From Hating Everything She Was, To Being Head Over Heals In Love With Herself - Stacey Shares Her Journey Through Mental Health Stuggles and An Eating Disorder.

My name is Stacey and I am strong, powerful, independent, and beautiful, but I wasn’t always this way.

A lot of you may find it weird to hear that the girl that some of you know has
a very dark past, a past that almost took me from this world. All my life I have strived for perfection, I wanted to have the best job, the best car, the best boyfriend, and above all else the best body. I wanted to be liked by everyone and found it very upsetting when I wasn't liked. This need to be perfect came at a cost, a cost that would ultimately find me at St. Catharines general in the Psych ward on suicide watch.

Shortly after I had my gorgeous daughter Freya my world spun into a whirlwind of guilt and regret and pain. I HATED myself, I HATED what I looked like, I HATED my life, so I decided to try and change this so I went to a local gym and I hired a personal trainer. At first it took
me so much effort to drag myself to the gym, but after a while I started to love the way I felt, and I started to shrink right before everyone's eyes. At first everything that i was doing was healthy, and I was getting healthy life was getting better, then my gym went bankrupt and I
was forced to find another gym and trainer to keep up with my incredible progress.


I eventually found a gym that felt right to me in Niagara Falls and I continued with my routine.

I got a new trainer and I was feeling fantastic. As a few months went on you could find me at the gym 3 hours a day 7 days a week, and as bad as that may seem to make things worse I had developed something that would consume me …. An eating disorder.

​Now I have suffered through eating disorders when I was younger but they were never to this extreme,
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WITH as much as I was going to the gym I was doing all that on only a 600 calorie diet. Before I even realized that I had a problem I started to notice physical things like I was losing strength, all of a sudden weights that I had no problem lifting all of a sudden seemed heavy to me. I remember being at the gym one morning and I was running and the next thing you knew I was on the floor …. I had passed out but the scariest thing about this was the fact that my heart rate was insanely low, so low in fact that my doctor informed me that if I were to continue the way that i am going he was fearful that my heart would just STOP!

I did slow down slightly at the gym but not as much as I should have.
The day that i realized that I had a problem with eating was my sisters rehearsal dinner, we had pizza and wings for dinner and I had 1 chicken wing, and a quarter of a square slice of pizza. As soon as I consumed that i felt so guilty with myself for eating carbs that I ran to my mom and dads bathroom and threw everything up and cried, I cried for so long and I remember my dad coming in and just holding me and my mom telling me that we were going
to get me help. Soon after I started going to New Port Eating Disorder clinic and things started to get better, but with eating came weight gain.

The weight gain was scary but It was coming on slowly and I kept telling myself that i was getting healthy. Then came my second pregnancy, and then the fear came back, I was so stressed out, I cried all the time, I wanted to die, I tried to really watch what I was eating but also tried to make sure my child was getting fed. I gained weight, and I gained weight fast and I gained quite a bit of weight. After I had my son Quinn I had postpartum, I feel that a lot
of that stemmed from the fact that I went back to work 2 days after i has him.

I had my son in June and come September 15th I was hospitalized. I remember driving that night thinking that I was going to jump off a bridge and that everyone else would be so much better off without me. As I was driving I saw the hospital sign and I decided right then and there I would give life one more chance.

Three and a Half years later I weigh more than I did, however I LOVE MYSELF …. Most days! I am graduating on Honor Roll from Hospitality Hotel Restaurant Operations this June and I'm going for my Bachelor Degree in the Fall.

I started performing Burlesque again and I am the lead singer in this amazing band Strange Tendency.

But above all these accomplishments my best accomplishments are my 2 beautiful children cause if it wasn't for them I can assure you I wouldn't be here today, they saved my life.
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I am Stronger, I’m a Fighter, I will Rise Undefeated!