I've just started working on my 250. I went out on a limb and decided to write about something very personal and completely unrelated to law school/education/career/interests.
This is only my first draft, so give me all your critiques (including telling me to scrap it completely and write about something else).
Thanks in advance.“Just one more minute,” I told myself. Sixty seconds later, “c’mon, you can do one more.” Forty-five minutes later, dripping in sweat and muscles burning, I stumbled off the elliptical machine, looking proudly at my wrist to see the number displayed on my heart rate monitor: 550. Five hundred and fifty more calories I was allowed to eat that day.
Living with an eating disorder is rarely obvious. Case in point: I have never been skeletally thin, starved myself or forced myself to purge. However, I have spent the greater part of three years meticulously tracking every gram of food and ounce of liquid entering my body and recording every calorie burned.
I thought this was what was required to be fit, healthy, and thin. What I didn’t realize was that I would lose myself in the process: turning down plans with friends for fear of not having access to “healthy options” and consistently choosing calories burned over memories made. I obsessed more about how I looked than what kind of character I was developing.
I’m recovering now. I haven’t tracked a single meal for over four months, and I exercise for fun, not punishment. However, disordered thoughts are hard to shake. Recognizing that sometimes my body needs sleep more than an intense workout causes me anxiety. Taking bites unassociated with a caloric number is a struggle. I won’t stop working toward recovery, though. Regaining normalcy, and with it my life, is worth the effort.