Hi, guys, Welcome back to Thursday's episode. It is solo sam oh I was playing will isn't it? What does that call alliteration? Okay? Fuck, if it's not the ruruation, I'm just gonna sound so stupid. But anyway, Yeah, back onto our solo episodes. I think this is the first one I've really really done alone. I'm sitting in the room with our producer Blake, so I'm gonna be speaking to him as well because I feel all good but not used to it. Today, I wanted to kind of
open up about my journey with my eating disorder. I feel like it's been touched online a little bit, like I've obviously spoken about it here and there, but I've never really gone into detail about my journey. I was quite afraid for a few years, and I wasn't really over it as much as I probably should have been to talk about it. But I wanted to share it
with you guys a little bit. I'm going to go into the details that I feel the most comfortable with sharing, and there are so many episodes I could do about this because it's such a complex mental illness and something that everyone, I feel like has not to extreme lengths. But some people and a lot of people I know have dabbled with body image issues or eating issues, or self doubt and low confidence issues. So I think it's
a really important topic to talk about. But I want to quickly make sure that you guys aren't taking my word as a bible and not thinking that that's the way to do it or that's the way to have it. Like I'm speaking from experience, not from a medical professional. If you are really really struggling and this is a really hard topic to listen to, please don't listen to it. I'm not asking you to sit through and put yourself through hell and listen to my experience when you're going
through your own journey. There are so many episodes that you can listen to that are way more positive than this. And if you are really struggling, please contact professional and someone who actually really knows what they're talking about and not speaking from their experience and can speak from an educational standpoint that can actually help you recover. And there will also be a whole heap of resources and links in the show notes for you girls to reach out with.
Maybe you can this will inspire you to have a chat with your parents or seek help from your boyfriend or someone close to you, that you guys can go on this journey together and live life and enjoy life. But yeah, I think let's just get straight into my story. So, yeah,
a bit of backstory. I'm twenty two years old. I think some people think I'm a little bit older than that, but no, I'm twenty two and I was diagnosed with anorexia novosa at the age of seventeen, when I was in year twelve, so that was twenty twenty and it's been a journey ever since. But I don't think it really started there. My whole life, I grew up really really healthy. I loved being active and I loved playing sports. I grew up in a really healthy, active household, which
was amazing. And I also quickly want to preface that my family and everyone around me have always been an amazing sort system. They'd be my number one supporter shouting me from the sidelines, and it's not any of their fault. Again, I'm speaking from experience and how I've processed things in my life, and that is never my family's fault, and my family are amazing people. But I did grow up in quite a tumultuous household. There was a lot of things going on in my family that I will never
speak about. But because of that, my eating disorder was a play on effect of me feeling like I didn't have any control over other people's actions and other things that were going on in my life. So it kind of developed into me having orthorexia, which is an extreme obsession with healthy eating and exercise. I was just obsessed with it. I was a playing state hockey at the time. I was playing for so many hockey teams. I loved it. I was really active, but there was a click one
day where my love for it became an addiction. And eating and food and controlling those things is actually an addiction that you have to break. And that's why I sometimes recovery it seems so impossible, because you're addicted to the feeling, and you're addicted to that voice and that validation that that voice is giving you. And yeah, because
twenty twenty happened, obviously, COVID happened. I think that really then highlighted that because I had nothing else to do, I was stripped from all my workout classes, I was stripped from my hockey team and all of those things that made me me suddenly left and I was only then responsible for me and growing up and everything like that. I'm the third child to my parents kind of always told me how resilient I was, and I never really
knew how to open up to people. I was quite a broken kid in the way of like, I didn't know how to speak about my feelings. I had had bad experiences with psychologists, breaking confidentiality and everything like that, so I kept a lot to myself and I just kind of took it to an extreme. I'm not going to go into details about it because it's not that important to the story, but I pretty much just went down a big rabbit hole in COVID and got very
very ill, very quickly. Because I wasn't leaving my house, I wasn't allowed to do anything, and my brother actually was the one who noticed it and brought it up to my parents because my parents were so busy working and everything like that, and pretty much I just crashed and I was really really sick. And I was had turned eighteen at that time, so I was an adult, so I wasn't forced to do anything. And again, this
is where my strong minded headspace comes from. That I refuse to have a problem, and I think their best. I think I get asked a lot of questions about how do you help people that are around you with disordered eating and that mental illness, because it actually is a mental illness. And sometimes people think they only care about what they look like and that's what they're doing.
It's actually not. It's a lack of control that someone's trying to control in their life, and it could be about a million other things besides food, and majority of the time people with an eating disorder are actually obsessed with food. They actually love it way more than of the person. But it's a control thing for them, and that's what mine was. And I was going to these doctors appointments, and I was voluntarily going to those doctor's appointments, so I was making sure that I was like still
okay enough to go through life. And there was obviously boundaries and everything that I had in place that I was able to do. But I could barely walk upstairs. Guys like I was really not well, and I didn't really notice it until I then discovered that I had a problem. And I think that's like the biggest turning point. And girls will that haven't gone through recovery is like you one day and you will know where you have taken this too far and your life is horrible. My
life is miserable. I could barely stay awake. I was sleeping because I all I wanted to do was sleep off the days. I wouldn't leave my house, I wouldn't go to social events. I wasn't enjoying life because all of those things came around and what my eating disordered mind deemed as bad and deemed as anxious and everything like that, which is not. They're the joys of life
and they're the best things ever. And it wasn't until I met my boy ex boyfriend Caleb and honestly like, yeah, we're not together now and everything like that, but I wholeheartedly will give him my life because he saved my life and he taught me that food is not There is no such thing as good or bad food. Everything is amazing in moderation and seeing someone with such food freedom, like he felt like a burger. He just went and
ate a burger. He didn't think about it, and he felt like ice cream after DESRT he just went and got an ice cream. And I was so freeing because I was like, oh my god, you haven't thought about that for like six hours. You haven't like calculated your whole day. You just felt like an ice cream and you went and ate it. And he was like yep. And I was like, oh, like that's kind of good. And then he would be like, why why didn't you try it? You do that? And then I was like, oh, yeah,
like I guess it wouldn't be that bad. And guess what, it wasn't that bad, Like I think, once you really dumb it down, it's not that bad. It's not gonna fucking kill you. And I don't want to talk about logistics about it because I think that could scare people about it. But I tell you right now, it is so fucking hard to gain weight that one ice cream is not going to kill you. One burger is not going to kill you. Putting rice in your dinner is not going to kill you. Like, none of those things
are gonna kill you. And if anything, they're gonna fucking save you. And they saved me. They literally brought me life back. They made me a human again, and I got color in my face, I started to look more like a woman. And obviously it's really scary with all of those changes, but I think I'm living proof of my life got so much better after I I chose recovery.
And yeah, it's not linear, and you do battle with those thoughts for the rest of your life, but it's earning those tools to not live and then not give into those negative thoughts, and that's what you do with a nutritionist. I worked alongside a nutritionist and a psychologist. But the people that really saved me with the people that I opened up to and told that I had a problem, because for a long time I kept it
a secret and it wasn't worth it. Like I ended up giving into that and was like, yep, like, guys, I really need help here. And everyone would sit around the table and everyone would not talk about oh, that's so bad for me or anything like those words were off limits and they weren't allowed to say that. It's like, we're having passive dinner passes, so young, let's eat pasta. And I think the changing the language around food is
really really important. And having support networks and telling people that you need extra help is proving to you and proving to others that you're actually way stronger than what you think you are and asking people for help is okay, and that's what I would do. I'd be like, look, I really need to eat lunch today, and I probably will put it off unless I tell someone that I need to eat lunch day. So I'm telling everyone around me that I'm spending the day with you've got to
make sure I eat lunch. And everyone was like, all right, got it, perfect, It's lunchtime, Sam eat lunch. Because I've told everyone I felt like I had. Everyone had to hold me accountable and everyone had to make me eat lunch. And then because you're around people, you're not thinking about it and you just eat the lunch. And those little things I think were the best tools for me to get my life back. Actually, and since that, my life has become so much better. Like I travel, I do
all of these things. I enjoy nice food, I love drinking with my friends and all of that stuff I never did when I was really really struggling. And now I'm on my own journey. Now I've you toy back and forth, like you go through hard times, and I think sometimes it's really easy to fall back into those old patterns, and I can tell in myself how strong I've become over those years to never give into those thoughts anymore. And now I'm like a healthy adult and
I could. I always used to look at those people who chose recovery, being like, I don't know how the fuck you've ever did that. When I was in the root of it, I was like, that fucking cheek is fucking amazing and how I don't know how she got there, and I'll never get there one day. I always thought I was never going to be that girl, But I'm living proof right now because I'm clearly speaking about it. And once you gain that control back in your life,
you were literally capable of everything. That is the hardest thing I've ever had to overcome in my life. And now it's not a thought in my everyday life. It's not something that controls me. I now can go to the gym, and I enjoy going to the gym. I'm not using it as a punishment. I'm not eating anything because I can't have it and stuff like that. Like I love eating healthy, I love eating whole foods. I love doing things and nourishing my body that make me
feel good. But fuck me, if there's bol of fries there, I'm gonna fucking eat the bowl of fries. And I never used to do that. I never used to do any of those type of things. And I think now as a twenty two year old looking back at the eighteen year old, seventeen year old, nineteen year old, all the way up till I was about twenty years old, I just want to give my old self a hug
and tell myself that it's going to be okay. And I think, if you're young and you're really struggling right now, I want to give you a hug and tell you that it's going to be okay. But the only person that needs to convince themselves it's going to be okay is yourself. And that food is not the enemy. And food is a joy of life, and food is purely a vessel for you to live. And if you want to live and have experiences and enjoy life for everything
that it has, you need eat food. I saw a psychiatrist once when I was going through that whole journey, and she literally said to me, and I think this is like one of the biggest turning points. She said, I diagnose people. I work with people with schizophrenia, I work with people with all of these mental illnesses, and I can medicate them to help them and to get them, help them get their life back on track. Do you know what your medicine is, Sam? And I was like, well,
what is my medicine? Like rolling my eyes like this bitches like honestly not going to help me because I was so stuck in it. And she was like walking into Woolies, grabbing a fucking basket and putting food in your basket and then eating it. That's your medicine. And I can't convince you to do that. I can't convince
you to swallow a burger, but that's your medicine. I cannot give you a tablet or a prescription that's going to fix what you're going through because the only person that's going to fix that is you walking into the supermarket and you buying yourself food. That is your medicine. But yeah, obviously this is kind of like the first
part of me talking about it. I think for so many years I didn't want to talk about it, and I didn't want to open that can of worms because I wasn't truly ready to let that part of my life be on the internet. I kind of talked about it a little bit the other day on TikTok. But I don't want those huge comments. I want to be able to talk about it in the space that I'm comfortable with without other people telling me I'm doing something
wrong or telling me I'm not doing it enough. For all of those things, recovery is individual and there's no right or wrong way to do it. There's obviously a line to follow along, but everyone's got to do it in their own way. And I think this is the next step almost in my recovery, is creating a community around that and talking about those things to help hopefully help other girls to choose the right path. And yeah, that's where I'm at in it all. Obviously, not a psychologist,
I'm not a genius. I'm just speaking from experience, But yeah, I think that's I'm at, finally at a point where I'm ready to accept that that was a part of me, but I no longer identify as that. And for a long time I still kind of identified it as it, and I wasn't completely over it or at a good enough point in my life to speak about it. But I've been an amazing, massive journey. I had to give up uni I had and that's how I fell into
social media and then having my life on social media. Obviously, you have people commenting about how you look every single day. But I think this is a time where I'm ready to be open with you guys in such an important subject that I'm ready to talk about in certain times. So if you guys want to hear certain other things about it, or if you want other people to talk about it, if you want people to come on the podcast and talk about it and we can unpack and
find some solutions, please message me. My dms are always open. I will read them all. But yeah, that's a little bit of my story about my eating disorder. She's a fucking bitch, actually, and I fucking hate her, but she's long gone. She's an enemy and she's I've delisted her from my life. But yeah, I love you, guys, And if you are really struggling, please go to the show notes below and reach out speak to your mom and dad. I know it's a really, really tough conversation, but tough
conversations always have good outcomes majority of the time. So yeah, I love you. Turned to Segesta papers a banana patasana papers a