Angie’s Inner Growth journey started with the beginning of her social media presence 8 years ago when she was in high school. Her profile started as an eating disorder recovery account to hold her accountable to her meal plan. She would post foods that she feared and tried to make it look aesthetic and add fun to the food. She would then add in the caption how she was feeling in that moment about eating that particular fear food, and she soon started to build a supportive community that was rooting for her. She found comfort in others that could understand how she was feeling and going through the same thing. Instagram also gave her a sneak preview to other profiles that had recovered and showed her how she could heal herself.
Her instagram account today
Fast forward a couple years, she had repaired her relationship with food and started to move away from eating disorder recovery pages and found people who just really loved food and recipes. She moved onto content creation that was focused around recipe development, meals she was cooking that day, and her healthy recipes as a college student. Her content shifted to how she could maintain her health and continue her healthy relationship with food.
She now uses her platform to give back to the community that helped her, by talking about body love, food freedom and intuitive eating. Her community has watched her grow and change and she loves being able to connect with everyone and share where she is now and how recovery is possible.
The Beginning of her eating disorder
Angie recounted when she started to develop a poor relationship with her body and she remembers back in 8th grade comparing her body to other girls and feeling like something was wrong with her. It put a lot of strain on her emotionally and she overall felt inadequate in her body and left out. She remembers she slowly started to google things such as “how to have a flat stomach” and “how to lose weight fast”. Being so young and vulnerable she didn’t know any better and thought that these unhealthy tips would help her look the way she thought she wanted. At the time she was just looking for one answer to quickly change.
As a type A, she always thought that she had to be doing more. She had to run more and more and began cutting foods out of her daily diet. She over-exercised and over-restricted, and she fell into such a trap and couldn’t control it anymore. Her disordered habits led to her no longer being able to function and she got really sick. She had no fuel to sustain her exercise habits and began creating huge food rules for herself. She felt like she had to be perfect in everything she did if she wanted to be healthy.
She didn’t understand how others could live a life of freedom, but she couldn’t let herself enjoy things. She would punish herself and didn’t know how others could have such a good relationship with food. There was a significant point where her mom realized how much weight she had lost, and her mom took her to the doctor to do weekly check-ins. It was a very loose plan and Angie found that she took the flexibility for granted and wasn’t making any progress. After a few months, the doctor mentioned that she might have to go into in-patient care. She became so defensive of her eating disorder to protect it, so she pushed back, and the thought of in-patient care didn’t scare her enough. However, they had decided on their own that she was going to the hospital.
Her hospital stay
Angie's parents ended up taking her to the hospital without telling her and she lived there and was fully supervised throughout her recovery for about a month and a half. She ended up leaving after meeting her weight goal but her relationship with food and exercise became worse because she didn’t have the mental health support. She didn’t know how to live in her new body. She ended up falling back into old habits and back in the hospital. She realized how important the mental aspect of eating disorders is and how that is where you truly need to start to conquer your eating disorder.
her book
Her healing began when she was able to see food as fun and realize how much you can enjoy it and the experiences you get to have with it and others. She channeled this energy into writing a book about everything she went through. Angie started a google doc that was a memoir and was sort of a place for her to dump all of her feelings, but she soon realized it could be her book! She started to pitch herself to publishes and had one message her back that ended up being her publisher. Her book ended up being about her struggles but in the end how Instagram saved her life, and how there are positive elements to social media. She was able to find herself through her community and content creation!
Carolina spoke about the idea of “expanders” and how seeing others heal and go through recovery, could actually end up helping yourself. By connecting with someone else you can grow yourself! One person can resonate with you and feel a genuine connection.
Learning from social media
Angie has learned so much from social media, she has learned that she doesn’t need to show everything on social media and found the joy in being present in every day life. She realized she doesn’t have to be “on” all the time, and doesn’t have to do things just to get content and can spend her weekends doing nothing. She’s learning how to set boundaries in her life with the level of sharing she’s doing on social media. She prioritizes her relationships and the moments with the people in her life.
I personally loved this episode as someone who struggles with body image and my relationship with food. Hearing other’s amazing stories can be so helpful and empowering. This episode can help you in so many ways. If you want to listen to it more, click below!
XO
Michaela
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