“From the moment I left the changing rooms, my teammates, who had been like my siblings, never considered me again,” Silvia Fascians, a 22-year-old from Padua, Italy explains to Daily Mail. “That made me feel abandoned and worthless. Thoughts about restricting food began to take advantage of me. It all spiraled down when my granddad passed away, again I felt abandoned and lonely.”
“Then I fell into what I call my darkest nightmare.”
Silvia’s eating disorder, initially sparked by the abandonment she was feeling after leaving a professional basketball team, only worsened after her grandmother passed away, causing her to skip meals altogether and eventually develop bulimia:
Silvia revealed that she would binge and purge up to five times a day.
She said she became obsessed with food and would come up with all kinds of tricks to avoid eating.
When her worried family insisted on weighing her, the severely sick teenager hid weights in her underwear to stop them from finding the truth.
She added: ‘I had lost all contact with the world – it was just me and the monster sitting on my shoulder clapping me when I starved.
‘I wanted to disappear from this world and my body portrayed those feelings – my body was empty, I lost any shape or form, and I was reduced to skin and bones.’(via)
Silvia didn’t realize she was in dire need of help until one day she saw an Instagram photo of a girl who looked lean, yet had muscle tone. “Instagram saved my life by making me see a real life story of what doctors or people were just telling me, I needed proof and Instagram gave it to me,” she explains, “Something clicked and I began to think that I could be that girl too.”
With her brother’s help, Silvia began to integrate weight training into her gym routine. Two years later, she had fully recovered:
‘It isn’t easy. It isn’t something you just decide to do and it magically happens.
‘Many times I fell, many times I got back into old habits and many times I thought that I couldn’t do it.
‘Anorexia completely changed my life for the worst. I took it as a means to change my life for the best.’(via)
Silvia is now set to start a MSc in Food Marketing and Business Strategy in September and says she wants to “keep motivating, sharing my past and present life with people.” Judging from the over 15,000 Instagram followers she currently boasts, it looks like she’s achieving that goal quite well:
But can she get as ripped as Chris Pratt when he went from Dad Bod to Hot Bod? I think so — I’ve got faith in Silvia:
[H/T Daily Mail]