Eat the Pizza

I love pizza. It’s probably my favourite food in the entire world. I remember when I was deep in my eating disorder I was in my second year of university. I remember when I would be with my friends after a night of drinking and everyone would decide to order pizza. I would be paralyzed. My ED would say to me,

“Don’t eat it. They’re watching. They already think you’re fat. Do not eat the pizza.”

So I would sit there, wanting nothing more than to just have a slice of pizza, but I wouldn’t. I would make excuses to my friends about why I wasn’t indulging with them; things like I’d had too much to drink and I didn’t feel well, or I had pizza recently and didn’t feel like having any, things like that.

The thing that doesn’t make sense is that when I was alone in my dorm on a regular old weekday, my ED would push me to order myself a large pizza, eat the whole thing solely with the intention of purging. My ED would convince me that because I was alone, no one was there to judge me, and it was perfectly okay to order a large pizza to myself. But then the more I would eat, the more my ED would guilt me into purging. I remember one night I had eaten way too much pizza, and felt disgusting. But I also remember I did not want to purge, so I took a shower. My ED was so loud and it screamed at me,

“You’re disgusting. How can you stand to look at yourself in the shower?
Look at your stomach. Look at your thighs. No one will ever love you like this.”

I purged in the shower. I was crying my eyes out and I felt so alone. I wish I could say that this was my rock bottom moment, but it wasn’t. As my disorder continued and progressed, I felt like I was letting my life pass me by, because it was. I was missing out on things that I loved, on doing things with my friends, on wearing certain things, I would literally avoid leaving my apartment on days where my body image was too low to fathom being seen in public.

I remember thinking my ED was my friend. I thought that it had my best interests at heart, so it definitely wouldn’t lie to me about people judging me for eating pizza. It wouldn’t convince me to stay in my apartment if I really shouldn’t be staying in. But I was so wrong. Now that I am in recovery, I can see that there was nothing friendly about my eating disorder. Bulimia was not the friend I thought it was. It wanted to kill me and it most definitely did not have my best interests at heart. I wish I knew then what I knew now, but alas, hindsight is 20/20.

So, the lesson here is that, a friend will never tell you to not eat things you love. A friend will always let you do what feels right for you. A friend will let you be you. Moral of the story: Always eat the pizza.