New to 3FC
Hi my name is Pam. I am 18 years old and from CT. I have been struggling with weight loss and weight gain since I was 12 years old. I first went on weight watchers at the request of my mom the summer before 7th grade. I lost some weight but I was always hungry. I ended up gaining the weight back and spent most of that year miserable and uncomfortable in my own body. During 8th grade I started restricting my calories more and lost about 35 pounds to get to 140. By 9th grade I had gained 10 pounds back again. I started playing volleyball for my high school that year and maintained a weight from about 145-155 pounds. I still felt extremely uncomfortable and disgusting in my body. I had been experimenting with bingeing and purging and restricting since 7th grade but my junior year it came to a peak. I spent the entire summer before bingeing late at night in my room and then purging everything up. Once school started I had decided that I had had enough of the binge/purge cycle and landed myself in the land of restricting and over-exercising. I started restricting my calories to under 1000 a day then under 800, then 500, then 200. I was playing volleyball for hours after school as a starter for both the JV and Varsity teams. My class load was extremely heavy and I would stay up all night, alternating between doing homework and sneaking out of my house to run several miles. I barely got any sleep and functioned on a cocktail of caffeine pills, diet pills, and coffee. My weight dropped to less than 115- nearly underweight for my height around January. At the time I was very entrenched in my eating disorder but I received a wake up call when a teacher pulled me out of the hall at school and declared I looked dead. I slowly began to increase my calories, convinced that I could gain the weight on my own, which I did. But this increase in calories led to me feeling overwhelmed with food. I started bingeing and purging again secretly at night after spending all day running from food I would gorge myself on large quantities of food in the privacy of my bedroom. I was still depressed and unhappy but I gained about 15 pounds from this constant cycle of bingeing and purging. I was still barely getting any sleep at night and I was falling asleep in my classes. I dropped from being a straight A student and on the path to be Salutatorian of my senior class to the kid who was skipping exams because she was taking too many laxatives and couldn't sit for more than 5 minutes without running to the bathroom. My grades dropped to a steady line of B's with my homework grades the only thing keeping my averages alive. I was failing tests because my memory and concentration was so poor and I was too sleep deprived and focused on my body to care.
In March of 2008 a girl in my grade went to a teacher and told her I was taking diet pills. The teacher confronted me and I broke down, telling her everything from the diet pills to the lack of sleep to the cuts I was making on my own arms and legs. She gave me three days to tell my parents but never gave me the chance to tell them. I spent a week erasing messages from the voicemail and not sleeping at all. When my parents finally found out they consulted a few specialists in the field. The first one who got back to us spoke with me on the phone and declared that I needed residential treatment immediately. So four days later, off I went to a residential treatment facility in Mass. I spent 5 weeks there, came home, relapsed immediately, ended up in the hospital, then psych ward, then back to residential. I spent from March to July there and left prematurely because I was determined to go to volleyball camps. I went to the volleyball camps, did the outpatient work, and returned to school in the fall for my senior year where I immediately went back to restricting and over-exercising. After leaving residential, my weight had gone up to 145 and by the beginning of school I was 150. I felt terrible. The last time most people had seen me, I was a frail, bony bundle of nerves, but somehow managing to pull everything together. I ended up going back to residential for another month after landing in the hospital from dehydration and got out in early November. From November to January I did an Intensive Outpatient Program which prevented me from going back to school and pushed me further behind in all my classes. I was discharged in January to twice a week therapy, weekly nutritionist appointments, and a biweekly appoint with my doctor to ensure my blood pressure and pulse were not too low. Since then I have gained weight and have now been maintaining at about 160-165. I feel absolutely miserable in my body and somedays long to go back to my days of eating less than 200 calories and exercising like crazy. But rationally, I don't want to go back to that place and I would really like to lose weight and get healthy. The problem is, my metabolism has been so messed up from years of bingeing and purging and restricting and exercising that I cant eat 1200 calories and lose weight- I actually gain weight on 1200 calories.
I am sorry that this has been such a long post and seriously if you read it all, you are my hero. I just really felt the need to get my story out there. This past year especially has been such an emotional wreck for me that I really want to get back a normal life and I want to feel good about my body.
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I'm so glad you're here with us now. I first would say you should really look into a dietition about your calorie intake per day. You're right, 1200 calories for me, or anyone else is...very low. However, for your body it seems it's super high. I honestly have never talked to anyone in your situation! That's not a bad thing though! I promise 
