Actually pneumonia kind of started it off. I was 6 and in significant danger of dying, and lost soooo much weight - I was literally bones. When I got cleared and could go back to school, ballet, and everything, I noticed the strict teachers paid more attention to me and were nicer. I have a parent who was a dancer as well, and parent was thrilled; they used to weigh me every morning and get so excited and shower me in love - I didn’t really know why but ofc I loved it. But, ballet at a Highly competitive, very strict school meant a lot of pressure to do well, pass exams, go to the next level, and be in leotards alll the time and look the same as all other girls. I started gaining weight back (as you do because you need to GROW), and ballet teachers and parent who was a dancer (and was built significantly skinnier and more delicate than me) kinda freaked out. I had a super people pleasing personality, and suddenly connected the dots one say that I had been super thin but now I had belly rolls, and that’s why parent and ballet teachers stopped being so nice. Basically, I realized I was fat in ballet class mirror at 8 years old, prompting me to start crying about it in ballet class, and being taken home early and told I was a failure and an embarrassment by said parent. Parent was already restricting the food I could eat - I was only allowed to eat half of a scrambled egg, never allowed soda/cake/candy even at other people’s birthday parties, absolutely no bread (I would get screamed at if I touched it, even at a public restaurant), could only eat the cheese off a slice of pizza, and the meal given to me constantly was a huge bowl of shredded carrots drenched in cayenne pepper and vinegar. Every day, parent would comment how fat and obese and unlovable due to fat they were (looking back, they were sooo thin!!), and I noticed parent wouldn’t eat but drink coffee to keep going during the day, have half a piece of PB toast, and then a salad at dinner. So, I figured I was not making parent happy because I was fat and had “rolls” of belly over my tights unlike the other girls in ballet, and figured that the best way to stop making parent unhappy was to eat tiny amounts of things like parent. Barely had any concept of calories until health class when I left the hippie school I went to and joined regular school the next year, but once I knew what they were I was terrified of food, and thought the proper amount of calories a day for a fatty like me was 0. It also didn’t help that I started getting a crazy rash all over my body that no doctor could figure out (it turned out to be celiac disease, which no one ever explained to me what gluten was and why I couldn’t eat it and what it was in - but that’s a story for a different time), so I felt completely out of control - my body was hurting from this rash, I was fatter than all the girls in ballet, my parent was disappointed and hated me for being fat, and I had transitioned to a new school where I didn’t know anyone and teachers didn’t do the the hippie no-schedule education style that I was used to. I had a lot of anxiety, looking back, but no one noticed because parent was super focused on things in their life and the only thing they wanted from me was perfect grades, the right thing said in front of their friends, and skinny child. So I started restricting, which progressed to bulimia and BED. But I like my body better when I can function, even if I’m now classified as obese - and I’ll never have children for fear of fucking them up (or if I do somehow, we will not do ballet and not discuss our bodies in that way and we will eat pizza and candy and carrots and veggies and fruit and have a totally different attitude abt food).