Recovery is hard work, but for a lot of people recovery during the holidays is even more hard. Recovery is your own journey but it’s unfortunate when the people around you could possibly disturb that journey. For me, holidays are hard because I’m not very much of a family person. My family doesn’t really understand mental illness and they certainly don’t understand what it’s like living with an eating disorder. They don’t understand how sitting around a huge table surrounded by food is actually one of the most anxiety provoking things for me, but I have to pretend that everything is fine. They don’t understand that when I say “I’m okay” or “no I’m full”, I mean that, and I just want you to leave me alone. Maybe it’s a family thing but it feels like holidays are forever based around food.
Not even with just eating disorders but with any mental illness, holidays are hard. Imagine being an alcoholic surrounded by your family and friends drinking, your family of possible addicts talking about their drug habit or sharing stories of their recovery. This can be a good or bad thing depending on where you’re at. Ultimately, holidays can make or break you, leave you feeling loved or full or leaving you feeling more alone than ever.
This holiday season, be grateful that you are still here. Be grateful that you’ve made it this far and that you’re continuing no matter how hard it may be. Be grateful that you’re you, and whether or not it’s believable, that is enough

It’s crazy to think back to the time in my life where every thing was dictated by a little voice in my head. Don’t get me wrong, the little voice in my head still tries to scream at me and make itself known, only after years I’m able to push it back. Some days, it still does have the upper hand and I fall back into that person I used to be, but other days I push through as if the voice was never there at all. ​

My sophomore year of college, when I was 19 going on 20, I developed anorexia. Anorexia was my best friend, we were two peas in a pod. I would obsess over what I was going to eat that day, planning my meals the second I woke up and making sure that nothing would get in my way. I would go to the gym to “allow” myself to eat dinner that night, I wouldn’t eat all day if I knew I was drinking, I would make excuses as to why I wasn’t going out with friends if they were doing anything that involved food. Get a bad grade? Starve. Eat “more” than you should? Starve the next day. Have a fight with a friend? Starve. ED had more rules than Regina George in mean girls did. I was convinced I was happy, I was convinced that everything in my life was so well put together. Though reality was I was falling apart. I stopped caring whether or not this illness would kill me, the idea almost gave me peace. When I looked in the mirror I just couldn’t see what everybody else saw, and to this day that still hasn’t changed unfortunately, but it has become better than it was. I would use my phone calculator to make sure everyday that I didn’t eat 500 calories or less. At the time, that was everything to me. That seemed, normal, to me. Now as I sit here writing that I could almost burst out laughing at how psychotic that sounds 3 years later. 

I started seeing doctors more frequently because everyone was getting concerned about me, everyone but me that was. My childhood doctor was the one that finally got me to take a look at my life and realize that I needed to change. He told me that because he was a man he was aware that he couldn’t understand what goes through a teenage girls mind, and that he could only tell me that if I didn’t receive help I would suffer more crucial consequences, hospitalization or even death. Multiple people told me that; other doctors, family, friends, but it wasn’t until somebody admitted that they didn’t understand, that they didn’t blame me for being sick, did I realize that I had a problem. For so long I was fighting myself, lacking self love, because it was the only coping method I knew. 

June 23rd 2014: the day that my life started over. Today I have been in recovery for 3 years. Of course I have my bad days, in recovery it may seem like there are more of those than good ones, but every day you wake up and tell yourself you got this. You can get up and eat that bagel for breakfast, you can go to brunch and eat chocolate chip pancakes, go out to dinner with your friends and have dessert. Life is too short to spend it listening to a make believe rule book in your head. Slowly but surely I am learning to separate my voice from EDs voice, it’s difficult I know, but it’s not impossible. Fight yourself for yourself.

I would like to preface this article with my congratulations to Cosmopolitan Magazine for going outside the exhausted fashion or beauty editorial and bringing forth a truly relatable exposé on the troubles of an eating disorder. I related strongly with the author in that marijuana is a powerful tool towards alleviating stress and there is an abundance of research that proves it can help to treat a variety of mental and physical illnesses. The article goes into detail to explain that many who suffer from anorexia use marijuana as a way to ease anxiety and nausea while in recovery, as the ‘munchies’ allow for the user to consume food in order to return to a healthy weight. The author explains that marijuana allows those treating anorexia to form a new relationship with food and that many have found great success with this method of coping with their disease. And while I agree whole-heartedly that marijuana is a viable option to relieve anxiety, I strongly side with Gina Bongiorno, a therapist out of the University of California San Diego Eating Disorders Treatment program, who states ‘If someone has to rely on marijuana to reduce their anxiety and get through a meal, then they are never learning how to regulate their emotions and lose the opportunity to heal their primary issues’. 

As someone who has dealt with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder for eight years, I know very well that there is no magic pill or in this case magic plant that can cure a mental illness. Sure medication, exercise, and even marijuana can aid in treating my anxiety yet these things don’t kill the demons in my head. Because when the pills run out, the workout is over, and the weed high wears off, I still have the weight of my depression pressing down on my chest. I still have the same insecurities, the same worries of not being good enough, and the heavy sadness that melts my mood like a candle just because. Marijuana and medication are ways to treat the physical aspects of mental illnesses, yet in order to fully improve upon your happiness; you need to focus on treating your thoughts and your feelings. Marijuana may bring on the munchies and help you to put on weight, but it doesn’t eliminate thoughts of hatred towards your own body. Suffering from anorexia is so much more than just the physical and it makes sense that it can’t be treated just by a physical treatment such as a pill or a high. It is vital to someone with a mental disorder to step back from everything else in the world and work on healing the walls of hate and anxiety that they have built up over years of having depression because the only way that we can get better is through self-love. And while that may sound cheesy as hell, I don’t simply mean just saying ‘I am beautiful’ to a mirror everyday. Learning to love yourself takes years of practice and like mental illnesses, there is no quick cure to self-acceptance. It takes time and patience to get to a place of internal peace but the journey towards self-acceptance and body positivity is perhaps the closest way to a cure. 

Because while marijuana, medication, and therapy may like to simplify mental illness to a happy pill or a twelve-step program, there is no cure. Mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression are diseases that a person is born with and will likely deal with the rest of their life. But by fighting the demons within head on through the disentanglement of ones deepest emotions and thoughts, do we start to notice positive change towards a happier and healthier individual. 

We live in a world where we are hyper obsessed with our looks. From dieting, to makeup, to fashion, to tattoos and piercings, there are hundreds of industries out there telling us how we should appear. At the same time, the media is also telling us how we should love. Movies and television ooze beautiful actors selling romance and sex, and as biological creatures with needs of intimacy, we crave the same kind of platonic and carnal pleasure. But what if there’s more of a correlation than we think between how we come off to the world and who we choose to love.

It’s no shock that every human on this planet has his or her ideal physical type. Even blind people have a way of know what their body yearns for without even needing to see the person standing in front of them. Some like it short, others like big girls, a fair few many even have a thing for tattoos. And we’re told it’s completely natural to like what we like. Having a type can be seen as a product of a simple biology, where one mate looks for traits in a mate that indicate good health, only now it is our brains way of saying that person is someone I want to get to know better. And while these feelings are all and good, the way someone looks shouldn’t be the end factor in whether or not we fall in love with them. Interests, personality, goals, and their past outweighs looks hands down on paper, yet when it comes down to facts it is someone’s appearance that often makes the first impression. Yet could this aspect of our seemingly ‘unconscious’ biology be holding us back? 

 You’ll never see the Victoria’s Secret model with the Dungeons and Dragons player that is unless the Dungeons and Drags guy looks like Ryan Gosling. No matter how much someone will tell you that your looks don’t matter, they are the first things that someone notices about you and they can immediately write you off in their minds. Why else does it make sense that so many popular ‘pretty’ girls are so mean? It’s because no one in their lives has ever told them no and their looks have put them in good graces? This by no means implies that ever pretty girl is mean and there certainly are some less attractive girls with ugly attitudes, but let’s play it by ‘stereotypes’ for a second. As animals our most reactionary sense is sight and it can be said as evolved human beings that our most powerfully uncontrollable emotion is love, thus it is easy to evaluate that the immediate visual attraction we feel for another human is much more deep rooted than the skip of a heartbeat. 

So if we are visual creatures with inherent ambitions of reproduction on the brain, how does finding a love partner come in to play? Is it possible for a person who swears that they only date larger woman to fall for a hundred pound girl even if on the inside they are entirely compatible? Of course cases like this occur every day with personality ruling over looks (not including those who marry for money), but it’s hard to see an immediate reversal of what our brain finds attractive at first glance. Can we truly get past looks in order to find love?

The latest body-obsession circulating social media is known as Dad-Bod, a figure worn by the likes of Leonardo Dicaprico. And while body positivity and loving yourself at any size is all and good, it is hard not to see the ridiculous double standard right in front of our eyes. 

It’s no secret that the media has it’s definition of the way that women should look, we see it every day from the models that grace the pages of magazines to the actresses that star on the silver screen. And because we see these beautiful, thin, and put together women 24/7, it becomes engrained in our heads that we too should uphold our looks to the same standard. From dieting to fashion to beauty, we are told every day that this is the way a woman should look. Sure the body positivity movement is making incredible strides with models like Tess Munster changing the standards of beauty in the modeling industry and actresses like Lena Dunham proving that you can be funny at any size, but acceptance isn’t coming as quickly as we would like. 

Of course men of every body type deserve to be recognized in the media, yet the most upsetting aspect of the Dad-Bod trend is the double standard is represents. When a man like Leo posts a photo of his less than toned physique, he is praised and labeled as sexy. But when a female celebrity wears a bit more weight, she is called out on it immediately, even if the celebrity is a mother! How is it fair that dads like Leo get praised for having a flabby physique but celebrity mothers are expected to bounce right back after pregnancy? While Dad-Bod may be a step for frat-guys with beer belly’s to get away with having a bulge, it is safe to say that the women who are shamed into not wearing a bikini for having any type of belly and the woman who put in extra work at the gym to feel like they are "allowed" to wear a bikini aren’t having any of it.