November 16, 2011
I am twenty-two years old, and I have had an eating disorder for a year and a half. Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.
I was born perfectly healthy, and I was perfectly healthy until around age eight, when I started putting on weight. By age ten, I was certifiably “chubby.” This didn’t occur to me then. It’s only from looking at old pictures that I know I was overweight. In elementary school, I had no concept of weight or size or pretty or ugly. I was a happy child. My parents never did anything to dictate my eating habits, so I ate what I wanted whenever I wanted.
This pattern continued and by sixth grade, I was no longer chubby. I was fat. At twelve years old, I was five-foot, four-inches, weighed around 150 pounds, and had B-cups. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a fat little girl. But when I compared myself to my friends, I knew I was different. I was a size 12, when most of them hovered around a 2. Some of them could still fit in to children’s section, while I was shopping in juniors. I distinctly remember that I hated buying pants because I could never find any that “fit” me, or looked good on my “body type.” I’d learned what a body type was from reading my cousin’s Cosmo magazines. I was a pear. I had “curvy” hips and a relatively slim waist. However, it never occurred to me, even then, that I was fat. I was just disproportionate, or I wasn’t shopping at the right stores. I still didn’t see myself as the fat girl. Besides, there were always girls who were bigger than me, and I could tell exactly who they were, so by all rights I should be able to tell if I was one of them. And I happened to be friends with other girls who liked themselves enough that they didn’t feel it necessary to point out one’s body type. We were too busy hosting séances and talking about boys to care about cellulite.
My unshakable self-confidence began to erode during my freshman year of high school. I had two friends, Ashley and Mina, who were more appearance-conscious than any of my junior high cohorts. Ashley dealt the first blow. I had gotten into an argument with her, and I had told her she was being stupid, and she said,
“Who do you think you are? You can’t say that to me! You can’t even fit into a size seven.”
It took me a few days to process what she’d said, or what it implied. That was genuinely the first time I became aware that other people saw me, and judged me, based on my size. Up until this point, I really thought I was average. Even nice-looking. But certainly not fat, not at all.
Honestly, I consider myself lucky that I didn’t really consider my body like that until I was fifteen. Most girls now become body conscious around age six.
Either way, it made a crack in the floodgates and little bits of self-loathing started to trickle through. I became paranoid. When people told me I was pretty, were they just saying that to console me? When boys asked me to dance, was it some kind of practical joke? Mina was a bit more sweet in her condemnation. She pulled me aside once before lunch and said,
“Rachel, you’re one of the prettiest girls in the class. No, really. But you could be the prettiest girl in our class if you’d just lose twenty pounds.”
She said it like a favor. Like I would thank her for saying it. Like she was pleading with me to just lose weight.
I knew I was pretty. I’ve known it all my life. I have a pretty face. I have nice skin and my features are very proportionate with a tiny nose and lovely mouth and big hazel eyes with long, long eyelashes. I knew I was pretty. It was a non-negotiable fact. My mother had always bragged that people get plastic surgery to look like me.
I had always thought that being pretty came from one’s face. This was the first time I realized that there were other factors involved, things that made me not as pretty as I had been convinced of my entire life. And in that instant, my entire identity as a pretty girl changed, and I became a pretty fat girl. In my own head, I was now the girl who was pretty, but fat. And I knew what people said about me. They said that I was so pretty, I had such a beautiful face, but it was wasted on someone with a fat body.
I began to hate having my picture taken (which was extra unfortunate considering my mother was, and still is, a photographer). I would get actively angry whenever someone tried to make me pose for a photo. To combat all this, I became the photographer. I always had my camera and I took the pictures. I was safe behind my lens, and no one could ever point it back at me. That way, there would be no concrete way to memorialize my horrible fat. A few picture slipped through over the years. From high school, there are maybe six or seven full-body photos of me. And I can remember every single one of them in perfect detail.
Posing with a group of my friends in Times square, wearing a large white shirt and size-16 blue jeans, the first picture where I could identify myself as the “fat friend.” I swear, my ass was double the size of all the other girls’. I still had a problem finding jeans. I’d only ever own one pair at a time, and I hated wearing them. They never fit right. By this point I’d had my private crying fits in dressing rooms. This would continue throughout high school and past college.
A photo of me smiling for Winter Ball, wearing a wonderful short, dark green dress with my hair done up like a princess, knowing that the dress and the hair were wasted on me, and they’d look so much better on a smaller girl.
Standing in front of my high school sweetheart with his arms wrapped around me from behind. Seeing it makes me feel bad that he wasn’t with a thinner girl. He deserved better. I never knew why someone who looked like him wanted to be with me. I always felt like he was too good for me, and I was just waiting for him to figure it out.
Prom photos, in my strapless dress, and my arms were huge and fat and dimpled. I stood out again, as the fat friend. I was included because people felt bad for me. I looked like an awkward whale.
College brought with it a brief release. I had a new address, and new friends, and something to focus on that had nothing to do with what I looked like. I had finally learned how to do my hair and make-up just like “all the other girls.” I looked normal. I considered myself to be perfectly average. Even though nothing had changed about my weight. By this time, I was 5’5”, and I weighed upwards of 170 pounds. My breasts were double-D’s, and I couldn’t be proud of that fact, because I knew it was just because I was fat. None of my older female cousins had boobs like that. Just me. Because I was the fat one.
College brought with it good changes too. I began working out in the mornings with my roommate. Nothing serious, nothing at all really, just spending 45 minutes on the elliptical, not even breaking a sweat. But I’d look at the calories the machine said I’d burned, and think that this gave me an excuse to eat more, so I did. I packed on fifteen pounds during my first two years of college, from random, inconsistent, often late-night eating. I stuffed myself from the school’s buffet-style cafeteria, consoling myself that “at least I was working out in the morning.” And most of my initial weight gain went unnoticed, because as a college student living in the dorms, I basically lived in sweat pants and athletic shorts anyway. My the time my high school sweetheart broke up with me, at the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I weighed 185 pounds.
I spent the summer in Mexico studying abroad, and came back thinner and tanner than I’d ever been. I had lost twenty pounds, and weighed less than I did throughout most of high school. But I didn’t register it. In my head, I was still the fat girl, and I had a long way to go. My false cognitions were validated when he dumped me.
He dumped me because I was fat. I don’t know if that’s true, but I never got a real reason, so I assumed it was because I was fat. And good for him. He shouldn’t be forced to be attached to such a weak, ugly, fat girl like me. One week later, my father filed for divorce. I stopped eating healthy at all. And I started drinking. Over the next year, my body composition changed entirely. I lost most of my muscle mass because I wasn’t getting any proper nutrients, and I just bloated. From the late nights, the junk food, the alcohol, I got up to my highest weight of my entire life: 188 pounds. At 5’5”, I was obese. The BMI chart said so.
I was twenty years old and I hated myself. Then, the worst possible thing happened: I got C’s. Not one, but two C’s. College Algebra and Advanced Spanish Grammar. I had always considered myself an A-student. I had at least a 3.8 all throughout high school and my first two years of college. Being obese was not a wake-up call, but getting C’s was. It was the end of the semester, during middle of December in my junior year when I accidentally fell into one of the best relationships of my life. I started dating my now ex-boyfriend, Michael. Though we are no longer together, he is to this day one of the most supportive, close friends I have ever had. He is a genuinely good human being.
Michael and I moved in together about five or six months after we started dating, not because we were passionately in love, but because we got along well and it was financially advantageous for both of us. We had a lot of the same friends and they all regularly came over and had a few beers. The night everything went to hell was a few days after the end of the semester. It was May 15th, 2010. Michael, Blake, Brent, Grant, and myself were sitting around the table playing drinking games. It was “Never Have I Ever,” wherein each person goes around the table in order saying something that they’ve never done, trying to “catch” as many other people at the table who’ve done that thing. Then, the people who’ve done it have to put a finger down. The winner is whoever can go the longest without putting down all five fingers. It was Grant’s turn, and he said,
“Never have I ever fucked a fat chick.”
No one put a finger down.
Grant: “Blake, whatever, you fucked a fat chick!”
Blake: “What?! No I haven’t!”
Grant: “Blake, you fucked that girl at the fast food place you used to work at. She was fucking fat.”
Brent: “Blake, she was really, really fat.”
I thought to myself. I knew which girl they were talking about, and she was more than just fat. She was hideous. Obese. Skin hanging over her elbows obese. Definitely fat.
Blake: “She wasn’t fat! She was the exact same size as Rachel!”
A horrible awkward silence filled the room. Blake had inadvertently called me fat. And not just fat, but “fucking fat.” And it was true. I took a second to step outside my head and I realized that I did look just like that girl. She was my exact same size. I was mortified. And the other guys realized it too. Brent tried to alleviate the situation.
“Oh. Yeah. Well, the girl wasn’t really fat, I guess. She was normal. Never mind, Blake.”
I laughed it off. I congratulated Blake on sticking his foot in his mouth, and I laughed it off. One hour later, everyone went home, Michael went to bed, and I sat in the living room and cried until morning. I was in shock for the next few days. On May 19th, 2010, I started my new life.
I downloaded a calorie counting app for my iPod, because there’s an app for everything, and I decided I would be consistent with it. I got on the internet and looked up calorie counting and nutrition. I figured out, based on my BMI and loads of other random little numbers which I now obsess over, exactly how many calories a day I needed to stay below in order to lose two pounds every week, which the websites said was the maximum healthy amount of weight I could lose per week. I fed into a lot of random, unsubstantiated information in the beginning. Some of it became so ingrained that I couldn’t shake it. I decided I could have 1350 calories every day. More if I exercised. I got a very nice heart rate monitor which also counted calories, and I wore it while I worked out. In the beginning, all I did was walk on the treadmill, or use the elliptical. The surprising part was, it worked. For the first month, I lost two pounds a week, sometime three. The first fifteen pounds came off with ease and I was ridiculously proud of myself. I hadn’t even changed what I was eating at all at this point; I’d just reduced the amount I was eating.
This trend continued all summer. Some weeks I’d only lose a pound, but that didn’t matter. The number was going down. Soon, I was in the 160’s. I hadn’t been down that low since almost junior high. I was ecstatic. When I bought my first size ten pair of jeans, and they actually fit, I almost cried in the dressing room, but for a completely different reason than normal. My parents were so proud of me. I ran my first 5k with my father. During this time, I became obsessed with fitness and figure models. I would pour over Oxygen magazine and Muscle & Fitness: Hers during work, carry around copies in my backpack, clip out the work out routines to take with me to the gym. Everything I ate had to be “clean.” I decided I would not just become skinny; I would become fit. I wanted muscle tone and definition, a low body fat percentage. I wanted to be able to bench press enough to make the boys just a little uncomfortable. It started out as such a positive thing. I regained all the self confidence I’d lost over the previous ten years. Finally, I’d found something that was mine and something I was very, very good at: losing weight.
Michael did it all with me. He started going to the gym very frequently as well, eating clean with me and we kept each other in check. We supported each other wholly. His self-esteem went up with mine, and for a few months, we had a perfect, happy relationship.
The trouble began in October of 2010. I started applying for grad school. The pressure of the applications wore on me until I became a complete wreck of a person. During that semester, I don’t remember going to class, writing papers, working out. But I did it all. I got straight A’s and managed to lose another ten pounds. I was in the 150’s. Looking back, I spent all of October through February in what would likely constitute a major depressive episode, but I didn’t recognize it at the time. I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t good enough to get into grad school, and I almost missed the application deadlines entirely. When I started losing half a pound a week, that was all I could take. I lowered my caloric intake to 1200 a day, barely above what’s considered “starvation mode.” It was during this time that all my sick little rituals started.
I bought foil star stickers for my calendar. I’d get a gold star every time I went to bed hungry. That meant I could never eat anything after 7:30pm. If I was eating anything, I’d have to put it down and stop. If my stomach was rumbling by the time I feel asleep, I’d get a gold star in the morning. I got a green star every day I worked out. This ended up being six days a week. Three days on, one day off. If I managed to do both of these things in one day, I’d get a silver star. Red stars were for days I did something wrong. Either I skipped a scheduled workout, or eating after 7:30pm, or worse, gone over my caloric limit. These were the days I couldn’t sleep. I was too anxious. Eventually, that turned into every night. Restrictive eating causes insomnia. I didn’t know that at the time. I couldn't sleep on the nights on I got a star, because I was too hungry. I couldn't sleep on the nights I didn't get a star, because that meant I'd done something wrong.
Then there were my “fat people shows.” I became fixated on television programs like “The Biggest Loser” and other obesity documentaries on TLC or Discovery. The E Network even aired a multi-episode special on eating disorders called “What’s Eating You.” I ate it up. Every time I watched my shows, I had to be working out. I stopped letting myself watch TV unless I was watching it on the television attached to the machines at the gym. I started planning my workouts around my favorite shows and I’d stay longer and longer just to watch them. “Heavy” on TLC was one of my favorites, or “I Used to be Fat” on MTV. Michael started referring to them as my “fat people shows” and it stuck. Now I recognize this behavior as seeking out triggers. I was just making myself worse, but I saw it as inspiration to keep working out, lest I become one of the behemoths on the screen. It was a morbid fascination.
I also started categorizing food as “good” or “bad”. Bad food included things like desert, anything with more than five grams of sugar, anything with more than 400 milligrams of sodium, anything with too much fat. I couldn’t have pop, fruit juice, potatoes, milk (unless it was in a protein shake), any kind of dressing, cheese, pizza, pasta (unless I was carb-cycling). It got to the point where I had to know exactly where my friends were going out to eat before I agreed to come along, just so I could count the calories before I went. My behaviors were labeled as “bad” or “good” too. Good behavior meant waking up at 6am to go to the gym before class. It meant cooking all my food ahead of time. This all sounds well and good, until the breakdowns from “bad” behavior came. If I forgot to cook my meals, or if I didn’t have time to make something to bring to work, I’d start sobbing in the kitchen. The more I obsessed, the slower I lost weight. The slower I lost weight, the more I obsessed and the more rules I made.
In February of 2011, Michael found me in my bedroom crying because it had been two days and I’ll failed to lose a single pound. He was so concerned he started crying too. He convinced me to see a therapist. At the clinic, I took an intake evaluation. Do you obsess over food. Does your self-worth revolve around your weight. Would you be happier if you weighed less. How upset would you be if you gained weight. How many calories do you eat per day. How many times per week do you exercise.
I was in therapy for two months. During this time, Michael and I ended our relationship, because I could barely function, and because I pushed away everyone who tried to help me. He’s still a big part of my life and we’re great friends. I’m still not sure whether or not therapy helped. The only thing that really seemed to help was getting accepted into grad school. My life felt more in control, so I felt more in control, so I didn’t feel the need to control my food so much. My anxiety drew back for the summer, but I kept counting calories and exercising. Toward the end of the summer, one of my friends confided in me that when she’d first seen me after I lost so much weight, she’d thought I’d been sick. “Like, you looked like you’d been through chemo,” is what she said. I pretended to be taken aback, but I was extremely flattered. My sick little brain still considers that the best compliment I’d ever received. I should have known then.
Then I moved away from home, far away. And everything went to hell.
It’s been four months now that I’ve been living on my own, totally free to weigh and measure all my food, set up a timer for when to eat, work out in my own apartment whenever I feel like I have to. Grad school is the most stressful environment I’ve ever been in and I feel completely out of control over everything in my life. The only thing I can control is my body. But I’m not in control at all. Which brings me to this, now, and why I’m writing this blog.
My current boyfriend, Liam, a wonderful, intelligent man with more insight than I’ll ever have, asked me if I could eat a brownie. Just, eat a brownie. A normal sized brownie. Like a normal person. And then just sit there. Not think about how many calories were in it, not reach for my phone to calculate how much I’d eaten that day, not worry about the sugar or the circumference of my thighs. Could I physically enjoy a single brownie and not worry about it?
And I realized that I couldn’t. I can’t eat a brownie. I can’t eat cake, cookies, candy. I can’t eat pasta without inducing a panic attack. I can’t have dressing on my salad. Eating cheese has become a deep moral decision. Preparing a meal is a two-hour process involving charts and prayer. I can’t go for more than one day without working out. I can’t go out with my friends to dinner or bars. These aren’t things I’m choosing not to do. I just…can’t do them anymore. This disorder, this thing that gives me so much control, is controlling me. The food, the anxiety, my body, is all in control now. And I need to get myself back.
