Video Transcription

Bella’s experience of an eating disorder | #AnEDLooksLikeMe

Hi, I’m Bella, and an eating disorder looks like me. Anyone can have an eating disorder, no matter how old or young they might be. I don’t think that’s something people get or understand or think so.

It started when I was about 17. It’s because I felt like everything in my life was out of control, and this was the one thing I felt like I could control. I think people think that it’s something that you choose to do, but they don’t understand that it’s like a psychological illness that’s controlling you. It’s so hard to break; it almost feels impossible in the moment.

I literally had friends here saying, “You look so great! Oh, you’ve lost weight, you look amazing!” I was extremely unwell, but this validation made me feel so good. But then for my age, it wasn’t enough. It was like, “No, you can look better.” I thought it had to be extreme, like you had to look completely different to have one. So, I was like, “No, I don’t have that. There’s no way.”

Then I was just googling one night all this stuff that was happening to my body. I was like, “Is this normal?” because I lost my period and my hair started to fall out. After I was googling these things, there was like symptoms of an eating disorder, and then I saw that the Butterfly Foundation was the first thing that came up in Australia. I was just reading the post and reading people’s stories, and I was like, “Wow, I can relate to that.”

I felt like my body started to change a lot in lockdown. I stopped, you know, dieting, and through that change, I became way more accepting because I was like, “Wow, maybe this is the size my body was always meant to be.”

I don’t want anyone to be at war with their body, but I want people to know that it’s okay to accept their body just as they are. Society’s always told us, “Oh, it’s vain to love ourselves,” but it’s so, so untrue. We deserve to love ourselves. You need support. You’re worthy of it, you’re deserving of it, and you should seek it.

The Butterfly Foundation helped me recover, but they can’t do it alone. They need people like you to help them, so other people like me can recover.

Video by Butterfly Foundation