Food. I’ve wanted to write about my struggle with food for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it until now. I want to share my story and the experiences that I have gone through in my life thus far that concerns food, my body, and my health.
I guess the first time I thought I was fat was when I was ten years old. I knew I was pudgier then other kids and my friends, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. I had been dancing since I was four years old and started strictly doing ballet by the time I was eight. Ballet was something important to me and I was actually good at it. I began pointe when I was nine, a very young age to start. I went to my first 5 week summer program for ballet when I was eleven. Going to a place where everyone was in love with ballet opened my eyes. I knew that I couldn’t be some fat girl if I wanted to dance. All the ballerinas were beautiful and skinny and I knew I had to do something to change that. 7th grade started and I was feeling more insecure than ever. Although I had lost my “baby fat,” I can remember looking at my thighs and thinking how disgusting I looked. I was twelve. I began to try and starve myself to be skinnier. I didn’t care what I had to do to lose weight, I would do it. I desperately wanted to be anorexic and I was jealous of the people who were (I know this is a fucked up way to think). The longest I lasted without food was only three days. I felt so weak that I couldn’t go longer, but food always seemed to pull me back in. 8th grade was pretty much the same as 7th, trying to starve myself on occasion or trying to just eat salads. I would eat a tiny salad for lunch every single day for a month to see if it did anything. I would step on the scale every single day at home and write down my weight to see if I gained or lost a pound. I was obsessed. I remember feeling so fat and ugly and I hated myself and just wished that I had a different body. At the end of 8th grade I had been cast as the lead role in the ballet Sleeping Beauty, which meant I would need to do a lot of partnering work with a guy. I knew I desperately needed to drop weight so it would be easier for him to lift me. Every time a mistake was made I would think it was my fault or it was because of how fat I was, when really it was probably because my partner was a horrible dancer and couldn’t even lift a gallon of milk if he tried, but I decided to blame myself instead. I spent countless nights crying about how I looked. Standing in front of a mirror 22 hours a week in a leotard and tights fucks with your brain.
Fast forward to the summer after my junior year of high school, I discovered something. After eating a huge portion of a meal, I felt so full and sick that I just threw it up. It was amazing. It was gone from my stomach and I didn’t feel guilty about eating what I had just shoved into my mouth. From then on, any time that I felt like I had too much to eat, I would simply go and throw it up to feel better. It wasn’t until beginning of senior year that I began to do it consistently. Ballet was as usual making me feel like I was fat and made me feel guilty for eating anything. Almost every night I would get home from rehearsal, eat my dinner, and watch it all reappear in my toilet. I never had to stick my finger down my throat, I never had to use a toothbrush, all I had to do was think about how disgustingly fat I was and that would automatically make me gag. Sometimes the acid from my stomach would burn my throat, but the pain was good because I felt like I should be punished for eating. At school I would try and eat well, but sometimes I would cave and would get something like nachos. As soon as I would get home from school I would immediately go to my bathroom and think of how horrible and disgusting I was and it would all come back up. My family never noticed anything wrong, maybe I subconsciously wanted them to know and pay attention to me, but they didn’t. My brother walked in on me a few times throwing up, but I would just tell him I didn’t feel good and he would go away. I think my friends knew. My dance friends definitely knew something was up, but they either didn’t know what to say or would try to say something and I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t care if other people thought what I was doing was wrong, I was happy doing it and it made me feel better. No one was going to change my mind. It was my body and I didn’t care if I was destroying it because it was what I wanted. In February of my senior year I had my first real boyfriend. He made me feel like someone could actually like me even if I was fat and ugly. I tried stopping my habits of purging all my food. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. Every single thing I would put in my mouth, I would think about how easy it would be to just go and throw it up, but I had to try and resist it. Sometimes I would cave and do it anyways, but it was a lot less frequent then before.
I was getting a lot better, and by the time I met my next boyfriend I had essentially stopped everything. This guy made me feel so incredibly beautiful and perfect that I didn’t care how other people saw me or how I even viewed myself. He was all that mattered and he loved me just the way I was. It was the most amazing feeling. That feeling only lasted a year. I started to feel him slipping away. Maybe I wasn’t as beautiful to him anymore or maybe I wasn’t good enough anymore. This was a point in my life where I realized how much your emotions can affect your appetite. The troubles in my relationship caused this horrible feeling in my stomach. I was nauseous just thinking about what was going on. It was like there was a pit in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. I stopped eating, not because I wanted to but because my body just didn’t want food. If I tried to eat even the tiniest thing like a cracker it would come back up. I got back into the cycle of how easy it was to just purge everything. I didn’t want to do it, but it was the only thing that made me feel better. I found a comfort in doing it, I still do. Once I got into the rhythm of puking I couldn’t stop. It was like a release for me. After I would finish I could breathe and relax, until the next time came. I was depressed. I was in a bottomless pit of sorrow that I couldn’t seem to crawl out of. I don’t think I really ate a full meal for about two months. I thought I was going to stay like this forever. For the first time in my life I felt like I needed some sort of medication to make me function normally, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. In my relationship I felt like I was nothing, I meant nothing, and I was disposable. I dropped weight extremely fast. Within the first three weeks I had dropped 15 pounds and people were starting to notice. The ironic thing about it was that I wasn’t trying to do it, it was just happening. The relationship that I was in ended and I went back to school after my month long winter break. I attempted to make myself better because that’s all I could do. It was a slow process but I began having normal eating habits again. The bad thing was I thought I started seeing myself get bigger. I am caught in this cycle of my brain telling me how fat I am and me saying I need to be healthy. I can’t seem to escape my battle with food. I am now back to that insure girl who I was when I was twelve. I feel huge. Why can’t I just be skinny? Some of you may think I am crazy for thinking this, but they are my thoughts and nobody will change my mind. I will have to live like this forever and I’ve accepted it.
