Bronwyn's story - 'Healthy'

I don’t know when exactly things started. But growing up with overweight parents and an underweight sibling it wasn’t difficult to see why I ended up how I am.

I don’t hate my body, I was always revered for being the “healthy one” and my sibling was the ill one, the one with the chronic illnesses who can’t get out of bed without cracking a hip. But I was younger and naive and some part of me felt like they were special for being treated like a doll. Someone you had to walk on eggshells around. And as an account on social media I followed once said. “If you want to look like a doll, you have to eat like a doll.” And dolls don’t eat.

It wasn’t their fault I ended up with this mind-set, but there was something so addictive in tracking every grain of rice and every step I took. I restricted myself to within an inch of my life and I felt so good after losing weight. But then I would lose control and find myself drowning in chocolate and cake and whatever I could get my hands on and the guilt was so consuming I couldn’t breathe. And I was still heavier than them, still bigger, no matter what I did to myself and no matter how much pain I put myself through.

You are never going to force that scale down and it is pointless to compare yourself to someone who lives a completely different life to you. I would watch people eat, thinking about how they look and how fast or slow they eat, whether it is going to go fill them up or if they’re going to snack later, telling myself that I have to do better that I have to be the best, regardless of whether I’m doing the right thing for me.

It’s been hard, not being the healthy one anymore. Even though I am eating plenty and working hard not to hate myself for it. My mind is the unhealthy thing, I’ve learned. And until I’m well again, I’m not going to be comparing myself to an imaginary skeleton.

You can’t feel guilty for what you eat or don’t eat when your example of success is not healthy. My autism, too played a role in this. I’d been diagnosed as a young girl but I masked so much of that part of myself, it got lost in with the endless weight loss apps and calorie counters I would waste days using.

Some people think autism makes you less accessible to the rest of the world, like you lack some connectedness to society or peoples perceptions. In my experience, it only heightens how you see people and yourself. I saw thin people and larger people and my brain compartmentalised them into groups, the bingers and the restrictors and I wanted to be on the good side. But it’s more like a pendulum swinging from one side to the other and that swinging never stopped for me.

Once I’d finally told people, I think it took a while for them to grasp the depth of what I’d been experiencing. It made it easier, and also harder to not be alone in my mind.

And now that I’m on the path to recovery I’m working on getting out of the toxic mentality I’ve been holding onto.

You get one life, and no matter who you are, you deserve to live it. And feed it.