(tranquil music)
- I'm Jazzmyne.
- Hey, I'm May.
- Hi, my name is Angel
and today I'm going to be talking about my eating disorder.
- My eating disorder started when I was in high school
and I was having a lot of issues with control.
I was being a good student.
I was in volleyball.
I was working a job.
You know, I felt like so many parts of my life
weren't able for me to control,
and the only way that I could control
was the food that I was eating
or in that case, not eating.
My family did find out that I was restricting myself
and I was making myself sick after I ate,
so then I went to therapy.
And that helped for a little bit.
And then I thought I was fine.
I wasn't really taught in therapy,
so much the mental part of it.
- Growing up, honestly, I've always had
kind of disordered eating habits,
but it had never been something that really consumed me.
August of 2019 I moved from LA to Philly
and I had a really hard time adjusting.
My eating disorder started with binge eating.
So I actually ended up gaining like 10 pounds.
The binging ended up causing a lot of restriction.
And then I started going to therapy for my eating disorder
and kind of got the binging under control
but the restriction continued.
Then I developed really serious anorexia.
- I guess my eating disorder started out in high school.
My mom had lost her job.
I remember her telling me one day after school,
Hey, you know, things are gonna be rough for a little while.
And that caused a sort of panic within myself.
And one of the things I was fortunate enough for
was that I was a scholarship kid in private school.
So the lunches that we had were very,
I won't say unlimited,
but you could eat a lot in a short amount of time.
I developed a panic of sorts that because we were going
to be struggling financially
that we wouldn't be able to afford food anymore.
So I would eat enough during lunchtime
in just like an excessive amount,
just at the off chance that today is the day
we're not going to have enough to eat.
I developed that fear and it never really went away.
- So then I went to college.
About my junior year I kind of found myself
in the same position where I was overwhelmed again.
I went back to restrictive eating and working out
and taking pills and making myself sick again.
And that is also when I started to go to therapy
that was offered at my college.
In therapy I was suggested to possibly go
to a treatment center and that really terrified me.
So I stopped going to therapy
and I stopped my eating disorder like that day.
Again, I wasn't taught the mental aspects of that.
Ever since then I've kind of been on this journey
of dealing with having to figure out the mental side
of eating disorders and where that comes from for me.
When I was restrictive eating,
and when I was making myself sick,
I wasn't doing it so much for the thought of like,
I want to be thin as much as it was I want to feel control.
But at that time also, if I had more positive examples
of what different bodies could look like,
I don't think I would have turned to controlling
my life in this way.
- From September to end of December, I lost about 35 pounds.
I went home for Christmas break,
and my parents were pretty concerned
'cause I was like insanely thin.
They just had me go in for a checkup.
The doctor ended up testing my vitals
and I had a pulse of 28.
I was told that pretty much if I continue my behavior,
I'd be dead within two weeks.
Everything kind of just like fell together.
And I really had to realize what had been happening.
'Cause I kind of just normalize it
and was like, oh, like this been happening my whole life.
But this time it was different.
I went right into pretty intensive treatment.
- It was really hard in college.
I didn't gain just the Freshman 15.
I gained the Freshman 50,
and my friends would like inch around the situation,
but not in a way that's proactive,
more of in a judgy way.
There's such a stigma around plus size people
having eating disorders.
They assume that if you're a plus size,
there's no way you can have an eating disorder.
And that's just not true.
It's took me a long time to understand even myself
that I had developed an eating disorder,
and it's something I'm still working on now.
It's not something that just goes away.
(tranquil music)
- My treatment was going to be six, eight weeks.
And I ended up completing my treatment on March 6th.
I went straight from treatment, moved back to LA,
started my job at BuzzFeed
and then had one week in the office,
and a week later the world kind of shut down.
- I'm seeing what this pandemic is doing
to a lot of my communities.
That first of all was going into a lot of control things.
If I'm at home all day, even if I do have work,
my day is essentially evolved around my meals.
I woke up, I ate breakfast.
Then like, okay, you wait a few hours
and then you eat again for lunch
and then you might have a snack
and you wait a few hours and then you have dinner.
And that's what my mind was doing
to keep myself on a schedule,
which was really, really, really hard for me
because that was me thinking about food so much.
To be back in this mindset of when I was 16,
and when I was like 21.
And I'm 29 now thinking that I've worked through all of this
and I don't think I did as much as I thought that I did.
- Before the pandemic, I was a college student
as well as I worked at BuzzFeed and I had another job
and I had extracurricular activities.
Keeping myself busy with extracurriculars
and stuff like that was something that,
you know, if I keep myself busy,
there's really no time to excessively eat.
Once the pandemic hit, it was like all of that routine
that I had was all of a sudden interrupted.
I was like, I'm home all the time.
I'm bored now, what do you do when you're bored?
You eat.
- So when I got the notification
of restaurant's shutting down, that was like,
I had a big breakdown because I had a plan.
I, with my treatment team,
made this whole plan of what I was gonna do
and how I was going to structure my meals in a certain way.
And one of the main things that I was using,
and to better control the way that I was eating
was restaurants and sitting inside of restaurants
was something that was really helpful to me
because they cook with fats
that I was scared to cook with when I was at home.
And they portion your food out to a normal portion,
which I wasn't really yet able to do.
- I live with my partner who one, is mostly vegetarian,
and two, just eats a lot of greens,
a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruits.
So I was also having a really, really hard time
comparing my food and my food intake
compared to the person that I was living with.
- Another thing that was really hard for me
was at least at the beginning when it was like,
you really don't want to be grocery shopping
more than like once every two weeks,
it was like, okay, I need two weeks
worth of food in my apartment.
As someone with a binge eating disorder
that is like your literal nightmare.
I ended up my first day after grocery shopping,
having a huge binge.
And then same thing happened the second day.
And then I called my parents,
and I was like, hey, this is not working.
Like I can't be here.
So I ended up flying home,
which obviously was another stressor
because that's not safe to be on a plane.
When I kinda felt myself falling back into old habits.
I was stuck in between this place of what is more unsafe,
me being here in LA alone with all my food,
resorting to these old habits
or flying across the country,
getting onto a plane and exposing myself.
It was just kind of like finding this in between
of what is more or less unsafe.
- I didn't realize it was going to be an issue at first,
but then as time went on,
I was like, why do I keep going into the kitchen
when it's not time to eat?
I'm not hungry.
Why do I keep walking over there?
All that extra free time,
it was like, what do I fill that with?
- Another thing that wasn't helping
was just having time to be on social media
and see the comments and the jokes
of what other people were saying.
People were like, okay, well we have to be at home,
so we're going to make sure we do this diet plan.
And we have to be home so we're gonna make sure
that we're doing this workout plan.
- Since I'm so early in my recovery,
I'm still not able to exercise at all.
And when I see even my closest friends
or my siblings and my family doing all these things
and going on all these sites
it was so hard for me to remove myself from that.
- Something that really affected me during the pandemic
that was a bit triggering,
it was all this value being placed on Adele
all of a sudden when she lost weight.
All this like good associated with being thinner,
it's got in my head.
It's like, it almost keeps me even less motivated
to do things that are gonna like be healthy and helpful.
Especially as someone who struggles
with the whole gaining weight thing,
when everyone's placing such a value on that,
it it takes you to a dark place.
- People are gonna expect me to come out of this pandemic
as a new, better person, because they're like,
you've been at home this whole time,
you should have lost weight.
And I was really, really scared of that.
(tranquil music)
When I was kind of at my lowest
so far during this pandemic,
it was just a lot of me thinking about food and thinking
that I was doing things the wrong way.
Luckily not only do I have a supportive partner,
but I have a therapist online who helped me.
I don't physically have the physical aspects
of an eating disorder,
but I had the mentality of an eating disorder,
and that's the part that I'm working on.
So it's been really tough.
- I still am doing eating disorder based
therapy once a week.
I'm doing that with the same person
who was my case manager in intensive treatment,
so that has also been really helpful.
- I've had to mostly, I would say,
just check myself in those situations.
I don't have access to a therapist right now.
Before the quarantine I had previous ways
I used to keep busy.
Now that I'm in quarantine,
I've had to kind of just readjust some things,
diving into a good Netflix show,
diving into a good video game.
Those things have been real blessings.
And even immersing myself in things
that I haven't immersed myself in a long time.
I started writing again.
- My therapist gave me some really good advice
where she told me to remember
that I need to be present in my decisions
instead of just making a decision.
And for me, that's how my relationship with food has to be.
It's not like that for everybody.
But for me, when I decide what I'm eating
or what I'm making or what I'm ordering,
I'm practicing to think an extra 20 or 30 seconds
to be really present and not base myself or my decisions
off of society's standards or what my partner's doing
and base it off of like, what does Jazzmyne really want?
What is going to satisfy Jazzmyne?
- So now that I've been back in LA for awhile,
I actually ended up moving into an apartment
with two of my friends.
Just being in an area where there's support
and where there are people that I know,
like if I need somebody to come sit with me when I eat,
they'll do that for me.
Or if I need somebody to cook dinner with me
so that I don't feel so alone in that.
I know I have that, and that has been a huge help for me.
- My friends and family have been very supportive of me,
like checking in on me and stuff like that.
- For awhile I had that mentality of like,
I want to be able to fight this by myself.
There's literally no reason to do that.
Leaning on people has definitely been
my saving grace in this.
(tranquil music)
I think post pandemic when we're all
seeing each other again, it's really important
to realize that people's bodies are gonna have changed.
Whether it be people gaining weight or losing weight.
You don't know how that happened or why that happened,
or if it was in a healthy or unhealthy way
or how they're feeling about it.
- Before you start talking or saying things
that have to do with bodies and body types
that especially aren't you,
just take an extra moment and try to understand
where someone else might be coming from.
- Bringing up a comment about someone's weight
is never appropriate.
Stuff like this can just take you to a very dark place.
And I know from experience.
- This automatic congratulatory instinct that we have
when we see people losing weight is so toxic.
And I think that that is something that everybody
needs to be more conscious of,
because it can be very damaging to people.
(inspirational music)
- You know, it's obviously different for everybody,
but if you have resources or friends or family
that are open to hearing you talk to them.
Like I said, I'm 29 years old,
and if I didn't finally open my mouth
to my partner and my therapist,
I would still be struggling and going through things.
- This time is hard for everybody,
even for people that don't have eating disorders.
For me and for people who could relate, it's like,
it's okay to feel like this is hard,
because this is (bleep) hard.
- Also, if you've had any type of eating disorder
or anything, and you find yourself in this,
you're not relapsing but you're not okay.
Just know that that is normal
and that doesn't make you weaker.
- Recovery is not linear.
Do not let that discount all the progress
that you have made.
- No matter if you have an eating disorder or whatever,
you're worthy of that love and care,
and that's something even myself,
I'm still trying to teach myself.
I'm rooting for you.
I hope y'all are rooting for me.
Let's root for each other in this situation.
At the end of the day, we're all just people.
And we're all just trying to be okay.
- If you or someone you know
is going through eating disorders,
we have links in the description below.
(inspirational music)