My Story

Hi again, (if you found your way from the About page of this blog)

or just hi, you lovely human reading this-

I’m Mimi and I’m glad you’ve found my site.

I’m an 19 young woman living in the delightful state of Vermont. I’m currently enjoying a year off from school and building a love affair with CrossFit and clean food. I am learning how to live a healthy lifestyle and heal myself of a combination of silent eating disorders that I have struggled with my whole life.

Here’s my story:

I have never liked my body. Starting in elementary school I was always bigger than my friends.   I was ten years old- already worrying about what others thought of me because being ‘bigger’ didn’t mean just being taller than most of my friends (including the boys) until around 7^th grade, but also heavier.

And so began my obsession with being skinny.

Freshman Year

I can remember skipping meals in sixth grade, saying to my friends, “I’m so fat,” through seventh grade and in eighth grade, isolating myself at lunch tables while everyone else was eating and my stomach was growling. Skipping meals led to me going home after school and eating two times what my body needed. I would find comfort in the food only to be overcome with guilt afterwards.

My freshman year of high school things got worse—not eating all day until an after-school binge where I would only stop eating when I felt physical discomfort. I fell into this vicious cycle that would leave me in tears, staring in the mirror for hours at the way my stomach would bulge out and sucking it in to see what I could maybe look like if I “just lost ten pounds.” I would Google “how to lose 10 pounds in one week… two weeks… three weeks…” But I kept bingeing- tomorrow I would say, tomorrow would be the day I would make it all day without food. But I could never last and each day I would eat more. Slowly, I started to gain weight.

and I was obsessed with being skinny.

Summer Before Junior Year

Mid-binge food became a drug and it didn’t matter what I was eating I just wanted more and more and more.

These habits continued through my sophomore year. When I started my junior year at age 16 I had 155.5 pounds on my 5 ft. 4 in. frame. In my mind game- I was fat. After this, I discovered a way to begin purging the food from my body. I justified because I wasn’t technically bulimic.

Laxative pills. I started with four at a time, then six, then eight, then fifteen… They didn’t help me lose any weight but by using them I maintained my current 155.5 lbs. Anything to keep me from getting any bigger.

Did I mention I was still obsessed with being skinny?

By January 2013, I was failing AP Chemistry. I was also learning what the word ‘friend’ really meant through experiences with mean girls. I was depressed. I filled myself with self-hate, doubt, and shame.

Everything sucked. I sucked. I hated me.

January, 2014

On a particularly bad day in February, my mom gave me a red ring. She told me how much she loved me. She reminded me of the grace in my heart. She reminded me that I was beautiful.

The ring was to remind me to, “Be true. Be you. Be strong.”

In June 2013 my mom and I cut out all grain and dairy from our diets and with the exercise I was doing I came back to school in the fall for my senior year teetering between 125 and 130lbs. I was hardly binging anymore and when I did it was on healthy foods like fruits and veggies.

Keeping up with my clean eating life style became a challenge when the emotional stresses of school began to weigh down on me. Soon cheat days turned into cheat weeks and by January 2014 I weighed 140 pounds.

119 lbs. in Honduras (skinny, but not fit)

In February 2014 I moved to Honduras to volunteer. I kept a journal of all the food I ate for the three months that I lived there—making sure to eat between 800-1000 calories per day, or less if I could help it. On the days I ate more I’d use laxatives. When I came home in May I was 119 pounds.

But being surrounded by good food all the time made it impossible for me to keep starving myself, and by June 2014 I weighed 130 pounds again. For the month of May laxatives would help me deal with my binges. I also got better about throwing up and covering it up.

I justified it because I wasn’t dying which meant it wasn’t THAT bad. 

I wasn’t even skinny yet and I was fighting an addiction to food. I was never good enough for myself.

In June 2014 I started going to CrossFit classes and fell in love pretty quickly. Why? I could see my progress. In three weeks I could use a heavier kettle bell, or a 35-pound barbell instead of a fifteen, and my cardio recovery time improved daily. I had leg muscles, bicep definition, oh, and did I mention my butt?

With CrossFit came healthier food choices, too. My mind trained itself to crave good food in order to fuel my workouts and then refuel my muscles afterwards. So now here I am, six months later learning how to love my big butt, my strong thighs, and pudgy tummy(see?! still learning!!).  It isn’t much about what my stomach looks like anymore but how much I can back squat. I’m not obsessed with the idea of a thigh-gap anymore-but my 2K row time.  Have I mentioned I love food now, too? (In a healthy non-addictive way.) We love to work together and nourish this hella strong body that I am working on.

 

 

Now you’re asking yourself, I’ve just read this long sob/success story about a teenage girl– why does any of it matter?

Here’s why:

-I am here to share my story with you so that maybe

if you’re struggling with the same things I did

(andstill do some days) you can find inspiration to

work on being fit instead of skinny…work with me to

redefine what you think is beautiful/hot/or whatever your

adjective of choice is.

-I am not here to be a success story flashing my

before-and-after-fat/skinny-miracle-weight loss-bullshit

in your face. Truth is, I’m still healing and working too, and

my body is still changing. Instead, let me help to inspire you

to find happiness within yourself and please, share your

stories with me so you can inspire me to keep healing.

Just remember this one thing…

be true. be you. be strong.

Bryce Canyon, UT after 7.5 miles!

xo- mimi

Carlsbad Caverns, NM