It was the summer after my senior year of high school and out of nowhere I felt like I was going to vomit whenever I tried to eat. After a multitude of tests, including swallowing barium to see if there was something anatomically wrong with my digestive track, my pediatrician suggested perhaps it was psychological. You don’t say… For context, around this time I was getting ready to leave home for college, my boyfriend had broken up with me (we’d been together for an entire three months – but he’d told me he loved me!), and a friend’s mother had died. Anxiety had made an elaborate drag-queen-esque entrance into my life and left the door open for other mental health conditions to follow behind her.

At some point, before my pediatrician’s revelation, I had recognized that I was able to eat again but I liked the feeling of control, so I didn’t tell my concerned parents and continued to not eat under the guise of nausea. I was a late-bloomer, and even at 18, still had a thin girlish body with few curves to speak of. I was under no misconception that I was fat, but I liked feeling that I had control of something. And in the height of TRL, Slim Fast, and the Victoria’s Secret Angels, the concept of “too thin” didn’t seem to exist. Until my doctor told me that she would advise my parents to keep me home from college if I didn’t start eating again.

I made a miraculous recovery.

For a year or two I was fine, being away at college gave me the control over my life I yearned for – or the illusion of it anyway as I was still at the end of a very long leash held by my parents. That is until I started dating a new boyfriend: a tall and muscley baseball player. Most of the baseball girlfriends fit a certain mold: Traditionally beautiful, perfectly plucked and painted, and incredibly thin. You could just tell they had been the popular girls in high school, and I had, well, not been.

The new boyfriend said, “You should hang out more with the other girlfriends more.”

What I heard was, “I wish you looked more like them.”

It started innocently enough, I vowed to eat healthier – but that quickly turned into counting calories. Consuming less than 1,000 calories a day or less was the goal. Then the relationship with the boyfriend grew less healthy as he became more controlling and my anxiety peaked. I clung to the control I’d found comfort in years before. I started going to the gym twice a day, I lowered my calorie allowance and added diet pills. On occasion, I would lose that control only to binge everything in sight. Luckily for me, or so I thought at the time, I worked for the University’s accounting office where one of my responsibilities was physically accounting for all equipment purchased by university departments over a certain dollar amount. This meant I got to know the campus and all of its less used bathrooms quite well. Counting calories soon became binging and purging in hidden bathrooms.

That is until I nearly passed out at the gym and again while shopping at the mall. My boyfriend threatened to call my parents, who I knew would yank me home on that long leash. So I vowed to do better, eat more and vomit less.

And I did. For the most part. However, it wasn’t until the relationship with that boyfriend ended my senior year of college that I was truly able to overcome the full hold of my eating disorder. Unfortunately, the negative body image and damage to my hip joints has lingered. I haven’t spoken much about this because my story is a dime a dozen. But it is still something I battle and partly why I feel compelled to bring it up now.

The pressure to work out and eat healthy sounds a lot to me like my college boyfriend telling me to be friends with the cool girls. The difference of course being that being active and eating right will hopefully lead to a longer and healthier life – which I should want. I do want! What I have trouble with is separating healthy from thin, and body positive from fat. It’s all a slippery slope for me: eating healthier leads to counting calories, working out turns to obsessively checking the scale for progress.

I inherently know good foods from bad foods, and that healthy should be about how I feel, not a number on a scale – but the should’s are the heart of the struggle. And between new year’s resolutions, Miguel and I’s trip to Mexico at the end of the month, and my upcoming author headshot photoshoot, my body has been on my mind a little more than usual.

Outwardly I try and say that I am ok with the body I have now. That it has been through a lot, and I will get back “into shape” or not, whenever the time feels right, that my curves are beautiful and all that other body positive stuff I read. It truly is a good body and has served me well! It also just happens to be four sizes and 40 pounds heavier than I was when I got married. A fact I’m unable to ignore every time I look at myself in a swimsuit and think how horrified 20, 30, even 35-year-old Kelly would be at the reflection staring back at her. But I’m not those women anymore - life’s given me a strong dose of perspective since then. I’m also now in a relationship with a man who loves me and whatever body I come in.

I don’t have the answers, and not to worry, I’m not at risk of hunting down secluded bathrooms anytime soon. I just felt like being honest about this struggle because I figured if I’m going through it, then some of you probably are as well. These thoughts are nagging and annoying and they suck and until I figure out how to make it not suck I figure we can let it suck together.

Image description: Kelly at 20 years old, looking very thin with waist length hair sitting on the floor staring at the camera with a blank face in a white tank top and short plaid skirt.