Despite all the diet food around, I was not a small child by any means. By the time I was ten, I was already five-nine thanks to still-cold-on-the-inside fish sticks and thinking Flintstones vitamins were food. I had developed a pretty intense obsession with candy and would go down to a local store called Sugars most days after school and buy some. And by buy, I mean put in my pocket and not pay for it. I was alone a lot as a kid and food became a dependable source of happiness. People can let you down, but food never will. Mike and Ike were the only two boys who I knew would never hurt me. They gave me a lot of cavities, but never a broken heart.
Around age twelve, I started playing sports and fell deeply in love with basketball. It was the only time I wasn’t embarrassed about how tall and husky I was. What I was once bullied for, I was now praised for. But once I started practicing nonstop, I began losing weight and getting in shape. I also started getting the ultimate drug: attention. My family complimented me, coaches praised me, boys flirted with me. I imagine on a subconscious level my brain associated thinness with deserving love. I was hooked.
As a kid I felt like I had no control over anything—who my dad married, where my mom was and what she ate, who my friends were, whether D.J.’s date would go well on Full House . . . All I wanted was some predictable order, and my weight was literally the only thing I could control. This was of course incredibly unhealthy, but it soothed my brain to be in charge of something for the first time in my life. I learned from reading The Female Brain that organizing things reduces cortisol, our brain’s stress chemical, so maybe that’s why taking the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms, sorting them by color, and eating them one by one felt so good.
From fourteen to eighteen, I ate mostly rice cakes, nonfat yogurt, and apples. I became irrationally terrified of fat. I of course now know that fat doesn’t make you fat, but at the time I was impervious to things like science or facts. Eating disorders can be all-consuming brain take-overs that blind you to reality, so my brain became a labyrinth of self-deception. I knew it was bad when my hair started falling out, especially when it was wet. I remember going to my friend’s house to swim in her pool. I was in a brown J.Crew bathing suit. That’s how little I thought I deserved: Of the kaleidoscope of colors bathing suits came in, I chose poop brown. Anyway, I remember getting out of the water and seeing my silhouette in the form of a willowy stick figure. My shadow was a mere suggestion of a person. I was grossly proud of how small my body was; it was more my whisper of a ponytail I was concerned about. So much hair had fallen out it looked like a skinny rattail. Every time I brushed it, the brush would end up full of my hair, so much so that when I cleaned it off and threw the hair away, it looked like my trash can was full of Yorkies.
By the time I was fourteen, my eating disorder consumed my priorities, behavior, and thoughts. I didn’t have real friendships because in order to be friends with someone, you have to eat with them at some point, and I wasn’t willing to take that risk. Eating out means restaurants, and restaurants mean butter. In high school, every day for lunch, instead of going to the cafeteria with the other kids, I would go to my car and eat a bag of dried fruit alone. I didn’t hang out after school either; I’d always leave immediately so I could get home and go for a five-mile run to burn off the aforementioned dried fruit.
Around fifteen, I started getting alarmingly thin. I had severe cheekbones, prominent shoulder blades, and ribs for days. I looked like the shadow of Jared Leto. The only people I allowed to get close to me were those who would joke about my weight instead of attempt a real intervention. I didn’t mind being called Olive Oyl—in fact I took that as a compliment—but a real conversation about my weight was out of the question because it threatened my small, safe world of diet soda, dried fruit, and steamed vegetables.
The thinner I got, the thinner I thought I needed to get. I hadn’t heard the term body dysmorphia back then, not that I would have thought I had it, but I now understand that’s what I was experiencing. My perception of myself and my body was incredibly warped. It was as if I were looking in a funhouse mirror that makes your hips comically large. I literally could not see myself how others did. One time I was jogging up a busy street in D.C. called Wisconsin Avenue past a row of shops. A car driving by slowed down for a moment, and a man yelled out, “Eat something!” I remember stopping in my tracks. Today it breaks my heart to think that even strangers were motivated to try to help me, although, guys, I promise you that yelling from cars at women will never get you the result you want. This guy was not at all flirting with me, but if I’d had enough fat on my body to inspire him to, my suggestion would be to pull over and approach me. I might not respond how you want me to but at least you aren’t perpetuating a boring stereotype. Post a missed connections ad on Craigslist, Catfish me—anything but yelling from a car.
I look back now and see the scenario as being particularly poignant given it happened in front of a store called Sullivan’s Toy Store, my favorite place on Earth when I was a kid. The little girl who was once so obsessed with colored pencils and stuffed animals was now all grown up, with that passion for fun having been replaced with an obsession with calories, carbs, and food labels.
Although my mom dieted herself and was likely battling her own cunning demons, she started trying to help me. I can’t even begin to fathom the pain it must cause a mother to see her child starve herself. I can hardly go into work if my dog looks the slightest bit sad.
I actually admire how my mom tricked me into going to an eating disorder specialist. She cleverly sold her to me as a nutritionist, so I thought she could help me figure out which foods had the fewest calories. However, as soon as I met the woman, I knew she was my enemy. Since my eating disorder behaved like an addiction, anyone who challenged my comfort zone was very threatening, and I instantly felt like a tiger in a cage. The beast in my head made me think in extremes—people were either with me or against me, food was either good or bad, you ate the whole box or none at all. In psych lingo, this is often referred to as black-and-white thinking, but this was way before I could see in color. As far as my addictive brain knew, this bitch was trying to kill me, which is ironic, since I was the one killing myself.