Reflections
When I look in the mirror in my room I see a regular girl: some acne, a little bit of fat around the edges, maybe I try a little bit too hard to look good. I can recognize some of my better qualities: cute smile, curly long hair, tan skin. What do I see when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a public place? Well, I generally avoid that. I know from experience that even one tiny peek causes me to panic. I start comparing myself to every person, poster, mannequin, and even animated character in sight. I avoid mirrors because staring into one causes me to wonder, wistfully, why I can be starving and still look so normal, healthy, average.
I, along with half a million other American teenagers, have an eating disorder. And it began, like it always does, with the innocent desire to eat a little healthier and be a little thinner. I started out by making the obvious adjustments: cutting out desserts, adding more vegetables, exercising more. But after none of those alterations seemed to be changing the way my body looked I decided to take more drastic action. The answer came to me like an epiphany. I had my “Aha!” moment while camping with one of my friends. As we roasted marshmallows and ate unhealthy amounts of Reese’s peanut butter cups it came to me: If I wanted to lose weight, I should just stop eating. I put my s’more down right then and there. The answer was so simple! And so for the next three hot, sticky, August weeks I barely ate at all; The calorie count for a typical day added up to a measly 500, less if I skipped dinner. I told myself it was harmless. That I would only keep it up until the weight came off. And come off it did. Within a month i had lost 20 pounds.
I’d never felt so confident. I fit into all of my old clothes. For the first time in my life I was not self conscious about my appearance. However, I couldn’t block out the whispers, the subtle remarks about my weight and what I was (or was not) eating. One September afternoon at gymnastics practice my friend Katie brought it up,
“You know, you’ve always been thin, but recently you look SO skinny!” Later the same day another girl told me I looked like I’d lost a lot of weight recently.
I ate it up. Never before had I received so many of (what I thought of as) compliments. These girls were trying to make me realise that I was hurting myself, and after long enough I couldn’t deny what they were trying to tell me, and I was furious. I was sure they had it all wrong. They were jealous, trying to sabotage my success. My weight loss had altered my brain, and turned me pretentious. As I haughtily peered down at the bodies of girls who weighed slightly more than me I would rack my brain for reasons why they weren’t starving themselves too. Didn’t they want to be beautiful? By the end of September I was ravenous. I would sit at the computer for hours, looking at recipes and pictures of food, imagining how good they would feel on my tongue; until finally one night I snapped. It was the night of our homecoming dance Junior year of high school. All my friends and I went out for dinner. What could I do? Just sit there and watch them eat? No, there was no escaping this one. So I gave in. And boy did I eat. After attacking my dinner at Noodles and company I consumed so much Coldstone ice cream that I could barely dance when the time came. That night I slept over at a friend’s house, where we ate more: mnm’s and Reese’s.
When I woke up the next morning I couldn’t move. My teeth felt sensitive and my tongue was dry, coated in a layer of sugary gunk.I got up and realized something was wrong. My bellybutton protruded past my pants. I couldn’t suck it in because it was excruciating to use the muscles in my stomach. Midmorning my grandma took me out to breakfast for my birthday which made matters worse. That evening I didn’t eat dinner. For once I actually wanted to, but my stomach was physically too swollen to eat anything more without severe pain. The next week, bruised stomach and all, I did my best to eat “normally” again. However I now harbored an affinity for broccoli and cauliflower, while calorically dense foods caused me to shiver in my boots. It wasn’t long before I wanted to eat less again.
For the next few months I tried and failed to go back to my old, paranoid, starving days. Three days of barely any food would send me running to the refrigerator in an exhausted moment of weakness to shovel into my mouth all the things I never let myself eat: ice cream, cookies, bread, chips...
By winter break I had gained 25 pounds. I promised myself that the day after Christmas I would fix everything. I would eat less but in a healthy way this time. So back to the apples and celery I ran. Except this time I used an online calorie counter to make sure I exercised enough to burn off every calorie I ate each day. Months later and 20 pounds lighter my friends confronted me. I was livid. I resented them. Why would they confront me now? Why not in September when there had really been a problem? To appease my parents, friends, and track coach I ate more while I was in front of people. But soon I couldn’t control my cravings.
During all of 2011 and 2012 I would eat little throughout the day, “saving my appetite” until I got home. I would eat a normal dinner; but once my family had gone to sleep I would remain in the kitchen, eating quietly. The next day I would exercise ferociously, or even take a laxative to make up for the previous night. Feelings of self hatred, pity, and injustice surrounded me. Why me? The fact that everyone I knew seemed to have control of their food bewildered me. My food, and the urge to eat it (along with a deep-seated fear of gaining weight), controlled me. I waged a daily war against myself in my brain: To eat or not to eat? I nearly always gave in. As I got used to being bigger I accepted myself slightly more. However I was sure people were talking about me behind my back.
“Look how FAT she’s gotten!” I fantasized they were saying. “It’s such a shame, she used to be pretty”.
Nasty, if imaginary, comments swum before my eyes. Every fat joke I heard was about me. Anytime someone gave me a compliment I figured they were patronizing me; i knew (or thought I knew) they would go talk about it later amongst themselves. I was my own worst enemy. My brain had transformed me into a paranoid monster. I never stopped thinking about food, body image, and exercise.
After months of misery it slowly began to dawn on me the extremes to which I had gone. I began to realize that maybe the attempt to emaciate myself was causing my painful, crippling binges. I figured out that the best way to lose weight was to not care whether I did or not: no easy feat. Though eating at home became easier, my first semester of college was a different story.I wanted to be perfect. This was a new group of people to impress. I would show them I was athletic, attractive, smart, funny; and it all started with what I ate. The first week of school I ate rarely, lost 10 pounds. I was so proud. I was finally back to how things were before! But then disaster (also known as the C4C) struck. The bounty of food in college made it harder and harder to say no, and this semester was perhaps the most miserable of them all.
As I gained weight over the years I could see the strain and worry drain from my parent’s eyes. My friends no longer criticised my food choices and nobody pressured me to eat anymore. While people around me were happy that I had finally “recovered” I was drowning, struggling more than ever before. Society recognizes eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, and it is the general consensus that they are primarily caused by the media. Magazines, the same ones who used to encourage weight loss and the “ideal” thin body image, are now calling out celebrities that they have deemed “too thin”. Slender girls, healthy or no, are berated with criticism and their bad example blamed for the modern rise in eating problems, while “curvy” women are added to catwalks and fashion campaigns. Despite all this the problem remains the same: one body type is idealised and the other scorned.
Rapid accumulation of eating disorders in first world countries has been met by a substantial amount of research. There are countless documentaries on the illnesses; many doctors and recovered patients speak out about them, and they all agree on one thing: the answer to the problem is to eat. However the media fails to properly recognize exercise addiction, binge eating disorder, and laxative and enema abuse. After the anorexic is no longer terrifyingly skinny they are forgotten. Despite the extent of my starvation I was never severely underweight. Most bulimics are a healthy size, or even overweight. And even though TV shows and movies find endless humor in making fun of those who are overweight, obesity is in most cases caused by severely disordered eating. These are the people the media doesn’t think twice about; the ones nobody believes to be struggling and who may be too ashamed to report their condition to a doctor (so are not recorded in statistics). The people who don’t want pity, but simply someone to understand what they’re experiencing. We make up over a third of the population, yet we are ignored. America, with it’s stores full of tabloids containing headlines like “Scary Skinny Celebrities” and it’s gyms full of people wishing they looked different, needs to recognize the average person. The one who does not look too skinny. The one who might jokingly criticizes him or herself or avoid pictures. This society needs to pay more attention to what I see in the mirror.
