Welcome to the first ever post on the Eat Free blog! I’m not sure exactly what’s to come of this website, but I do have some ideas. One thing I know I will do on here is talk about my personal story, so I might as well start out with my journey from its beginning.

I believe my body issues first started in 2017, when my family immigrated to San Diego. As a kid I was online a lot and often came across videos and articles with clickbait-y “get-thin-quick” promises. My earliest memory of a doctor’s appointment took place during the same year, and I remembered it because it was the first time I was told I was overweight. My mom must have been told the same thing, because soon after was when I first started noticing the waist trainers, the stinky apple-cider drinks, and the self-deprecating language she’d use when describing her body. The doctor’s orders, social media’s influence, and my mom’s example all lead me to feel really awful about my body, and my biggest dream became being skinny.

My mom caught wind of this and enrolled the both of us into this parent-child weight-loss research program. I don’t remember what exactly the point of the program was, but I do remember having to wear a physical activity tracker, record myself eating, do a bunch of tests and surveys, weigh myself every week, and track my calories in a logbook. This is when I started feeling straight up bad for eating too much or not moving enough, because I knew I’d have to face the consequences at my next appointment when the lady helping my mom and I flipped through the book and made me go on the scale.

I ended up losing some weight and getting into the “healthy” range for my age, but I remember even when I first reached my goal weight I didn’t feel all that happy or accomplished. While I’m sure my mom and the lady that helped us meant well, this experience just threw me into the world of diet culture.

Skipping forward a few years, I moved from the U.S. to a small town in Ontario, Canada in 2020. There was a lot of tension in my family because of some mental health issues I was having, and I felt extremely depressed. During this period, my parents, to put it simply, were not nice to me. I can admit that I could be pretty nasty sometimes, but the language they would use with me a lot was cruel. In addition to this, I had gained a lot of weight without realizing it and I hated my body. I was just about to enter high school, so I resolved to get as skinny as possible and become my “true self”. At this point I’d completely given up on my mental health and my relationship with my family. Part of the reason I chose to focus on losing weight is because I knew it was something that would take up all my attention, so I could keep myself distracted from everything else in my life.

And this is where it really went downhill. Obviously I didn’t mean to develop disordered eating habits. It started slowly, like how every other weight-loss journey starts. I did the YouTube workouts, I counted calories, and tried to eat healthy. But I started getting more into it. With every pound I dropped, I became more afraid that I would slip up and gain everything back. So I started doing more things, taking more drastic measures without realizing when I crossed the line of what was normal.

At first my mom complemented me, but as time went on she started questioning me. Then she got worried, then angry. None of her feelings really stopped me though. I kept on for about a year and a half. I exercised more, ate less, and spoke less. I lost friends, looked in the mirror more, ate less, and exercised more. I cried more, and ate less, and stopped crying.

Then one day I stepped on the scale and saw a number that was kind of unbelievable. When I saw it though, I didn’t feel shock or joy. I felt nothing.

Which makes sense to me now – you need energy to form emotions, and you need proper nutrition to have energy. Before this moment I had already reached my “goal weight”, but I was afraid that if I stopped what I was doing then, I would gain everything back. So instead of taking it easy, I went harder and ended up at my lowest point. It was only here that I started to think about how unsustainable my lifestyle was. Was I really going to be this hungry, tired, and lifeless everyday for the rest of my life? Would going through each day forever mean checking off a to-do list of activities to maintain my weight, instead of actually living? I didn’t want that at all.

Social media was actually what pushed me along in recovery. Honestly, I think I owe my life to recovery coaches and influencers on Instagram. If you scrolled far enough through my camera roll, you would find hundreds of screenshots of delicious meals, encouraging messages, snippets of advice, and recovery challenges from the pages of these wonderful people. Recovery was a long process, with me eating a little more each day and exercising less and less. Slowly I realized how absurd the ED was, because I was no longer on survival-mode and my brain finally had enough energy to think logically.

There was no specific day I chose to go all-in with recovery, which might be my biggest regret. I wish I wasn’t so cautious and scared about going through with it. Every little thought I let slide about losing “my dream body” or being “healthy” was another delay to my happiness. Another setback on my path to freedom.

Which brings us to today, and to Eat Free.

My hope for Eat Free is that it supports you throughout your recovery journey like recovery influencers did for me, or, if you’re just starting out, that it encourages you to throw caution to the wind and reclaim your life starting now. I’ll cover the science of recovery along with the less tangible impacts it may have on your life. I want to talk about everything you’d like to know about recovery – from extreme and mental hunger, to weight-gain, to guilt, to self-rediscovery.

If you found yourself relating to anything I mentioned in my story (and even if you didn’t), Eat Free is for you. Please remember that the pleasures of life don’t have to come at a price. They have nothing to do with how much you move, what you eat, or your appearance. By simply existing, you have earned happiness. Now let’s find it again.