heres the trouble.

Here is the trouble...
It's been almost 10 years since now. Next month is my birthday. Every year or two around this time I start to think about my life and the choices I've made.

When I was 13, I made a decision that changed my life. I was with my family staying on our boat and my mum and dad had gone to the Marina store and bought Gummy Bears and those trolli sour gummy worms. They then proceeded to split the gummies evenly into three piles for me and my two sisters. I remember that day because it was the day I told them I did not want my share of the "Friday treats."
Now, I know that this seems trivial but it wasn't.

From that day on I realized that i got some sort of sense of empowerment from refusing food. The less i ate the better i felt and before i knew it I had shed the few extra pounds of "baby fat" and much more. I thrived off of the new stream of attention I was getting. Every time someone didn't recognize me or told me how thin I looked I was thrilled. It was simple then, just a set of behavior reenforced by a favourable response. I picked up on the difference in the way people were treating me and it became sort of ingrained in my thought process... Thin=beautiful...beautiful=love

Now it is important to disclose that up until this point I had been ostracised by my classmates and after this point everyone wanted to be my friend. As a child its all about acceptance.

I remember the first time I made myself sick. I was 15, my family had just moved across the world and I was at rowing practice on a Saturday morning. We had just done a 2k ergo and ran 5k and because I had worked myself so hard I needed to throw up. I wasn't thinking it would become a regular occurrence... I didn't think much about it at all to be honest.

Later that day we went out to eat and after I had finished eating I thought, "well, now I can do this....why not$?" Over the years turned that "why not?" has turned into somewhat of a compulsion. I am completely powerless and I feel completely hopeless.