#tbelledit

Troian Bellisario for AOL Build

There was one doctor who told me that when a lot of people go in for treatment, they won’t feel like they’ve come out from under their eating disorder until about 10 years of therapy. I didn’t understand that. I was so new to my therapist and everything that we were doing and I was like, ‘No, I should just be able to stop.’ I didn’t see that a lot of my thought patterns wouldn’t be normalized or made healthy again until after that 10 years, so what I thought I could do in that meantime was write about my experience and channel this story. And what if it can inspire other people to close the chapter in their life? I didn’t want to be struggling with this mental illness in my 30s. I didn’t want to be struggling with this mental illness in my 40s. I didn’t want to, god forbid, have a child and still be thinking in these patterns and talk to my daughter about it. 

Troian Bellisario for AOL Build

I find that meditating helps me with any body issues. It reminds me that my thoughts do not define me and just because I have a negative thought about my body (everyone does) it doesn’t mean that you have to act on it or let it define you.

Spencer Hastings in 07x20 - ‘Til DeAth Do Us PArt

I thought it was the end of my life, but then I realized it was a whole new way to start. Coming out of being hospitalized, the most frustrating thing to me was the people that I loved still didn’t understand my experience with the disease…So I sat down for a long while and realized that if what I feel the most comfortable doing is telling stories, then why don’t I tell a story about this? I wanted to try to put people like my father or my mother or my best friend in my shoes so that they could experience what I felt, and maybe understand.

When I was in high school, I was confronted because I had lost a lot of weight and people around me were concerned, and they said, ‘If you don’t gain weight, you aren’t going to college.’ And I was like, I can’t go from being the valedictorian of my graduating class to not going to college. I thought I was an utter failure, so I said, ‘No problem, I’ll eat.’ But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was I was suffering from a mental disease that is not solved by just putting on a few pounds.

Troian Bellisario for iHeartRadio