You need to read this Instagram blogger’s inspiring message about eating disorder recovery
“Lately, I’ve been wondering how I made it out alive.”
That’s how Megan Jayne Crabbe began a touching Instagram post about what it takes to recover from an eating disorder.
Crabbe, a body-positive Instagram blogger who goes by bodyposipanda, paired the harrowing tale with a before/after photo unlike most you see on the social media site:
In the “before” photo, Crabbe is shrunken, tiny, and frail. In the “after,” she is vibrant, grinning from ear to ear, with a healthy layer of fat all over her body.
"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," Crabbe recounted. "When starvation wasn't enough there were laxatives and diet pills, ANYTHING to make me smaller. Anything to make me more perfect."
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Crabbe followed up the memory with an incredibly important statement: That feelings of self-hatred and body negativity can happen at any size, and are no less real and valid than anyone else’s.
"I don't want you to think that you have to look like the picture on the left for your struggles to be valid - you don't. Your struggles are so, so valid at any size," Crabbe wrote.
Crabbe has devoted her Instagram page – and her life – to sharing messages of hope and love with other women struggling to exist in a world that punishes bodies that don’t fit in single-digit sizes. Crabbe learned first hand what societal pressure to be thin can do to a human body and mind. Now, she’s on a mission to help women find the self-acceptance that saved her life.
"If I can go from that fragile girl, 65 pounds in a hospital bed, completely consumed by anorexia, to the grown, belly roll loving, body positive woman I am today, then anyone can get here. ANYONE," she wrote. "Including you. You can overcome. You can rise up. You can take your power back. And you can sure as hell make peace with your body. You might not see that right now, but I do. So keep going, my love. Rise."
Crabbe wants us to know the numbers on our scales mean nothing. The number of rolls on our bellies mean nothing. The number of dimples on our thighs mean nothing.
The only number that matters, in the end, is the number of moments we spent allowing ourselves to be happy.
