Here we go: I am a recovering anorexic. I have been at a healthy weight now for about 2 years. I say recovering because I think I will always be recovering. I don't view eating the way every other normal person does and I probably never will. Every day I make a conscious effort to eat, knowing that it just takes that one time to relapse and become the way I used to be. It would be so easy to do that especially on days that I feel huge and ugly. My body image feels permanently distorted. I have enough intelligence to KNOW that I am not fat. But when I see myself in the mirror I still see a fat girl. I weigh 114 pounds on good days, 120 on bad days. I will not let myself go over 120. When I do, I freak out. I know this is stupid and I know most people would love to weigh 120. So, I'm sorry if this offends anyone. It is just me and it doesn't have anything to do with my perception of anyone else. I do not think that 120 pounds is what everyone should weigh. I do not think that anyone above 120 pounds is fat or looks bad...AT ALL. This is purely and solely about me and what I think ABOUT MYSELF. Just know that. Trust me when I say that this behavior is an improvement.
Three years ago at this time, I weighed 80-85 pounds. I wore a size 00 (that's right, two zeros-I didn't know that sizes went that small, either). Or a girls size 12. My 2's and 4's from my prior weight were falling off of my bones. I had only 7-10% body fat. A healthy woman's body fat should be 20-40% (I am happy to report that mine now varies from 23-29%). It all started off innocently enough. When I was a kid, I was overweight. I was 130 pounds of leftover babyfat when I was 12 and I was four inches shorter than I am now. Being called pregnant at 12 is definitely not cool. But when I started to grow, the weight came off. So, I was always a healthy 110-115 in high school and I didn't gain any weight in college. But the spring of my sophomore year in college, I decided that I was going to eat healthier and exercise more. I wouldn't eat any meat aside from fish and turkey, I wouldn't eat any hydrogenated oils or processed foods, and I wouldn't eat any refined sugars. So I basically ate fruits and vegetables and A LOT of boca burgers (veggie burgers)...not enough to compensate for the added exercise I was doing. It was a healthy plan at first but when the weight started coming off (quickly, I might add) I kept eating less and less so that I wouldn't gain the weight back. And it snowballed...
I never really thought I had a problem. Tim always confronted me and we would have 5 hour conversations about what was going on. And my argument was always, "I am JUST BEING HEALTHY." But see, this thing, it not only affects your external body but it affects your mind, your entire life. In the worst of it, no one could reach me. I was oblivious to my behavior and to the people around me that I was hurting. I had mood swings like you wouldn't believe. I refused to go to restaurants. If I was forced, all I ate was basically lettuce. I wouldn't go to people's houses if we were going to be eating there. When I went to my grandma's house for our annual golf vacation, I brought a week long supply of the foods I would eat. And I LOVED my grandma's food when I was growing up (I still do). I worked out 2 hours in the morning, 2 hours at night. I avoided eating in front of people at all costs. I wanted everyone to think I was eating more than I was. For breakfast I ate a small dry bowl of kashi cereal with a couple of chunks of watermelon, for lunch I ate a handful of carrots and some turkey, and for dinner I mostly ate a boca burger and some veggies. Sometimes I made non-fat, sugarless jello (the box said it was a FREE food-meaning no calories. This really excited me at the time). I allowed myself to have 3 pieces of sugarless gum a day. Oh, yes, and I ate a lot of ketchup. I put it on everything. I even used it as a salad dressing. I didn't even eat peanut butter! No fat, period. I remember one day Tim made me eat three small oatmeal raisin cookies made by my mom (my absolute favorite to this day). But at this point in my life, they were like someone making me ingest poison. I ran for three hours after I ate them to burn them off-one hour for each cookie. ON average I probably ate 700 calories a day. Some days it was probably more like 500. Tim told me once that he didn't even like to hug me because he felt like he could just break me in half. I weighed myself at least 10 times a day.
I was emaciated. I looked physically ill. My upper legs were the size of Tim's arms. People were always whispering to my mom, asking if I was sick, suggesting that I go to the doctor to make sure everything was ok since I had lost so much weight. I actually signed a modeling contract that summer. I went to one shoot and a lady there asked how old I was. When I said I would be a junior in college she shockingly said, "Oh, honey, I'm sorry! I thought you were only 12 or so." I will never forget that. Even the modeling agents told me I needed to gain weight and in that industry, usually the opposite advice is given. When I look back at the pictures from one of those shoots, I can't believe how small and frail I looked.
There is nothing scarier than the two things that happened that helped to bring me back to reality: 1) Having your heart beat so fast that it feels like it is going to explode while you are falling asleep but doing everything in your power to not fall asleep because you are afraid you might not wake up the next morning. 2) Finally going to have the doctor and hearing her say that if you don't gain weight you could face the very real risk of never having kids. I didn't have a period for 8 months to a year. I later learned that when your body is 'starved' things like menstruation are the first to go because that isn't a necessity to keep you alive. My doctor immediately put me on birth control (which I adamently refused to take at first because I didn't want to gain weight). My greatest fear to this day is that I screwed up my body so much that I am infertile. It still makes me cry if I think about it long enough.
After my doctor's appointment that day, I cried in my car and then went out and bought a bag of peanut butter m&m's. I made myself eat the whole bag before I left the parking lot. It took about 45 minutes (and this was just one of the small bags that you buy at the checkout line). If I wasn't so petrified of barfing, I would have thrown them up right then and there. But I didn't. Instead, I just didn't eat anything the rest of the day. But the healing process had started.
I am still amazed when I look back at how seriously hard it was to gain weight and to resume a healthy weight, and not what I used to view as healthy (as an anorexic). It is by far one of the hardest things I have ever had to overcome...harder than college, harder than growing up, harder than leaving home, harder than getting my wisdom teeth pulled, harder than losing my first love. I have never been a drug addict (or done any or tried any drugs-just to clarify) but I assume that this must be similar to what a battle a drug addict faces when they come off drugs. I relapsed so many times. Eat one day, don't eat the next. I cried so many times. It took a good year of constant struggles and internal battles to get back up to 110 pounds. The birth control helped (in fact, after the year of gaining my weight back, it actually made me gain so much weight that I weighed 132 pounds. When I switched to a different pill, I lost the 'water weight').
I also went to a tea in Colorado that summer with Tim's mom and a few other of Tim's girl relatives. I ate a little bit of a scone and that was another turning point for me. That scone was SOO good. It made me start to LIKE eating again. Of course, I hardly ate anything the rest of that day but I never forgot how good that scone was and it helped me to start adding some fat to my diet. I also started a 'food diary' during my gaining period. I would put smiley faces on days where I hardly ate anything and frowns on days where I ate a lot (or what was a lot to me). Each calorie was counted down to the most miniscule crumb so days with frowns were days with 900+ calories. I still feel so sad at how distorted I was when I look back on this diary. It is a painful reminder of who I was then. You really become a whole different person when you are like this. I can't believe that Tim stuck with me in this whole situation. I know I wouldn't have liked myself if I was on the outside. He has told me that this time period was the closest he has ever coming to leaving me. I still don't know understand what it was that made him stay but I'm glad he did. Otherwise, I might not be here. I couldn't have gotten better without him.
This is the reason why I am so disgusted by people like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Ritchie. There is no way that they are just losing baby fat, eating healthier, or exercising more. I said these same things. They sound exactly like I did three years ago. And I looked similar to what they do-emaciated, sick. It makes me so sad to hear that so many people think they actually look good. They look unhealthy! Like bones walking around. How is this anyone's definition of beauty?
The most important thing I have learned from this whole ongoing process is that healthiness is the ultimate goal. Real healthiness, pure healthiness, not distorted healthiness. Where your whole body feels and looks good, you are happy, you are whole, you are not self involved with some obsession, and you are aware of all of the good things surrounding you. You are not completely and totally obsessed and thinking only about what you are or are not eating. You know the point of total healthiness because you feel your best...like who you were always meant to become.
Body image is a product of our society. If you go by what you 'should' look like, most people would feel inadequate. I have learned to block that out on most days and to just strive to be my healthiest, MY best everyday. To cherish the people I love most and to notice the good things around me. To not be so selfish and focused on myself which for me involves eating for me and for everyone around me who cares about me. People with anorexia are the way they are for control. For control of their body, for control of what goes into their body, for control of something in their out of control life, for control of what size of clothes they wear. For me, I just plain out lost control. I don't know how it got so bad or why I let it, but I can personally testify that if affects everyone around you and it does so in the most negative way possible.
I see so many girls who look like I used to. I can spot them from a mile away...there is something in their faces that gives it all away. When I look back at pictures, I have this same look in my face. I just want to reach out to them, to hold them, to tell them that I know and understand what they are going through but that they HAVE to stop. I know they wouldn't listen because I didn't. But I still want to tell them anyway that being truly healthy is so much better than anything they are now.
Life is short and wasting it on self destruction is a waste of time that could be spent laughing, loving and living life to its fullest. On the toughest of days now when I feel like my size four is too big, when the scale reads 122 or my body fat reads 29%, and I am so tempted to just turn around and not eat and to return to where I was three years ago, I am reminded of this important truth and it always gives me enough strength to enable me to be my healthiest self and to accept myself as I am. And then, to prove that I am vibrant, well, alive and not going back to the scariest time of my life, I go and eat a huge bowl of mixed up ice cream, peanut butter and oreos. Because I know now that I AM healthy. That I am taking care of myself by not having total control all of the time and by letting myself indulge by eating and living my life. That I am never going to convince myself again that where I was three years ago defined 'healthiness.' That I am ok with the fact that I am not the skinniest person in the world and that, really, I'm the only one who ever cared anyway. That being skinny, THAT skinny, is not all its cracked up to be. That being healthy wins every day over trying to be so thin you hurt yourself. That I am never going to let a scale or society's perception of beauty affect my mood or my life to that extent again.
