Megan Jayne Crabbe is finally free from obsessing about every calorie she consumes.
But while celebrating her healthy new outlook, she learned an ugly truth: some people think she should have stayed anorexic.
According to The Daily Mail, 24-year-old Megan was first diagnosed with anorexia nervosa when she was only 14 years old. For years, the young woman from Essex, UK, struggled with weight and body image, at one point even dropping to 62 pounds.
In a post on Instagram, Megan described how her disorder nearly killed her:
“Lately I’ve been wondering how I made it out alive. Because really, I shouldn’t be here. [Seven] years ago I was lying in a hospital bed and my parents were being told that I might not make it through the night. [Six] years ago I was binging until I was sick. [Four] years ago I was working out every day until the room started spinning and everything went black. When starvation wasn’t enough there were laxatives and diet pills, ANYTHING to make me smaller. Anything to make me more perfect.”
As her story demonstrates, knowing she had to eat in order to survive helped Megan gain weight, but it didn’t help her escape her eating disorder.
As she wrote on Instagram, eating led to binging, then to self-loathing and purging in the form of exercise:
“There were only two options left: gain weight, or die. So I gained weight. More and more. Anorexia morphed into binge eating disorder and within a year I’d gone from 65 lbs lying on my death bed to 180 lbs, right back to self-loathing and wanting to lose weight more than anything in the world.”
Megan was so consumed with her weight that she described it as believing her “life would end over a few pounds.” Even though she seemed healthy and was no longer dangerously thin, everything still revolved around the number on the scale.
On the outside, Megan may have had a body that others would envy, but on the inside, she was deeply unhappy.
That’s when she had an epiphany. Megan wrote:
“I realized that no weight loss had ever made me happy. No amount of disappeared pounds had made me stop hating my body. And chasing thinness had made me lose much more than weight — I’d lost myself.”
Since then, Megan has dropped her obsession with weight and exercise, instead choosing to champion body positivity. And to illustrate that happiness has nothing to do with weight, she posted photos of herself with anorexia versus now.