So you’ve taken the time to talk to your parents and they don’t seem to believe you when you tell them what you’re going through. What now? Find someone who will. Even if you have to talk to fifteen different people, make sure that someone you trust knows and believes you so that you can have the support that you need to get through this. It may be a close friend that you tell, a teacher, even a friend’s parent. But no matter what make sure somebody knows. You don't have to go through this alone.
If you keep it all to yourself things can get worse than they are already. You could become suicidal, develop an eating disorder, and you could lose the people who are closest to you because bottling everything up inside does make you irritable and cranky, and who wants to be friends with someone that they’re constantly fighting with. I’m not saying that you’re like this… I’m saying that it can lead to this. Let’s take a look at the eating disorder part.
There are different types of eating disorders. The most common one that you hear about is anorexia (an abnormal fear of being fat that makes people, especially girls and young women, starve themselves). There is also bulimia (a habitual disturbance in eating behavior mostly affecting young women of normal weight, characterized by frequent episodes of grossly excessive food intake followed by self-induced vomiting to avert weight gain), and over eating (eating to suppress the feeling of stress, anger, resentment and depression).
Some people don’t even notice that they have an eating disorder. I know it’s hard to believe but it’s true. I’ve been there as well. I was anorexic and didn’t even know it. It started first with cutting out lunch. I just wasn’t hungry at lunch time and I felt like I shouldn’t force myself to eat. Then I cut out breakfast because “I didn’t have the time”. That’s not true though.
Everyone has the time to eat breakfast even it’s just a cereal bar that you eat on your way out the door. Then I stopped eating supper. If anyone asked I’d lie and tell them that I had just eaten or that I had had a big meal earlier that day and just wasn’t hungry. I didn’t notice that I was doing this… not intentionally anyway. But other people noticed. I rapidly lost weight, to the point when my ribs were protruding. I was constantly cold because I had no body fat. I needed help and I didn’t even know it.
