A conversation with Julianna Lowe

Quote of the day ~ "Be as passionate about listening as you are about wanting to be heard."

~Brené Brown

Julianna Lowe, 21, from White House, Tennessee knows what it’s like to live with an eating disorder. Lowe, who graduated from Western Kentucky University in December 2021, said she first developed an eating disorder at age 19 after being thrusted into a new environment around people she hadn't grown up with.

“I think I was just in a completely new environment comparing myself to things that I had never compared myself to before,” Lowe said. “So I developed an eating disorder.”

Lowe said she spent long periods going without food, and when she did eat, she said she tried to “counteract” it by working out and walking longer than necessary walks to her classes.

Lowe said her habits aligned with the idea of college students not eating whenever they’re busy or stressed.

“I heard other people talking about not eating and things on the internet,” Lowe said. “I just assumed that not eating was the solution.”

Lowe said her “disordered outlook on eating and on health” continued as her eating disorder spiraled. This went on for around a year and a half before Lowe said she began trying to recover.

Lowe said she pinpoints the start to her recovery to around January 2021, and she said she now is focusing on forming habits like being kind to herself and doing what’s healthy.

“You have to fight against yourself every single day to be healthy no matter what habits you form or how long you’ve been doing it, or what you say to other people,” Lowe said. “It’s always, always always going to be something that you fight against.”

Lowe said she started writing her eating disorder blog, Healthily and Happily, during her senior year of college as a requirement for her blogging class, though she doesn’t remember if she started in fall of 2020 or spring of 2021.

“I had just started trying to recover, and I had started following people on social media that were really helping move towards recovery,” Lowe said. “And I thought, you know, this is something that I am really, really working hard on every day and something that I have experience. So why not do this?”

Lowe said she had already posted extensively on her Instagram about her experience living with and recovering from an eating disorder.

She said she thought people in her circle could resonate with her blog, which she saw as an opportunity to interact with others about something she had more to say about.

“Maybe people would care about what I had to say, and maybe I could help other people too by also helping myself,” Lowe said.

Lowe said part of the reason she chose to write her blog on eating disorders was that she “wanted to understand it more” so that she could “work with it instead of trying to fight against it without understanding it.”

Lowe said it “takes a lot” for those who have struggled with a mental health disorder or experienced trauma to “piece together [their] thoughts.”

“I wrote the blog partially for myself because I wanted to be able to piece together my thoughts and understand what was happening to me and get myself on solid ground,” Lowe said.

Lowe said her blog posts, which include titles like “The devastating culture of eating on a college campus,” “5 tips for when eating gets hard” and various recipes, sometimes come from pulling ideas she sees on social media.

Lowe said if she experienced something during her day that triggered her, she would scribble it down and develop her thoughts about it in a blog post later that day.

“It basically is like, here’s my experiences, and I know that other people are experiencing this too, so here’s how I deal with it,” Lowe said. “Just like not making people feel like they’re alone. Being very personable about it.”

Lowe said she hopes people who are struggling with an eating disorder understand that they’re not isolated in their fight.

“I think when I was going through my eating disorder, I felt like, ‘Why is everybody not eating? Why is everybody counting calories? Why am I doing this?” Lowe said.

Lowe said during her eating disorder, she felt there wasn’t anyone to talk to about what she was experiencing because eating disorders aren’t talked about in society.

“I wanted to provide a place where that was talked about,” Lowe said about the inspiration for her blog.

Lowe said she wants readers to know that it’s okay if they are struggling with an eating disorder, but that that experience doesn’t have to last forever.

“There are ways to love yourself and to be healthy without the way that society tells you that you have to be,” Lowe said.

Lowe said moving forward she doesn’t think she’ll update the blog as frequently as she did during her blogging class, but she said she definitely thinks she’ll keep up with it.

“It helps me and helps other people, and I don’t ever really run out of anything to say,” Lowe said.