplements and teas and all of these things and their marketing. Who they marketed to were essentially people who wanted to lose weight quickly and easily people who wanted to lose weight quickly and easily. I consider it a fad diet, but something that she would do is she would have people who are trying to lose weight come in every morning this was like Monday through Friday or Saturday and they would have their Herbalife breakfast, which consisted of drum roll please, a shake, a tea and an aloe juice, and this group of people would keep themselves accountable on their journey. They would weigh themselves twice a week.

Speaker 1: 16:43

I think it's great that when you're trying to make lifestyle changes, you have other people who are on that same path with you. I think that can be so vital. What I don't think is healthy is weighing yourself constantly, and this is something that so many people struggle with. So my mom decided she wanted me to join the group. So I started drinking the Herbalife and every few days I began to weigh myself.

Speaker 1: 17:23

I do want to just say that, looking back now, I was never extremely overweight. I did weigh more then than at any other moment in my life, but I was also a growing preteen. I was going through puberty. I was learning how to fill into my body. It is completely normal for your body to fluctuate during this time. It is a time when you step into your womanhood. So many things are going on in the background that we don't even understand. So many things are going on in the background that we don't even understand.

Speaker 1: 18:13

When I slowly lost weight, week by week, I began to get what was in my head a positive approval from the world around me, so the love that I had been craving so deeply for so much of my life from the people at my church, my mom and this is how dieting became a normal for me at such a young age and how my obsession with my weight began. I got positive reinforcement from the world, so I kept going down my path. Me valuing my worth by my weight would be something I would struggle with for the next 12 years. This was my Achilles heel, and this was right before I entered high school. Then I got into high school and everyone knows how stressful high school can be for so many of us, and it was not an easy assimilation for me either. And there's the stresses of trying to fit in and to be accepted. All of my other insecurities were resurfacing again, this time a little bit more loudly, and I would always look in the mirror and only see how much I still needed to change to look more like what I felt like I needed to be, and this is how the bulimia entered my life right as I was starting high school the desire to control some aspect of my life, growing up with constant chaos and no real home, and not being able to control how my mom and dad were continuously conforming to what I felt like I needed to be in order to get love from the world my very limited and skewed worldview at the time, but this was what I believed in my heart and soul, and the bulimia transformed to anorexia.

Speaker 1: 20:40

While I was in high school. I became even stricter, more militant about what I could and couldn't do. When I go into something, I go all in. This is my personality. I definitely have that personality, personality of you either do it 110% or you don't do it at all. I don't believe in half doing something. That's just not in me, and it's both a blessing and a curse, because even with things that don't do anything to help me in life, like this, something that was hurting me, this having to go all in mentality was just not helping that, and throughout this entire time, no one knew that I was struggling through this. The only person I had opened up to about this was my best friend, who I met in high school in ninth grade. We were always together and she was the first person to really see it for what it was.

Speaker 1: 21:58

Other than that, in high school, I did have one teacher reach out to me in 10th grade because of some assignment that we had done on health and nutrition, and she was also one of the only other people who picked up and saw that I was struggling with this and, due to her recommendations of me going to see someone to talk about it, I went to a psychiatrist because that's what I was told that I needed to do, and I never went back. That was the one and only time in over 10 years that I ever saw anyone for this, and my mentality when I walked in there while I was in 10th grade was that I didn't think I needed any help and that I didn't think anything was wrong, and I truly believe that in my heart and soul I did not think that there was anything that was wrong with what I was doing, and she reached out to me and shared with me and opened up that she actually shared with our teacher in 10th grade and shared what I was experiencing because she was worried about me and she didn't know what to do to help me, and this was my favorite teacher. So out of all the teachers, this was the one that I would have listened to and I did, to the extent that I did, what she recommended and what she suggested, but I was just not in the headspace. I was not ready to accept help at that point. And this is how it really started and evolved.

Speaker 1: 24:06

And in the years between high school and basically 25, because that's when I finally threw in everything about diets and diet culture and what I can and can't eat and all the other things that I told myself, it changed so, so much and it just became an obsession about everything the food that I ate, the kind of exercise I did ate, the kind of exercise I did. And a few years before I threw in all of the diet culture and all of the restrictive mentality, there was an evolution in my eating disorder where I told myself I wasn't going to purge anymore and I wasn't going to restrict myself and not eat like I had for so many years. So I was essentially telling myself that I wasn't going to be bulimic and I wasn't going to starve myself. And this probably happened when I was 21 or so and I thought that that was still a step in the right direction and it was to one sense. But that restriction and those rules that I set for myself were still a part of my life. Still a part of my life. It was just in how I ate, how I exercised, the foods that I was eating.

Speaker 1: 25:58

I tried every diet imaginable to keep trying to lose weight and to conform to this perception I had in my mind of who I needed to be. I looked at the mirror all the time and I just saw all the places that I needed to be better or thinner or skinnier or I wanted to change. Everything was inadequate. I definitely had a very distorted body image that you just develop when you go through these things, and even though I had decided not to actively starve myself to the extremes that I had or purge, that distorted body image was still the version of myself that I was looking at Like. That was the version of myself that I kept trying to change.

Speaker 1: 26:54

So I tried every extreme thing imaginable, which I'm sure some people listening to this have done or tried or heard about to some degree. I would fast for long periods of time I would do water, fast juice, fast, anything to restrict? I tried keto no carbs, no sugar, working out two hours a day only eating quote-unquote clean foods, and these were the parameters that I still lived in. Is these extreme measures? These extreme measures? Even though I was, in my head, not actively trying to deprive myself of nutrition, I was still depriving myself at an emotional level. I was not really listening to what my body needed. I was doing all of these things to try to maintain the perception of myself that I thought that I needed to have.

Speaker 1: 28:13

After a couple of years of doing this, I realized that those insecurities that I had felt my entire life, the feeling of not being enough it's almost like it suddenly got louder and more annoying in my head, like there was no other frequency to turn into. Because all of these things that I was doing, these extreme measures that I was taking, they were all to make me feel like I was good enough. I was doing all of these things in the hopes that they would fill that yearning within me to feel love, to feel whole, to feel good enough. And something changed again and I talked a little bit about this in my first episode as well about kind of my coming to Jesus moment, as I like to call this part of the story, which was I hit basically a wall with it. After 10 plus years of being at war with myself, I could more clearly than ever see the two parts of me that were at war. Something had changed, and that was it. I realized at the part that I had been at war, with how much strength and power and all of these things it had over my life, but also how here I was 10 years later, feeling just as much lack as I had 10 years ago, so I finally got it. I finally understood oh my god, this is not doing anything.

Speaker 1: 30:10

The biggest thing in all of that, though, was taking a look at me, my body, the world around me, my life. It's one thing to realize that nothing's changed, and then the world around you hasn't changed, but this was me realizing that nothing's changed within myself, but, in the last 10 years, so much has changed, and it was essentially that this had taken a hold of every aspect of my life, because I had allowed it to, and in ways that I didn't even know, my insecurities were showing up in everything, portrayed myself as a strong, resilient, independent, fiery person who could overcome so much, and I needed to have that in order to survive. When I was younger, and that's how people around me saw me. They saw me as someone who was independent and driven. And oh my gosh, all of these things and I felt completely inadequate and the thing that was that something that I had gained that I didn't want to lose was also at stake.

Speaker 1: 31:51

Because of this and that was my relationship to my partner, my insecurities were showing up heavily in our relationship, were showing up heavily in our relationship and I knew that if these insecurities kept coming out the way that they were, of me not feeling good enough or worthy or all of these things, our relationship was not going to last very long. So this put things into perspective for me, because the moment that I met my fiance, it was a very pivotal moment in my life because his soul felt familiar to mine. I feel like we've been friends my entire life, so what the relationship was bringing, who he was and still is to this day. But I had gained something in my life that I didn't want to lose. So these feelings of being inadequate and not enough, it just got very heavy and dark. It was so dark.

Speaker 1: 33:13

I was my worst critic. I was just a little devil on your shoulder, always telling you things. I was that person to myself and I just think of like the angel and the devil that, like sit on either shoulder. I feel like I had two devils that sat on either shoulder and just told me all of these things. I fed myself all of these lies and I created this world within myself. I hated everything about me. I hated every single thing. I'm like can it get worse than this? I'm like, no, it can't get worse than this. I just wanted to be free of all of these laws that I had imposed on myself. I was so done mentally, like I just knew that something needed to change Because I was so unhappy.

Speaker 1: 34:31

And an eating disorder is an addiction. It truly is. You are dealing with addictive thought patterns. You are learning not to feed into these addictive thought patterns. You are learning not to feed into these addictive thought patterns and, like any other addiction, it is hard to break out of it, and that's why I want to touch on so many things regarding this, because, even since me choosing to break free from it, since me choosing to break free from it, there's been so many other things that I have been faced with, to deal with still to this day because of this, because of the addictive mentality, my first step towards freeing myself of these laws. I know I talked about having a therapist and reaching out to someone who could help me, help me understand what was really going on inside myself. What was this war? Where did it come from? Why did it happen? To begin with, I was willing to listen to anyone or get help from anyone who would help me simply cultivate more peace. That was all I wanted.

Speaker 1: 36:03

Outside of an eating disorder being an addiction, I am going to say that you also experience spouts of depression, which I did over the course of 10 years. But the other thing that was extremely prevalent in my life was the anxiety. I had anxiety about everything Anxiety about what other people thought about me, anxiety about not sticking to my rules, anxiety about absolutely everything, and this anxiety started very young too, and it was also very bad. And there's other points that I want to dive into this with another video. So there was just so many things here.

Speaker 1: 36:58

Outside of reaching out for help, I opened myself up to intuitive eating, and I'm gonna dive into an episode on this. But for the first time in my life, in over 10 years, I threw away all of the constructs of what I should and shouldn't eat and allowed myself to eat what I wanted to eat. And this was probably one of the hardest things for me, because it was having me tune in to my body's intuitive wisdom for the first time in so long. And when you don't listen to your body and what it has to say to you, you forget how it speaks to you. It's like not stretching or something for a set period of time. And then you go and try to stretch or do your splits or something like that, and you're like, oh, I'm a little tight, this doesn't feel quite right. Your intuitive wisdom is like a muscle If you don't use it, you will forget what it's like. It's like a language that you don't use.

Speaker 1: 38:23

And I think back now I'm about to be 28 and I've done so much work on this, I've worked through it so much, and I think of where did it come from? And I know my biggest wound was that lack of love in my life, not experiencing love since a very young age. And I know I've shared tidbits in my first episode and some other episodes, but I'm going to share a little bit more here. I know I said that my mom did not want me and it's true. She had four daughters before I came into this world.

Speaker 1: 39:19

Her and my dad already did not have the best relationship, the best marriage going on not have the best relationship, the best marriage going on. My dad was in and out of jail before I was born. My mom had her tubes tied. She was not planning on having another child. She was not mentally capable of having another child. She was depressed and there's other things there that I might share in another episode but she did not plan on having me and somehow I came into this world despite my dad being in jail most of the time when I was conceived and my mom getting her tubes tied and not wanting me and all of these things.

Speaker 1: 40:09

And when my sisters found out that she was pregnant, they thought she was crazy for having another child with this man who treated her and us them the way that they treated her, that they treated her and she hid her pregnancy. She hid me from the world for so long until she couldn't. She was older as well, she was 39, and they kept telling her that I was going to be sick and all of these things and she was just not mentally there to have a child. She did not want me and there's more deeper things here, but this is true and this is where I'm going to kind of leave it.

Speaker 1: 40:57

For the time being, she was already struggling with four girls and this man who was unreliable and all of these things. She could barely care for herself and her four other girls and everything else that was going on, and I felt this lack of love from almost my inception into this world. I have so many memories as a kid and I have conversations with my sister and my sisters until this day about this because they agree that it is something that I was born into, and I feel like my lack of love was definitely my biggest wound, growing up in an environment as well, in a home, where I did not experience love, so I never knew what that was and I never realized what I was missing in my life. And when I started receiving love from the world like actual love, it felt foreign to me and this hell that I created for myself just simply came from the lack of love I had for myself, trying to control some aspect of my ever-changing and erratic upbringing as well, and healing has not been easy and healing has not been easy. There have been so many other things that have come as a side effect from having experienced this for so long, from having been in my experience for so long. I had been blind to all the ways in which my body was trying to communicate with me all of these years, and there are side effects that I'm still dealing with until this day, and these are things that I want to more openly talk about with people who are going through something like this or some kind of disordered eating like this or some kind of disordered eating, because so many of the times, we don't realize how it can affect you, struggling with hormonal problems, general intestinal problems, psychological problems. There's so many things that you experience Learning how to turn into your hunger. There is just a list of things that came about Once I closed this door and started walking the path of healing.

Speaker 1: 43:43

At least now I was ready for that. I was ready to walk that path wholeheartedly. I was ready to just allow my body to find peace and healing things regarding the side effects of having dealt with an eating disorder, because it's just your body, dealing with the years of degrading it, and you have to acknowledge that as well as like sometimes, we make decisions and we don't know what that's really costing us All. Right, my loves. That's it for our story time today.

Speaker 1: 44:43

I wanted to open this up completely and just share with you and give you a little bit of insight into what an eating disorder can look like, where it may stem from, what my journey was like, and it'll give you a better understanding of why I'm here, why I am here recording this with you and sharing this with you, because I believe that healing can be done from learning from one another and sharing these parts of ourselves with others, knowing that there is another way, another path. So if you know anyone in your life, so if you know anyone in your life that struggles with an eating disorder, I would love if you share this episode with them. And if you are tuning in and you struggle with something like this, I just want you to know that healing is possible. Being at peace with yourself is possible. We can create this for ourselves. There is a reality that exists where you are not at war with yourself.

Speaker 1: 46:06

Hold on to that.

Speaker 1: 46:08

Meditate on that Journal, on that.

Speaker 1: 46:13

What would it be like if I wasn't at war with myself?

Speaker 1: 46:18

What would be different? How would I feel? And that might be the first thing for you to realize that there is another way. And that might be the first thing for you to realize that there is another way, even though it doesn't feel like there is sometimes when you're in it. You're so in your experience. You have this very limited view of the world and your perspective is just so limited as well. But just know that there is another possibility of experiencing peace and love for yourself like nothing you've ever imagined before.

Speaker 1: 46:59

It may take some time to get there. It may take months, years. I still go through my moments to this day, but it is so worth it. I wouldn't change it for the world. A part of me wishes I would have done it sooner, but you know what we all have to go through our own process. I'm sending you all so, so much love and peace. You are all amazing. I'll talk to you in my next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this message with any friends and family. I'd love to hear your takeaways, so share them with me by leaving a comment below or heading over to my instagram at jacinda marie. I am sending you all so much love.