Diary of an Eating Disorder

I am in high school, walking through the hall on the way to class, fighting my way through a crowd of kids, loud, pushing, shouting, shoving. The old Animals song is running through my head, “We’ve got to get out of this place…if it’s the last thing we ever do.” I sing it to myself as I bump and jostle my way along the crowded hallway. It’s not just that I feel like I don’t know anyone and am shy. I feel trapped in this place, like I am ready to burst.

I had spent my elementary and middle school years at a small school out of my district. It was called a magnet school, a program that was supposed to boost a failing school through increased funding and special programs, drawing students like a “magnet,” from all over. From this cloistered environment I was plunged into a large high school knowing almost no one. It was a question of adapt or isolate, and I chose the latter.

I did make some friends, I threw myself into extracurricular activities, joining club after club after sport, took the hardest classes and tried to get the best grades. But there remained this feeling of being apart from everything. Of not fitting in. I began to find hiding places, the nurses office -- she was an angel sent from two-hour nap heaven, an empty stairwell, the art room, the pool where I worked, a study carrel at the library. It was during my library-hiding time that I began seeking out the books with disaffected teen heroines, and decided that I should become anorexic.

Normally an eating disorder comes on slowly. It begins with a distorted perception of self, combined with an unhealthy relationship with food. It germinates, starting with a mere diet, a frustration and obsession with losing weight. Over time it becomes a increasingly pernicious, the weight can’t be lost fast enough, or at all. The diet stops working -- our bodies naturally want to balance themselves. Slowly food intake becomes more than just something to monitor, to restrain, but it becomes the enemy, the obsession.

Unfortunately for me, I did not have an unhealthy relationship with food or a distorted body image. I was very thin, 5’3 and weighing in at just over a 100 pounds. I had never been on a diet. I had a fantastic metabolism and a wicked sweet tooth, devouring packages of cookies in one sitting, a carton of ice-cream for dessert once my parents finally gave in and started stocking the cabinets with food that wasn’t inexpensive and healthy. The desire for the eating disorder came from two places, a growing unhappiness and a girl named Priya Johnson.

Priya was, beautiful, popular, plump in a large-breasted, round-hipped way. She was Indian and seemed more exotic than my plain Caucasian self, and also a few years older than me. She had a boyfriend, something that few people my age seemed to be able to accomplish for more than a week or two at a time. Sometime between my freshman and sophomore year she had lost a significant amount of weight, formerly round and rosy cheeks sunk into hollows beneath her eyes, curvaceous form given way to protruding hipbones, knobs where shoulder muscle or knees should have been.

Walking serenely down the hallway she used to seem like she was surrounded by some radiant exotic light. Now, who knows how many pounds lighter, she looked like she would shatter if an ill-swung backpack happened to bump her by mistake. Her hallway walking was now followed with a wake of whispers, “anorexia” “I heard she lost 30 pounds,” “Joshua’s breaking up with her, he can’t deal with all her issues.” “I hear she doesn’t eat anything except one apple and two pieces of bread a day.” “She was so pretty before, now look at her.”

But the thing was, Priya was still pretty. At least I thought so, even though I knew she was “not well.” I stared in awe at her emasculated figure, not so different from my own, just lacking the health and some muscle tone. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to look like her, I wanted to be her. At least in the attention way. I wanted people to whisper about me, discuss me, even if it was for a bad reason, instead of just look past. I wanted my personal pain to be visible like that. I wanted a way for people to know how unhappy I was, why I skipped classes hiding in the nurses office and the library, how I cried into my pillow every night. Hot tears of adolescence, I’m ugly, I’m boring, I’ll never be special, no one will ever love me.

So I hid in the library, reading books written by supposed teenage anorexics. I used the computer to research the disorders, anorexia and her sister bulimia on the pretext of a paper for a class. I learned all sorts of things about hating your body, counting calories, being obsessed with food.

My first step in becoming anorexic was gaining weight. If I wanted the weight loss to be at least somewhat noticeable I’d have to put a little on first. It gave me some practice with the calorie-counting parts, the frequent weighing. I managed to fill out a bit, but my previous gluttonous consumption of cookies and ice-cream didn’t really allow for much extra poundage, no matter how much peanut butter or macaroni and cheese I tried to shovel down. With gaining weight proving to be more of an undertaking than I felt I was up for, I moved on to phase two, losing it.

It wasn’t really that hard for me at first. I had a bad habit of oversleeping, and was accustomed to skipping breakfast some days, and for all my sugar cravings I could still be a fussy eater. I started skipping breakfast on a regular basis, and ate little for lunch. A granola bar, a bag of pretzels. I stopped eating with kids at school, just went to my hiding places so that no one would notice my lack of eating.

My family at this point wasn’t big on formal meals, my parents were involved with the culmination of what would eventually become a divorce. Since I was such a “good kid,” did my homework, didn’t drink, do drugs, sneak out, or really require much care at all since I was always holed up in the attic or with my books, they hardly noticed the fact that at the rare family meal I would do more mushing and pushing around of the food on my plate than actual eating of it. Or I would just skip dinner, tell them I was busy with homework and would make something to eat later. They never noticed that when I did it would be a hot chocolate and a styrofoam “cup-o-noodles” that I would only eat half of. I wore baggy clothes anyway, due to a previous insecurity that I was too skinny and too flat-chested to be able to fill out anything more form-fitting.

I started to think about food all the time. The food that I wasn’t eating. The food that I wanted to eat. The food I did eat, slowly, nibbling around the edges of a cookie until it slowly reduced itself to crumbs in my hand. This could take ten minutes. A bag of pretzels half an hour. An orange, which I frequently indulged in to stave off the pangs could last up to an hour, as I ate each section by biting a small hole in it with my teeth then sucking out the pulp piece by piece.

In the beginning, I hadn’t been anywhere near anyone’s approximation of fat, and I knew it. I started telling myself “you’re fat, you’re fat” over and over until I began to believe it. Before I had hated my body for being too small, too scrawny, awkward lines pointing in all the wrong places. Now I measured my stomach every day against the protrusion of my hipbones. There was already a deep cavity just inside each one, but if the center, the round of my stomach stuck out farther than the bones I was too fat. If my pubic bone didn’t jut out underneath the concave of my stomach, I was fat. If there was any round to my stomach at all, I was fat.

I became convinced that on the days my stomach was round, everyone would be able to see it, and notice. From deciding that I would “do” anorexia, try it out for a bit, I had become one, not just in eating habits but mentally. If I did eat, I would do it alone, I couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing me eat, I imagined it must look repulsive, disgusting.

One day a girl that I worked with at the pool brought a salad with her to work, saying she hadn’t had time to eat lunch and had to eat. I watched her wolf it down in awe, that she could be so un-self-conscious about shoving pieces of lettuce and bacon, dripping with dressing, into her mouth, right in front of people. I hadn’t eaten lunch that day, or breakfast. I was starving, dizzy, and miserable. I opened my Snapple and started the slow process of drinking it sip by sip, savoring each tiny mouthful, the sugar, the substance of it.

Dizzy was common state of being during that time. With not eating comes an initial weakness, a lethargy, a lack of energy to do anything requiring physical effort. Your stomach shrinks, contracts, pains. It starts to feel like it is eating itself for lack of any substance in it. After a little while though, that subsides. The dizziness becomes less of a faintness, and more of a high. I didn’t do drugs, so I didn’t know what it felt like to be high or even drunk, but the first time I felt the high of hunger I instantly recognized it for what it was, an altered state of being.

I was standing in my living room. The room seemed to reel away from me as I turned my head. My vision seemed to take a few seconds to catch up to my actual spatial orientation, and I felt like I was floating over the floor rather than walking. I was a like a giant bubble of my head, my body didn’t even exist, had floated away from the rest of me, was acting on its own accordance for whatever it needed to be doing at that moment. It was perfect, and I floated out the door, off to some club meeting or team event, stomach, fat, everything forgotten for at least a moment.

People wonder about the hunger. It’s not that the hunger goes away, simply that it becomes an ever-present way of being. You are not not hungry, just that hunger is a normal state like being awake, tired, having to pee, having a cramp in your right foot. It becomes something tolerable. Then in a twisted sort of way, reaches outside your stomach and attaches itself right onto your ego. This is a big motivator. You tell yourself you are better than other people by being able to withstand the angry growlings of your stomach. This is part of the egotism of anorexia. While anorexics tend to have abysmal body image and self-esteem, there's still an element of egotism and narcissism at work in an eating disorder. Essentially, the only way to sustain it is by being an incredibly selfish person the majority of the time.

Anorexia is about control. If you feel like you can’t control your life, you reduce it to something you can, food and calorie intake. If you can’t control the world around you, you reduce it to an equation of relative worth based on body fat. If you can’t control the confused thoughts in your own mind, you reduce them to hunger, resisting hunger, the last thing you ate, the next thing you are going to eat, the amount of time it will take to eat it.

I don’t know how much weight I lost. I can’t imagine that I gained all that much during the  period in which I tried to “bulk up.” I don’t think I ever dropped down below 90 pounds. I really don’t remember, and don’t think the actual number really matters all that much. What did matter was the fact that I was unhealthy, unhappy, and alone. The reasons why I went to that dark place in the beginning, the hopes that maybe my private pain would be registered on my physical body did not get any better. No one noticed me, still. I was just hurting even more, and even more isolated.

Another thing I can’t remember is why I stopped doing it. It must have been a gradual process, slowly returning to a normal or somewhat normal relationship with food and my body. I’m sure there was an adjustment period, getting used to eating in front of people, growing breasts, and especially having to realize that stomach’s are meant to be round, not flat. I guess I can consider myself lucky that this experience did not leave me with a life-long struggle with body image, weight, food. I might realize I’m eating a little too much fast food, and resolve to try to be healthier, but I never diet.

When I first went to college I would occasionally share the story, usually on a night of drunken confessional bonding. The thing was, it felt a little bit cheap. It was that play for attention that I’d wanted in the first case. I always felt like I was lying if I told it. Though the eating disorder and all its components might have been real, the part I didn’t share was how I’d picked it. How I wanted to rebel, wanted to for once in my life do something that was bad, wrong, not perfect, perfectly ordinary, perfectly forgettable and able to be overlooked. I didn’t want to start doing poorly in school due to my desire to get the heck away from home to a good college, was too afraid of recriminations to get in trouble with partying or drugs or even start smoking cigarettes (a habit I promptly picked up as soon as I was out of my parents house). I was too shy around boys to rebel in promiscuity.

An eating disorder seemed easier, doable. (There were a few other failed experiments along the way, but I won’t get into those now). I didn’t share the fact that it was really about the fact that I had a lot of hurt inside for a variety of reasons, didn’t share that I was your typical angsty teen, struggling to come to terms with a world of ideas and thoughts and confusion, I didn’t share or even recognize that I was depressed, stressed to the point of frantic, and had a core of unhappiness that had been going on with a few interruptions since fourth grade just wouldn’t seem to lift until I was in my twenties and had already flunked or dropped out of four colleges.

While I never dealt with the eating disorder specifically, I did have a lot of other things to work out. Those things that gave rise to my illness in the first place. It was a lot of soul-searching, and a lot of uncomfortable truths both about myself and the world around me to come to terms with. And I can't say that I've found all the answers, but have at least stumbled upon some truths that I can live with. As far as my body goes, now...I love feeling like a woman. I love having hips, breasts, thighs, a booty. The little belly that goes along with all that fun stuff, I call "Charlotte."

Authors Note: Names and identities have been altered.