February 02, 2003 1:03 p.m.
Introduction

Okay I thought I should give an introduction to who I am and all that stuff. I'm 19 and from California and my real name is Heather. I'm short(5'2.5'') and I weigh waaaay too much for my height. It wasn't always that way though. When I was younger I used to roller skate competitevely which burned off any calories that I ate so even though I was eating candy and junk food I was still stick thin. In fact, people used to tease me about how tiny I was and I used to hate it(what the hell was I thinking). A lot of my friends were older than me and wore junior sized clothing and I was still in kids. Then I stopped skating right before I started junior high when I was about 12. At that time I could barely fit into a size 1. All throughout junior high I just ate and ate and ate and because of it I gained and gained and gained. As I watched the size of my clothes go up I actually thought it was good thing because I had always been put down for being too small. But now I was too big. I had gone from a size 1 to a size 9 in two years and I know it wasn't just puberty cause I am small framed. Then, while on vacation in Hawaii with my family, about a month before I turned 14, My grandmother bluntly called me fat and said I needed to lose weight.

That was the turning point for me. After she made that comment my entire view on body image, weight, and food were changed forever. Suddenly I felt fat and when I looked in the mirror all I saw was fat and it became that the only thing that mattered was getting thin. When I started high school a few weeks later it only made things worse, specially since there was a girl that was my height and 88lbs in my PE class. I started to restrict to 190 cals a day and run before school in the morning and then walk for hours at night. I didn't even think what I was doing was unhealthy or anorexic behavior. I wasn't trying to be ana and that's why I was starving, I just did it automatically. And I did lose some weight, but then I began to binge uncontrollably and I gained it back. Up until last June it had continued on like that. I would either be starving or binging, never in between. Then in June it changed...I started purging. I had always told myself that I wouldn't because I had tried it before and it was difficult for me to do. But at the time I had been doing so good and gotten down to my lowest weight and then I blew it by binging. I just had to get rid of it, so I took a plastic bowl into my room and made myself vommit. I still try my hardest not to purge, but sometimes I can't seem to help myself. My dream is that I could stop my binge cycles once and for all so that I won't have to.

I should also mention that I started self injuring when I was 14 about 6 months after my ed emmerged. It started with carving words and initials on my arms and picking at my skin. I managed not to cut for 2 years, but I still kept picking at my skin. I'd squeeze my pores, stick safety pins through my face, and just start scratching at my face and back. I'd also stick toothpicks in the space between my gums and my teeth until it bled and when I was younger I actually managed to bite 2 of my fingernails all the way off. As i said , I had managed to stop cutting, but I started up again in 2000 and it hadn't been that bad until last October when I got kicked out of my house for 2 months. That's when I started to get suicidal and then cutting came back full force.

I would like to stop cutting, but I still feel that I need it, and as I said before, I would rather stop picking at my skin than stop cutting. Though my number one goal is still the same that it has been for 51/2 years...to lose weight and to be thin. And I would love it if I could just lose weight the healthy way, but I can't...mentally and physically I just can't.