Picture what goes through the mind of a teenage girl who thinks she is fat. Everyone says she is perfect just the way she is and she does not need to lose weight, but that is not enough for her. Even her doctor said she does not need to lose weight and that her weight is proportional to her height and age. This girl was me. I was this 17-year-old girl who did everything I could to lose weight, jeopardizing my health, until I learned that the process of looking skinny is not worth it.
Babies have baby fat and eventually lose it during the end of middle school or the start of high school. I always knew I was chubby from the ages of 10 to 14. Everyone else was losing their baby fat quicker than I was. No one knew how frustrating it was for me to not be skinny and good looking. It’s tedious work to accomplish. I had played soccer for 12 years, and was swimming competitively since my sophomore year. During junior year, I also had a boyfriend. Having a boyfriend who was good looking also pressured me into losing weight. Losing weight did not start to become an obsession for me until November of my junior year and that is when everything began to go downhill for me.
At the time of Thanksgiving, my swimming season had just ended, so I was not working out every single day of the week with my swim team, however, I worked out every day in the month of November on my own. While everyone feasts on all the fixings on Thanksgiving, I did not. For me, I noshed on a thin piece of turkey breast with a sprinkle of gravy. There is a picture of me in my room from that night, my face is pale and I never looked so skinny. I felt skinny and good looking. Club swimming started in January and I looked good in my practice suit for the first time. Everything was going my way.
However, when things are going my way, God always changes it so things will start to go wrong. My boyfriend and I broke up. It felt like I had gotten the wind knocked out of me. It felt like a ginormous wrecking ball hit me out of the blue with no warning. My heart ached, and so did my body. I was not good enough for someone. I wanted to lose even more weight so he could see how good- looking I was without him. So I started starving myself and my body adapted to this change easily. Little did I know I was becoming anorexic.
Every day was like Yom Kippur for me, a Jewish holiday known as the “Day of Atonement” where you fast for twenty- four hours. For breakfast, I would eat some grapes or a little bowl of cereal and a golden delicious apple. For lunch, my dad would make me either a peanut butter sandwich or a ham sandwich with cinnamon applesauce, along with Welch’s Fruit Snacks, a yogurt, peanut butter crackers and a Chewy Bar. I would eat two bites of my sandwich, my yogurt and maybe the chewy bar later in the day depending on if I swam the night before.
When I got home from school, I would eat dinner and head off to swim practice. My meal consisted of mac and cheese, pasta, chicken or pizza. However, I would eat half a piece of pizza, or half of the chicken breast. Then, after swimming, I would eat some grapes or an apple, and I would be done eating. I would go to bed starving. My stomach would not stop growling and making weird noises. I would toss and turn thinking about how hungry I was. This persisted for a couple of months.
Food was not on my radar at all during this time; fitting into smaller sized clothes was. Since I was losing weight, my clothes were becoming looser, especially my pants. When I went to try on jeans, it was fun now because I felt good about myself for the first time. My face lit up when I could finally fit in a size one jean at American Eagle Outfitters. My mom, on the other hand, was disappointed and worried about my health when she saw how well those jeans fit.
Actually, she was appalled. She warned me saying, “If you keep on losing weight, I am going to take you to get help. You are not healthy.” I did not care that she was disgusted because I was proud of myself. My mom started to point out how much my body had changed for the worse. When she looked at me, she was looking at a skeleton. My bones were protruding out of my neck; you could see my ribs through my shirts. My fingers had no fat on them, just like my stomach and my face. My face looked flushed and empty. It was though my face was translucent. I was white as a ghost. Never would I have imagined my mom describing me as emaciated and malnourished, but she did.
Shockingly, I was happy that my mom described me as malnourished. Unfortunately, my body was feeling the consequences. When I swam, I felt horrible. I used to have good endurance, but I had no endurance whatsoever. Swimming used to be enjoyable but not anymore. The easiest sets were now the hardest sets for me. My stomach would growl constantly during practices and eventually I would blackout during a set; I felt queasy and nauseous, feeling like I was going to hurl up water. It felt like I was on the spinning teacups ride when I swam.
After I swam, my bones ached more than usual; my bones were becoming brittle. Every time I stood up, I would feel like I was gong to faint. Getting up fast was the worse. I acquired random deep black and blue bruises all over my body. All of the energy my body retained went away; things would tire me out easily. It got to a point where I was urinating blood. What was happening to me? That was when I admitted to myself that I was sick and needed help.
Admitting to myself that I was sick was surprisingly not as easy as one would think. My parents were disgusted and disappointed with the person I transformed into. When I told my mom about urinating blood, she immediately took me to the doctor’s office. Getting on that scale was something I looked forward to. I looked up on the scale and there were two digits that appeared; I weighed a mere 98 pounds.
My highest I weighed was 135 pounds. I was happy as a clam, but nobody else was. Of course, I got a spiel from my doctor along with some scolding. She told me if I did not start to gain weight, she would admit me to the hospital for an eating disorder. But I told her I did not binge eat; I can’t be bulimic or anorexic. However, I needed to face the fact. I was anorexic.
Everyone was worried about my health, especially my doctor. Her goal was to see how much protein, sugar, calcium, and hemoglobin I had in my blood. But most importantly, she wanted to see the count of my white and red blood cells. I got a call from my doctor telling me I had low amounts of vitamins, proteins and calcium. What really worried her was the amount of white blood cells I had in my blood; I had a surplus of white blood cells in my blood, which means that my body was fighting an infection.
Hearing this news worried my parents more than it worried me. My doctor told us I had an infection in December and never left my system; virus cells were dormant in my kidneys and my body could not release them from my body because I was malnourished. She gave me some antibiotics and told me I needed to start taking vitamins every day to get my body back to the way it was before I starved myself.
My parents were paranoid with my weight; they had to watch over me to make sure I ate. I talked to my swimming coach privately telling her that I was losing weight on purpose and my body was in bad condition, but I was turning a new leaf and was going to eat like a normal person. She was very sympathetic and understanding towards me, which made me feel better, but she did tell me that if I starved myself anymore and did not gain weight, I would not be able to swim during my senior year. I wanted to make sure that would not happen, so I changed my lifestyle. She also was my nutritionist at the same time. I was basically watched whenever I ate. On a positive note, I did end up swimming my senior year because I was healthy enough, but I injured my shoulder by doing so. When I was malnourished, I lost muscle mass and it was starting to affect me.
To this day, there are a few people I have told about my struggle with anorexia. I have always kept it to myself because I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself. There will never be a time in which I don’t think about my body image. Body image is everywhere; we cannot escape the topic of body image with the media these days with models flaunting their emaciated bodies. What I did to my body is sickening. I treated my body like crap. I did everything I could so I would not look like the younger, fat version of myself.
I am not the same person I used to be. I am a junior in college now and I have matured. I have learned to accept my body. Anorexia is not something medicine can cure or therapy can cure. It takes time to overcome anorexia and it just lingers inside of you. It scares me that someday anorexia can come back knocking at my door and I can let it take over my body again. We are given one body, so we need to take care of our body.
