My Story
I grew up very overweight. Middle of five kids, in the suburbs of Maryland, hugely involved in the community mainly through my school down the street, sports, and my huge family just living minutes from my grandparents, cousins, and aunt. All my life, I’ve been different from those around me and known for my larger body. As time went on, with the help of people’s comments, opinions, bullying, and projected trauma, I began to let my self-worth, self-respect, and self-esteem become 100% based on my body that apparently didn’t fit society’s standards for beauty or acceptance.
By age 9 or 10, every waking moment I was spiraling about how my body looked. At age 12, my diet-industry impacted mom put me on my first fad diet, 21 Day Fix. Lost 30+ pounds, gained it all back of course. Did it again, lost weight, gained it back. Tried Weight Watchers, lost weight, gained it back. Into my teen years, I went from losing to gaining so many times with the same self-hatred, going between 220 and 260 pounds all the way out of high school.
Around this time, I discovered my passion for my current career; performing. After doing high school and community theater, I went to college to pursue a BFA in Musical Theatre. My first year at Long Island University Post was very carefree, fun-focused, and schoolwork-focused. I never thought about what I was truly getting myself into trying to pursue a career in musical theatre, until summer 2021. I like to call this my wake up call. I attended a fantastic musical theatre intensive in NYC for 15 days and was absolutely changed forever. I was refocused on the skills, the knowledge, the work, and the gut it actually takes/what I actually have to do if I want to be successful in this industry. Sounds great right? For my career, yes, very much so, but for the long, dark, and dangerous path I was about to be set on mentally and physically, the trigger on the gun was pulled.
Right before this intensive, I was reading their handbook and found them talking about how companies won’t hire someone that doesn’t fit their current standard of costume, look and performance. They were saying that your body has a huge say in your “type” of roles you would play. Now, I always was worried about my weight getting in the way of my career. I've had many people tell me that I was not serious about dance, singing, and acting because of my weight/lack of taking care of my body. I was always cast in the father roles, the comedic side character, the unattractive roles, never the leading man/love interest/anything that remotely was seen as a character that’s “supposed to” have an “ideal body type”. Seeing that in this handbook acted as the final straw in my mind in what I had to do to be ready for the physical demands of the industry/jobs I wanted to work. I thought that if I wanted to book jobs, dance better, sing better, act better, I needed to make a huge lifestyle change, primarily, my weight. I thought that if I was not skinny, I wouldn’t be successful (obviously not true, I should’ve focused on being healthy, not necessarily skinny because most times, your weight doesn’t equate to your health, but that was my toxic/trauma-filled mindset).
So what did I do after a childhood/young adulthood filled with yo-yo diets, body-image issues, trauma, and lack of experience/education on actually trying to create a healthy, sustainable, and positive lifestyle change? I began to starve myself. End of July into August and September 2021, I would eat maybe 500-800 calories a day. My toxic ass saw huge results, having lost around 50ish pounds in that little ass timespan. I got back to school and was praised for the unrecognizable change and it gave me an insane high. End of September 2021, my obsessive and mentally damaged mind discovered and became unhealthily enwrapped by tracking calories. I have a food diary in the notes app of my phone of every single thing I put in my mouth ranging from 600-1000 calories a day. It took over my entire life. Every waking moment I was thinking about food, my body, what I ate yesterday, how I can eat less today etc. and my mental and physical health just depleted more and more over time.
As Winter rolled around, I fell into a very bad depression. I isolated myself from friends, hyper fixated on my new food scale that I got for Christmas, becoming absolutely obsessed with looking and feeling as small as possible for as long as possible. My parents began to rightfully worry about me, but I covered it up with “I am just eating healthy”, “I am just working out a lot”, “I am fine, I promise” and a bunch of other bullshit. What made it significantly worse though is that I finally started booking roles in college and in the community around my school. I booked my dream role of Moritz in “Spring Awakening”, I booked the mainstage musical at my university, I even began looking towards professional jobs. I started seeing better results in my voice lessons, my dance classes, my acting scenes, etc. I associated my new level of success in all of the things I am passionate about with my new smaller size, which even further perpetuated my ED. I was living in a constant state of anxiety, stress, irritability, and sadness.
In March 2022, after having talked to my campus therapist for a while about my wanting to leave school due to my unhappiness with the program and living in this state of disordered eating, I dropped out. I booked and signed onto my first professional contract starting two days later as the male lead of two nationally touring original musicals for Stars Within Reach Productions. I was incredibly excited for the experience, scared that I dropped out, but immensely driven and determined to get my professional career kickstarted early. Around this time is when I started realizing that I needed to change…again. I needed to find a way out of this dangerous relationship with eating and my body, while pursuing my career goals to their fullest potential. On this contract, I started to increase my calories, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I had a couple nights of binging then restricting for the first time ever which after a year of restriction really took a toll on me mentally. I finished out that contract and moved onto the next.
In the Summer of 2022, I was a company dancer in TEXAS! Outdoor Musical, in which I needed to MAKE SURE I was fueling my body to be able to perform to the intense and rigorous degree I was hired to, but for the amount of physical movement I was doing, I was not fueling properly nor recovering properly. In a group full of dancers, I became even more conscious of my body. I was still glued to the food scale and not allowing myself to eat so many foods, having a couple nights again towards the end of the contract of binging then restricting, sometimes allowing the restriction to affect my performance, which killed me inside. Yes, my calories were much higher than a year ago, but I was still trapped in this vortex of disordered eating.
In Fall of 2022, I traveled the world performing for military bases all over Europe, the Middle East, and even Cuba. Due to the traveling nature of the contract and them providing food 90% of the time, a huge step needed to be made in recovery, as I had to kiss the food scale goodbye. It was my first time ever since the beginning that I would not be able to track, but I was determined to not let something as parasitic as my ED stop me from pursuing one of the most incredible opportunities I’ve been given in my performance career. Ever since then, I have not tracked, but it did not come easy whatsoever. I would underfuel, feel like I overfueled and then restrict, not allow myself to eat so many foods, even though we were visiting such incredible countries with such incredible cuisine that I may never experience again. Towards the end of the contract though, I did make significant progress. Not tracking got easier, I even allowed myself to try pizza and gelato in Italy once, I was getting more in tune with my hunger cues, with vats of relapse of course, but further and further in recovery.
After I returned to the US, in December 2022, something huge happened. I was sitting on the computer, studying for the Nutritional Coaching Institute Level 1 Certification I am currently in pursuit of and I began to feel an intense stabbing and constricting pain around my heart. I haven’t eaten that day yet, so I decide that this is my body telling me that I need to eat, because after restriction for so long, hunger cues are massively dysfunctional. I opted for a salad and (shocker) it did not help. The pain worsened, my left arm started feeling numb/weak, and I thought I was having some sort of heart attack. I was rushed to the hospital in which they did a heart scan, blood work, chest x-ray and found nothing thankfully. They said that I’m a healthy looking, young, and active person, there is no reason that you should be feeling this way, but then they looked at the abrupt drop in weight in my medical history. He then asked me how I underwent this transformation and for the first time in the history of my ED, I vocalized my need for help to a professional. I had a heart to heart with two doctors and connected with them to an extreme level that I have never experienced before regarding my ED. I was officially diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and Bradycardia (clinically slow heart rate because of the ED). Ever since then, because of those doctors, and this wake up call almost two years after my first one, I have vowed to never again let my ED get to that point again.
My Winter contract came around, performing at Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre in Fort Myers, Florida in which, with ups and downs of course, by February 2023, I'd never been in a better place with my ED and relationship with my body. I tried to focus on the mindset that food is fuel and my body allows me to do what I love most so I need to treat it with nourishment and care to find success. I’m allowing myself to eat more foods, not labeling foods as good or bad, the random binge/restrict cycles stopped and I’m starting to actually feel energized and happy.
Now, if only I could’ve made that connection with those people so much sooner would I have been able to avoid this terribly wrong approach to wanting to make a change with my health. If only I could’ve avoided all of that pain and trauma that took over my entire life and almost took my life. That is the reason why I feel like my purpose on this Earth is to help people like me. Help performers, parents, teens, athletes, anyone of any background make the changes they want to make in their life to reach their goals of physical and mental health, whatever they may be without going down the dark and harmful path that I went down. With all of the knowledge and extensive experience I gained and underwent, good or bad, I know that I can be the guiding light for anyone and everyone who wants to cultivate a balanced and healthy relationship with themselves, their food, and their life. Learn from experience, if you will.
