Obsessed with Being Perfect

by Spring
(Salt Lake City, UT, USA)

I was obsessed with being perfect. My eating disorder began when I started college as a modern dance major. Prior to college I did not worry about my weight and would have to say that I was at a healthy weight. In college, most of my day was spent dancing in front of a mirror wearing a leotard and tights, which revealed any fat on my body. I started to compare my body to the very lean and thin dancers next to me who seemed to have about 5% body fat and, in my opinion, looked really good.

In my nutrition class my body fat and weight was measured. I am 5’6” and my weight at the time was about 120 and my body fat was about 22%. My instructor informed me that for a dancer, these results were too high and that I needed to bring my weight and body fat down.

I became obsessed with monitoring all the calories I was taking in, and I started exercising obsessively. My calorie intake got as low as 800 a day and I would do at least an hour of cardio a day. I became more concerned with how I looked on the outside than how I was feeling on the inside.

Quickly I went from 120 pounds to 101 with about 5% body fat. To me I looked good, but could lose a little more weight so that I looked better in my leotard.

Fortunately, my dance instructors and friends started to notice and comment on my rapid weight loss, and they confronted me on the issue. I denied it at first, but after feeling totally exhausted and depleting myself of the joy of living a healthy life, day by day I learned how to take care of myself, view myself as a healthy beautiful person and except and love myself for who and how I am.