Chapter Four: “If You Hate Your Body Do Something About It”
My adolescent years were broken into two phases: when I was fat and when I was skinny. I spent the majority of those years as the “fat friend,” surrounded by girls much thinner and much more beautiful than me. I saw myself as their antithesis. And though it bothered me, I found a way to lean into it. I was a theater nerd, so it was easy to fashion myself as a goth — dark makeup, baggy Hot Topic clothes, spiked hair and collars. I pretended that I rejected the thin, beautiful, high school mean girl aesthetic. I pretended that I didn’t subscribe to traditional beauty standards.
But the truth was that I wanted to embody them more than anything. I just didn’t think that was in the cards for me. Larger bodies run in my family. My parents were larger-bodied as were many of their family members. I figured I was doomed to life as a fat person, so I tried to embrace it. But I never really succeeded. Being fat was just one more thing that made me feel separate from my peers, one more thing that made me different, less than, not good enough.
And if I ever got close to being okay with my body, the cruelty of high schoolers quickly took that away from me. I endured snide comments while changing in the locker room that were meant to seem like harmless jokes, but they never were. People made sounds like a truck backing up when I walked through the halls. I was compared to a marine mammal more than once. Then there were the more insidious, subtle cruelties — my girlfriends refusing to share their clothes with me because I would “stretch them out,” people commenting on what I ate during lunch period, the questions about how much I exercised and suggestions that I should get more active.
All these overt and clandestine cruelties burrowed into my psyche and nested there, always perpetuating the feeling that I was never good enough and that this body of mine was part of the problem.
One day during a free period, I was bitching about these insecurities to my girlfriends — as all teenaged girls do, as we’re taught to do. Sharing body insecurities is the primary form of bonding among teenaged girls, after all.
One of my friends rolled her eyes and snapped, “If you hate your body that much, do something about it!”
I still have a visceral reaction when I recall this moment because, at the time, it felt like an epiphany. Of course, people had told me to diet before. I was fat. People, including multiple doctors, told me to diet all the time. I’d tried diets before, but I always caved within weeks. I couldn’t stick to the food rules and I hated exercising. So, I’d never succeeded in losing weight. I’d resigned myself to the fact that my fat, chronically ill body was something that I couldn’t do anything about, couldn’t control. But that simple remark, the suggestion that I had the power to control and change my body, changed everything for me.
When I’d dieted before the motivation was this vague idea of “health” — that I would be “healthier” if I lost 20 or 30 pounds. It hadn’t been about changing my body, changing me. With that simple suggestion, I finally understood that I really could change who I was if I just worked hard enough.
So I started a new diet and fitness regimen. Like most girls, I started with the prescriptions laid out in women’s magazines — Self, Shape, Cosmo. I chose one of the diet plans and exercise regimens I found amidst those pages and got to work. With the newfound motivation of becoming a new me, my dedication was stronger. I wasn’t doing this because someone told me to, or so I could be “healthier” — whatever that meant — I was doing this so I could finally be a different person, so I could finally be good enough.
Since the diets and fitness plans laid out in women’s magazines almost always call for severe calorie restriction, I saw results pretty quickly once I really committed. And much to my delight, my results were noticed. My girlfriends praised my weight loss and my dedication. People who never spoke to me in the hallways when I was fat started paying me compliments. People celebrated my efforts to “get in shape.” I started to feel like I was truly becoming a new person.
Once I learned that losing weight could make me feel better, more worthy, I started pursuing it with the same fervor that I pursued a drink or a drug. I started cutting more calories and exercising every day. Of course, my weight loss increased, and the compliments increased with every pound I lost. The more I shrank, the closer I felt I was to becoming the person I wanted to be.
As I continued to diet, I discovered the high and the heady power that came with exerting precise control over my body. Even if the rest of my life was spinning out of control because of my budding addiction, even if my emotions felt completely unmanageable, I could always regain control by counting every calorie, every bite, every rep, every minute of cardio. When I couldn’t control anything else, I knew I could control my body. I’d been searching for power like this my whole life — the power to control something in my chaotic world, the power to transform, the power to be above everything else — and I’d finally found it.
I ate less and less. I exercised more and more. I reveled in the emptiness of being hungry and the power of denying myself sustenance. I reveled in the ability to push through a workout even when I was dizzy from hunger and my body ached. I felt like I was stronger than everyone else, superior in my ability to deny.
In my heart, in my gut, I knew I’d crossed the invisible line between dieting and having an eating disorder, but by the time I realized that I was so far over the line that I wasn’t willing to turn around. I’d gained too much from my weight loss — popularity, praise, control, transformation — and I wasn’t willing to give up those gains. So I accepted the fact that I had an eating disorder and dove in deeper.
