hello, and welcome back to The Bliss Bean. Today's video is a little less
lighthearted than they usually are. I also want to warn you that I will be
talking about disordered eating and so please turn this video off if you need
to and just take care of yourself. So I make a lot of content about productivity
and planning and habits and just living the ~best life possible~, and a lot of
people online as well as in my real life comment that I seem like this perfect
person who has it all together a hundred percent of the time. And it's a fun
persona to play, but it's not the whole story, and I generally don't talk about
the other side of things on here because I prefer to keep this inspirational and
motivational, simply because I know that when I am in a low place, I like to look
at more positive things to help me get out of that, but at the same time I do
think it's important to be honest and there's a point where it gets too far
and people just assume that I don't struggle with things, and I want to clear
that up. I initially got the idea for this video because a few weeks ago I got
an email to like sign up for this online healthcare thing where like, now that
you're 18, you can schedule and track your own appointments and all your
medical history and stuff, and as I was just kind of exploring it, I noticed how
many appointments I went to in 2016 and 2017. So now that a few years have passed
since then I understand that part of my life much more clearly and I think I can
talk about it from a more level-headed, understanding, and compassionate point of
view. I don't think this story really starts in 2016, and we could start all
the way back in sixth grade. And because I have written a blog post on this topic
and I think I just did such a great job explaining sixth grade in there I just
want to read a snippet from that. That winter I soon found myself spiraling
into a terrible sadness. It's hard to remember much from this period of my
life. I remember that I got sick a lot which only made the situation worse
because I would have to make up work at home. I remember that random thoughts
would start troubling me. A memory of something stupid I did would resurface
and nag me constantly, and then another memory. I collected agitating
memories like knick knacks and turned them over and over in my mind. I couldn't fall
asleep at night, I was constantly crying, and I could hardly smile around my
family. My parents were concerned but they didn't understand at all, which made
me feel very alone. So yeah, basically throughout my whole life I've just been
super perfectionistic, wanting to do everything AND do it well, and sixth
grade just introduced a lot of new opportunities for me to be a
perfectionist. And so my teacher found out about it and she kind of told me
about similar experiences that she'd had and I was able to get through that
season. Eighth grade, however, was also really rough for me because the jump in
the workload from seventh grade to the workload in eighth grade was so huge. I
did all of the extra credit, I would come in during lunch, and I don't know why I
cared so much because middle school grades don't matter, and so I did
perfectly, but then what happened was I went into ninth grade and ninth grade
felt too easy. I felt like everyone else was just racing ahead of me. They had
four year plans for the classes they wanted to take, they were studying for
the PSATS, they were getting involved in different clubs like right from the
get-go, and I just felt a little lost, like there
was so much I wanted to do and get involved in, and I didn't know where to
start, and I felt like a failure because of that. There's like a specific day my
freshman year where I remember just almost bursting into tears during
Spanish class because all of these feelings had been, like, building up and I
just felt so disappointed in myself for not, like, making better use of my time in
high school right away. It sounds totally unreasonable to me now because it kind
of was. Looking back at it, I definitely was not falling behind other people and
everyone needs a little bit of time to adjust to high school, but I just had
like all this energy in me, and I needed to put it toward something. And
unfortunately the outlet that I chose for all of this energy was controlling
my weight. I've never had a super great relationship with food or just body
image in general. Because for one, food and weight have been touchy subjects in my family
for as long as I can remember, and I would be foolish to think that all
of the arguments that were started because of that didn't affect me in any
way. I also remember in sixth grade our
teacher showed us this documentary about type 2 diabetes. For some reason for me, I
heard the statistic that like 1/3 of all people would get type 2 diabetes in
their lifetime, and I was so worried that I was like,
paralyzed from taking any actual action towards living a healthier life, like all
simmering until I finally had, sorry I just had like a hair in my mouth, until I finally
had the motivation and like the energy to start taking action, and in the worst
way possible It happened pretty gradually, I think as it usually does.
I started restricting my food and eventually pushing myself to eat as
little for every meal as I could get by on. I couldn't allow myself to eat foods
that I considered to be unhealthy, I created my own exercise schedule and
was exercising a lot. Now to me I don't know how I sustained it, I don't know how
I had the energy to pull that off. And I even counted calories which for someone
like me who is so data-driven and precise about everything they do in life, was a
very very slippery slope. So it didn't take very long for me to start seeing
the effects of this. A little bit of backstory, I got my first period when I
was 13. It was great and regular for more than a year the only time that I missed
one was when we went to Lithuania and that was obviously like the stress of
travel and jetlag. That was totally normal. But what wasn't normal was the
fact that I had a period on October 13th, 2015 and then I didn't have my next one
until April 6th, 2017. So that was almost a year and a half and that most certainly
was not stress and jetlag. I don't even remember how I reasoned in my head that
not getting my period for this long was normal. It was easy for me to pretend
that all of this was for health because if you were only paying attention to the
fact that I finally developed a consistent exercise habit and I was
eating better food, it seemed like I was doing pretty well. And no one knew that I
wasn't getting my period so I was really the only one who knew about this problem and
I didn't even view it as a problem. I actually was seriously considering
like studying nutrition and dietetics in school like I thought that I found my
passion and career path. Also, as you probably know, the online health
community is huge and has tons of information, which can be helpful but it
also makes it like a super dangerous black hole to fall into if you're not in
the right mindset to consume that information. So yeah, basically things
were just getting pretty bad. Eventually my parents started noticing and they
made an appointment for me to see the doctor. My period wasn't really something
that I'd ever talked about with my family. Like once I got my first one and
my mom like set me up and I was good to go I just kind of dealt with it myself
and so no one knew that I wasn't getting my period, but I knew that they would ask
me at the doctor's office because they always ask you "when was your last period?"
and I knew that I would have to admit that I hadn't gotten it in like seven
months. I knew that I had done this to myself, I had gotten myself to this point
and I felt so guilty about that. And it was just like awaiting judgment day where I would
finally be discovered and I'd have to confess and they would make me stop
doing what I was doing, but I didn't want to stop doing because I didn't want to
gain weight, I wanted to lose more weight. So yeah that night I just tried to stay
awake for as long as possible because sleep would make the time go by faster
and I wanted to hold it off for as long as I possibly could. I think it was at
that first appointment that my doctor asked me what kind of stuff I was
involved in in high school and when I started listing all of the activities
that I was involved in, I feel like I almost saw like this understanding wash
over his face, where he kind of understood of the root of my problem,
like where all of this desire to control my weight was coming from because he saw
that I also had this desire to control EVERYTHING in my life. This time of my
life really sucked and...
I just had to change my camera battery so that kind of ruined the mood, um
but yeah, I'm not really happy with how my family responded to this and dealt
with this situation. Obviously it's far in the past and I've long since gotten
over it but it was just such a point of tension in our family. Every appointment
was so tense and would end with me in tears and every drive home was like a
big argument over who saw this coming and who didn't and who responded
properly and who didn't. It was just a constant war in addition to the war that
was going on within me. ~so poetic~ I feel like when people around you are
sick or hurt it's very important to stay calm so that they stay calm as well like
if someone falls and breaks their leg you have to stay calm and act like
everything is okay, even if you are panicking, because making the injured
person start panicking is not going to help anything, and obviously my situation
was not a broken leg but at the heart of it I was sick, and I just wanted like a
sense of peace and calm. So in that year I had 13 doctor's visits, which is a far
cry from your usual annual checkup. I saw my doctor a bunch of times, I think I saw
a psychologist a couple of times, I got some x-rays done, some bloodwork. I
obviously knew that what I was doing was unhealthy
and would have effects on my body but for some reason I didn't know that any of
those effects would be long-lasting and I probably was avoiding that information
Like the main thing I didn't know was that not getting my period while I was
growing, which was a really critical stage in my life, meant that I was not
developing bone density, and so it was just flatlined where it was supposed to
be going up, and once I stopped growing it would not have the opportunity to
increase any more so basically I had set myself back and it was possible that I would
never reach a normal level and that I would have problems with osteoporosis as
I grew older. So as I mentioned I didn't want to gain weight but it was things
like that that kind of convinced me that I had to change things, so the recovery
process was kind of slow at first because I was definitely half-assing it.
I was like, well, I can still keep exercising I'll just try to eat more to
like balance it out, but my period just was not coming back so eventually
my doctor was like you can't exercise any more than one day per week and as
crazy as that sounded to me, it worked. April 6th, 2017 I got my period at school
which is quite insane when you haven't had it for a year and a half. Actually
that day we were leaving for a trip to San Francisco so that was a really nice
way to like start off this trip with my family, just kind of a milestone marking
that I had gotten better. Someone asked me how I got over my fear of eating
unhealthy foods and of gaining weight and I answered in two parts. I got over
my fear of gaining weight because I realized that when I ate more the
results were not nearly as bad as I thought they would be. I did not balloon
up, I merely felt better and put on more muscle, and then when it came to learning
how to eat unhealthy foods, I just saw how much more fun life was when I didn't
worry all the time. And when I say that I got over my fear of these things I want
to clarify that it's never 100%. I still have days where I don't have
great body image or I feel guilty about eating unhealthy things but it's so much
better than where I used to be and I'm healthy now, I feel healthy, and that's
what matters. I don't think it's possible to achieve a hundred percent recovery
but as close as you can get to it is what you're aiming for. So the whole
point of this video is to show that even if my online presence or even the way I
present myself in the real world makes it seem like I've got my life together a
hundred percent of the time, there are certainly dark days or even dark weeks
where I feel down and unmotivated and sad. It's just when I'm in that space I
don't really want to engage with the world, I kind of tend to retreat and hide
and so people don't really see that, but it definitely happens. I still struggle
even after getting through those periods *no pun intended*
those periods of my life, but when looking at the bigger picture, on a
grander scale, I am doing so so much better than I was in middle school at
the start of high school. Literally whenever I look back at like Google
Photos or scroll far back in my Instagram I'm just like damn, I am doing
so much better than I was last year, and every year I feel like that. I feel like
yes, I've finally gotten to a good place, and then it gets better, because I keep
working on myself. And that's the hopeful note that I want
to end this on. There's always room in life to improve, you can create a better
life for yourself, you have that power within you. Don't feel overwhelmed by the
idea of perfection because it's unattainable, no one can achieve it, but
feel inspired by the idea that little tiny changes that you make in your life
can lead to you becoming a happier and more fulfilled person. That's really my
purpose with my blog and my YouTube channel is to inspire you to make those
small changes and to improve your life, and if by watching my videos you have
experienced that on even the smallest scale, then I have been successful. So
thank you for watching, thank you for listening to this story. If you or anyone
you know is struggling with eating disorders there is a helpline at 800 931 2237.
I believe in you, you can get better. See you next week.