10th grade is when it really hit. I guess during the summer I had been hyper health-conscious, and when I went to Lycée (High-school) I began restricting my intake. Also, I was separated from my best friend Fiona, and began spending all my time with Mathilde, who was in my class. She was paranoid about her 'huge, muscly thighs', and I began to think I needed to lose weight. My parents bought a scale, and I started weighing myself, disgusted to find I weighed 55kg. We didn't even own a scale until that year, so I never weighed myself, except once at the beginning of 9th grade, at a friends house, and I felt so good that I only weighed 51kg.
Sometimes I wonder... if my parents hadn't bought that scale, would I have felt so much anxiety about my weight? Would I have developed an eating disorder at all?
Anyway, I began restricting, and at lunch, I would have some veggies, a side of protein (meat or fish) and some lettuce or half a small grape fruit. It doesn't sound that small, but it was still really restricting. My friend, with whom I always ate with, would have all that plus a yogurt and bread. In the afternoons, I would have two apples I'd saved from lunch, and I'd be feeling starving. Then when I got home, I would snack on whatever was out in the kitchen (bread and butter, was, as I remember, divine) and my dad (who would be cooking dinner) would stay "Stop, you'll spoil your dinner!", to which I would respond "But I'm starving!" And what would he say? "Good. You need to feel hunger."
However, this mid-day starving led to compulsive overeating later in the day. And try as I might, my weight ballooned to 57kg over the course of the year.
Then, for a period, my dad began to eat an apple and some almonds for lunch. I was shocked at how little he ate, and thought, wow, I eat so much more than he does... Okay, now I'M going to eat only almonds and an apple for lunch. The plan backfired, however, as I would feel starving in the afternoons and have something like 2 or 3 cubes of chocolate over the course of the afternoon. After over-indulging during the afternoon, I would feel so guilty and terrible about myself that I would sometimes force myself not to have dinner. I would be in two minds about it, till the very last minute, then I would finally say, no, I'm not having diner. I felt so much anger - the self-denial was a painful torment. I would actually sit at the table with my parents and watch them eating dinner. What hurt me most was how easily my dad accepted it. I would say "Oh, I'm not hungry, I'm not going to have dinner tonight." and he would just respond "okay." Hw really could not care less whether I ate or didn't eat. He did not notice anything was wrong at all.
I'm still rather pissed off at my parents during that period for not noticing anything was wrong with me. I wonder, if I hadn't lost so much weight afterwards, if they would have realized there was a problem at all.
Anyway, at the end of the year, I really began to restrict, and I would have my apple and almonds for lunch, and a small, light salad for dinner. I also started watching anorexic vlogs, the "supersize vs. superskinny" show, as well as reading pro-ana sites, and doing research on how to lose weight. I started going on long walks with my dad in the forest, and performed self-hypnosis on myself to reduce my desire to eat. It worked. I lost a few kilos.
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