I was twelve years old when I first realized I was fat.
My best friend was having a birthday party at her house, and because she was lucky enough to have been born in a summer month to a mother who insisted on always having a pool on her porch, the invitation header read: POOL PARTY ! All of my friends were planning to walk back to her house at the end of the last day of elementary school (which made us very mature, I assure you) and jump in the pool wearing the bikinis their mothers had bought for them the weekend before at Limited Too.
“But WHY doesn’t it fit, WHY DOESN’T IT FIT, IT FIT LAST SUMMER.” I remember screaming that at my mom while she helped me bend to try and get my chubby arm through the hole of my black Speedo brand one-piece bathing suit. Black was supposed to be slimming. Black is a compulsive liar. She blinked up at me the way a small puppy does when it knows it’s done wrong by making a piss-puddle on the carpet, or when it has been missing its owner all weekend. As a twelve year old, I didn’t think to acknowledge the pain my mother felt because I was held back by a childhood of poor meal choices and my parents giving in to episodes of tantrums over nearly lost Happy Meals, or those Kid Cuisines that came in the little blue boxes with the penguins on them.
I’m the first to admit, I was never an apple slices and carrot sticks kid. I was Lunchables and Ice Cream. As a result, I looked like a triple scoop of Ice Cream when I would run on the playground with the Carrot Sticks and play kick ball with the Apple Slices. I took turns on the swings with the kids who ate real fruit instead of purely sugar and packaged fruity snacks.
I used to cry when my mother would put salad on my plate. I would scream horrific sounds of an only child and make terrible threats of, “I’ll never love you again!” until she would remove it from my plate and throw a black container from the blue box with the penguin into the microwave. I hated waiting three minutes for my meal to be finished. I needed a granola bar in my hand to ease the pain of waiting for my next meal. It became a common theme in my life, through my childhood and into my teenage years: waiting for the next meal.
I remember the number the doctor gave me when I went to get checked upon that summer. After the pool incident, after I couldn’t keep up with the others on my spring baseball team, after being called Tubby at the beach, but before my breakdown. The doctor told me 163 wasn’t a suitable weight for a girl of not even thirteen years old, not even an inch over five foot. I didn’t even notice my mother looking like a puppy dog again. I was too consumed wondering what the number meant; where did it come from, why was there something wrong with it? I liked math just fine, I was an excellent math student. I never once remembered learning that there were good and bad numbers, just that there were numbers. I asked my mother as soon as we left the doctor’s office, “Is that what an ‘even’ number is? A good one? And I’m an ‘odd’?”
She didn’t say anything. We went through the drive-thru at McDonalds instead, because unlike doctors, well they loved to make me smile.
I didn’t like boys because they didn’t like me. I didn’t wear Abercrombie and Fitch like the other girls in my seventh grade classes because they didn’t make clothing my size, and to be honest, I didn’t even own a pair of jeans because I had to shop in the women’s section though I wasn’t tall enough to make that an appropriate alternative. I was the chronic sweatpants, the Unwelcome, the girl who didn’t get picked last for kickball, but rather avoided the game at all costs because she was smart enough to avoid the awkward explanation of “we don’t want you on the team because you’re fat. I already knew that I was fat. I just didn’t know what to do about it.
“I’m sick of being fat. I’m a whale. I want to wear jeans.” I announced to my mother as I returned home from middle school one day. She was bent over the fireplace with a twisted piece of newspaper in her hand, a flame creeping up the paper getting closer to her hand as she focused more on me than the fire she was trying to start. Our house was always cold, but it didn’t bother me under my layers of bodily insulation. She blinked, smiled, blinked, frowned, blinked, blinked, raised a brow, and jumped when the warmth engulfed her hand. She threw the paper into the fireplace and turned to me to tell me that she was proud.
I decided that I had been right about numbers. I was odd, and all I wanted was to be even.
Perhaps I would have done something about my body and how much I hated myself for simply being too much had I not found a boy who seemed to like me for what I was. Five foot two, one hundred seventy four pounds. I was a fool for thinking that he was actually in love with me, when really his “I love you” was another way of saying “I want to have sex with you.” I was just another girl drowning in her disillusion. I pretended like he wasn’t abusive, like my tears weren’t his fault, like it was normal that he would scream at me if I wasn’t next to the phone at seven o’clock every night to answer his call. He called me fat, he called me stupid. Therefore, I was fat and stupid. I spent two years being his fat and stupid blow up doll.
He dumped me on my ass despite my pathetic begging for him to stay. He left me with nothing, and I honestly believed I was nothing. I don’t believe a person can change without the sort of desire that absolutely tears at your heart, takes bites out of your soul, and literally takes control of your body’s nucleus. You have to want to change, want to be someone else, with every fiber in your being. Only then is change possible. Only then will you find out that somewhere in the middle of the pitch black cave you dug out for yourself by refusing to conquer your own demons for so long, there is a light just waiting for you to reach up and turn on.
I remember the night I reached up and turned my light on. Before I got in the shower every night, I would lock the door and strip down in front of the mirror. I pulled my pants off and felt my eyelids fighting to close in their embarrassment of the thighs standing before me. They didn’t simply touch, they mashed together in a way that reminded me of how I would butter my roll on Thanksgiving. Dunk my knife in margarine, grab half of the flakey biscuit, and mash the yellow cream down into the bread until every inch was coated, at least an inch thick. One thigh was the buttered knife, the other was the squishy biscuit. They mashed together like the pile of potatoes that sat next to my pile of holiday biscuits.
I pulled off my shirt and my stomach fell out, limp like the tongue of an exhausted, panting dog, hanging out the side of its mouth. My boobs hung like upside-down hot air balloons. My arms, oh god my arms. Chunky. Beefy. Huge Italian sausage looking lumpy limbs, like I was constantly wearing those inflatable cuffs that children slid onto their upper arms so they could float in the pool.
I clawed at my skin until I had bright red nail marks and sometimes, I would bleed. I would dig my hands into my stomach until there were bruises, scratch at my thighs until I winced in pain, slap my sides until there were bright handprints and tears rolling down my cheeks. I did this until the heat of the shower saved me from myself and fogged up the mirror so I could no longer see the reflection. I always wished that was the end of it, I can’t see the girl in the mirror so she doesn’t exist. I turned around and got into the shower to sink down and uncomfortably position my large self in the tub, sitting with my face tilted up, the water disguising my tears as part of the downpour.
Eight hundred calories. That night, I cried on my bed, and pulled that number from thin air. I was regularly eating thousands of calories, so there was something about this beautiful, loopy looking number that spoke to me. It was even. Even numbers were good numbers, while I was an odd number and always had been. I realized that in order to track my progress, I would need to know where I was at the beginning of this daunting, impossible journey that my sheer desire had made seem so doable, achievable, and realistic.
One hundred eighty one pounds. It was the ugliest looking odd number I had ever seen and I decided to stop crying right then and there. I wanted to sleep, wake up, and see what I could have for breakfast that seemed the most unlike the girl in the mirror.
It ended up being one and a half cups of plain Cheerios in 2% milk. I was proud of myself, I wasn’t full, I was ready for lunch to jump out at me, furious, telling me to go to the pantry and make macaroni, noodles, top ramen, anything and everything. I made salad. I remembered that I never liked salad, and in fact refused to eat it every single time it was offered. I ate salad because I was determined to do anything the old me wouldn’t have.
Six hundred calories. Six hundred was a nice looking even number too, and if I could lose ten pounds in the first week by eating eight hundred, well I knew I could lose more in the second week by eating less. It was simple logic. I cut my intake, and though ten pounds didn’t make a difference in the girl I saw in the mirror, I liked to see that the number was changing. I liked spending all of my time in front of the television, following the instructors on my free exercise videos. I worked out with Jillian Michaels every day, some girl named Cindi who made my thighs hurt, and another named Nicole who promised I’d be ready for a mini skirt in no time. I replaced my friends with these powerful women who pushed me to sweat, and tracked my calories on yellow post-it notes that I’d bring everywhere with me.
I replaced the 2% milk in my morning cheerios with water, and soon learned to love them dry. I took the avocado from my salads and added celery because I heard somewhere that chewing it would burn more calories than the vegetable had itself. I fidgeted in my seat in the car to burn calories, I jumped rope in my bedroom, I did leg lifts until I fell asleep at two in the morning in my bedroom. Soon, my ten pounds lost were twenty. Twenty turned to thirty. Thirty turned to thirty six by the end of the month. It took one month for me to stop clawing at my skin, and two months to look like a completely different person. I, however, didn’t want to stop when I first saw signs of normalcy in myself. I had gone from an obese body mass index, to an overweight one, and finally to a normal weight. I was normal. These numbers said I was normal.
Eight hundred to six hundred to four hundred to one hundred to two hundred to fifty. Calories. Fifty calories a day, for weeks at a time. It was insanity, absolutely, but enthralling to see that under the layers of unhappy was bone structure and curves that were sexy rather than sassy. I didn’t need food, food had betrayed me and ruined my childhood. I hated food because it was the very thing that had ruined every picture I had ever posed in or taken of myself up until that point.
It is said that when a certain point of starvation is reached, the body will take over and make hunger unbearable. I was on my first camping trip as a regular sized girl when I met my first binge. My mom made pizza and I had two slices with three or four rice cakes. I thought it was the end of the world.
When I first started to lose weight, everything was crystal clear. Don’t eat a lot, eat the right things, burn off what you eat, keep track, and cut out calories where you can. Stay moving. Get sleep. Never stop moving. As time in my journey passed, I noticed the very thing that had seemed so simple and reliable, controllable, was becoming foggy like my shower’s mirror. Can I ever eat again? If I eat more than what I have been, will I gain weight? Have I gained weight? Can people see if I’ve gained weight? What if I’ve gained weight, will all of these people who go to my school who finally stopped looking at me like a little fat girl call me names again? Will girls still ask me how I did it, and to teach them how too? My life revolved around the process. It gave me something to focus on while my parents’ marriage crumbled and evaporated before me, something to cuddle with late at night when my bones ached with the frigid pain of malnourishment. At least I had bones, I would tell myself, at least I’m going to be thin.
Going to be thin. At what point, if any point, would I finally be thin? When would I stop spending the holidays saying no thank you to festive meals and treats, and instead indulging a bit in a cookie, or a meal that consisted of more than Splenda, aspartame, and zero grams of fat? I was convinced that if I ever were to do that, the compliments would stop. The boys who were begging me to go on dates and bluntly asking me to have sex with them would stop all of that because I was the type who ate Christmas cookies and Valentines chocolates. I didn’t want to be that girl, not when I could be a special brand of superhuman who had taught herself to stop being so damn needy. It disgusted me that everything revolved around food. Couldn’t I go to the movies without facing popcorn, or out with friends without having to make dinner plans, or explain why I was only ordering a diet coke and a plate of raw onions with a side of mustard? Waitresses looked at me funny when I ordered. The only people who ordered raw onions with a side of mustard were those who knew the entire plate had not a single calorie on top of it.
It became my excuse for everything. Fail a class, at least I’m thin. Have no friends, at least I’m thin. Fight with my father, at least I’m thin. Get used by a boy who only wanted me under the sheets, at least I’m thin. I was getting everything I had ever dreamed of, crossing off goal weights, being asked to join an agency as a petite model, receiving a letter from my elementary school best friend who held the pool party that ruined my life as a twelve year old, “how can I loose weight like you have?”.
I cannot say how I kept the motivation that brought me from 181 (obese) to 170 to 155 (overweight) to 142 to 135 (normal weight) to 127 to 115 to 112 to 107 to 104 (underweight) to 100. I suppose it became a way of life that I had built so strongly for myself, I was completely unwilling to stop trying to see how far I could go. At 100.1 lbs, I reached up to feel my pulse and thought about clawing at my skin again in the space between beats. I told my mom everything, though she already knew, and asked her to go healthy food shopping with me in the morning.
I continue to fight every single day to eat more, and I still work to find a way to lose weight while eating enough to keep me from dropping in the middle of a work day. It’s hard to give up the only thing that remained comforting when you father walked away, when your mother cried for weeks and didn’t know how you were to survive, through multiple breakups and the loss of close friends, close family, money, your house. I dream of helping myself by helping others to find the ground again, the contrast to the floating-type light sensation of a successful dieter. I aspire to help others find their inner beauty, to love themselves, to see that being a healthy and fit bombshell is much more beautiful than starving bones. I am as much support as I receive support, and I find hope in my situation by forcing yet another change of my own - sick stick to sexy strong. I want to write a book and lace my love of writing between the letters. I want to speak to other girls and crash waves of realizations into their beautiful faces and broken hearts. I want to raise daughters to love themselves, and continue learning to love myself.
It took losing 81 lbs for me to realize that you live once. We are so much more than even and odd numbers.
