Vicky, 14

Hi, I'm Victoria although I've been called Vicky all my life. Let's see, it's hard to start a story when you don't really know when it started, but we can start at the moment I was diagnosed as overweight... When I was 7 years old, all my life I had been taller and heavier than what was "normal" for my age and although everyone in my family thought it was because of my genetics it was really because of my bad diet. When I was in preschool

"I remember always being a little bigger than my friends and it felt somehow strange because if all the other girls were shorter and thinner, why couldn't I be like that?"

I have always felt like a giant, and being with people who are not my build has always caused me great discomfort. When I was around 7 years old my mom took me to the pediatrician because she thought I was developing prematurely. But in reality, I was just overweight, and that's okay, it's something that maybe with exercise and a diet on some children it might be removed, but the problem was that I also had signs of anemia and diabetes. Thanks to this, for a year or so, I was on a ridiculously strict diet in which I could only eat sweet things once a week, all-natural juices without sugar, and lots of protein (meat, which I don't like) and I started to practice competitive skating which is funny that I did it for years because I hated competing (I quit after I fractured my wrist), but thanks to this I lost 15kg and was relatively healthy, although I was still chubby and very tall. 

After losing weight the comments I always had from adults were "You lost a lot of weight, you look very pretty like that" "You look prettier like that" and "You look more beautiful when you are skinny like you are now, although you need to lose a little bit".

Receiving these comments at such a young age, engraved in my mind that being skinny = being pretty.
So every time I gained a little weight, I felt that I was ugly or that I was not enough to be pretty, this always caused me a lot of frustration, especially when my family or people around me thought of my body as if I was not affected by their comments. When the quarantine started I gained weight but in August 2021 I started practicing martial arts so I went down a little and I stayed at a weight of 60. The biggest problem started in 2022. Since I was still small at that age I had basic knowledge about eating disorders, that is, I knew that if I vomited my meals I could become bulimic and if I stopped eating I was going to be anorexic, it sounds horrible but in reality, it was the only thing I knew. At the end of 2021, I got sick with rhinopharyngitis. Something I hadn't mentioned was that I have had chronic sinusitis since I was little and although I had surgery it didn't work. Long story short, thanks to the Christmas cold and my allergies, I had my whole throat and everything connected to my nose super irritated. I felt very bad and for about 3 months I was on treatment although sometimes I would throw up the medications because they were too strong and my body was not used to it. The rhinopharyngitis treatment ended in May 2022. Shortly after I got bronchitis, you will think I have bad luck, but it gets much worse.

May 6, 2022, is the day when all hell broke loose. it was my best friend's birthday, and we were eating pizza with our friends when one of my friends ironically asked me why I was eating so much if I knew it was going to make me fat. He told me I had to exercise more knowing that I train 5 days a week and sometimes I do it on the weekends, and I kept thinking, maybe, he is right, if I stop eating I can be thinner, but analyzing I realized that my mom would notice if I stopped eating so since I was throwing up from the meds no one was going to notice if I made myself throw up,

"I knew that that was a TCA but I always thought that I would know when to stop"

So I did it for about 2 months, I would throw up every chance I got until I got better and I could no longer hide why I was throwing up so I stopped a little bit, I would throw up only when I was alone or sometimes I just didn't eat or ate very little, I was fascinated to have that feeling of control, that I could control what I ate and what I didn't...I could control my weight. During this time I would get bruises out of nowhere and every time I got up or made a sudden movement I would get dizzy. After a while I got sick with bronchitis again and went back to it, the problem when I was sick was that I could not train because I didn't have enough energy, so my desperation to lose weight was greater. I got better after a month and started training again but I began vomiting in the morning and at night from Monday to Friday and sometimes on the weekends. 

Since I exercised a lot I stopped vomiting and only sometimes stopped eating, which over time became more habitual to the point where I wouldn't eat anything all day. Some days I don't why, I couldn't stop eating, even though later I felt bad about myself and I vomited everything. I came to think that my bronchitis was raised due to my self-provoked vomits as it damaged my throat a lot. Little by little I stopped doing it but in November I got sick again, I didn't have to pretend anything because the medicines were so strong that I didn't feel hungry at all and I slept as much as I could so I didn't eat. By December I was better and only sometimes I stopped eating some random food. One day, I woke up early and didn't eat anything until 4 p.m. This made me feel very bad to the point that when I went to eat, I felt like throwing up and had a big headache, causing me finally to stop.

There are still days when my body looks one way and other days when my body looks another way, it's too hard to see myself looking pretty. It's a situation where I constantly feel frustrated because of how my body looks, and I want to stop eating again or throw up again but I make an effort not to do so. I have never really thought that all this was a TCA, I just consider it a very difficult stage in which I was obsessed with how my body looked, but I really hope that this story reaches someone, I am not good at expressing myself, but I tried to do my best.