When I Was 17 I Thought I Was Fat
There’s this picture my mom has of my prom. In it I am wearing a gorgeous blue dress. In it I was smiling, I looked fine and you can’t see my ribs. But still, I was starving. I was 17, I had money to buy food with and pantries stocked with snacks and a mom who cooked every night but I was starving.
When I think of that year of my life I just remember being hungry all the time. From the moment I reluctantly woke up in the morning, to the moment I begrudgingly went to sleep at night my stomach was in a constant state of distress. I did not believe in carbs, I did not believe in eating in public and I did not believe in rewarding myself with so much as a chocolate milkshake without an hour and a half workout session to go with it.
Just a few months prior I had weighed 15kgs more, which would have been heavy on a shorter girl but seemed to suit me and was my natural body type — tall and curvy. Some would say I had been blessed — I had a classmate who didn’t. And while I cannot blame him for the years spent binging and purging, making excuses not to eat at birthdays and manners nor for my attempts at mastering the art of pushing food around my plate what I can do is highlight the moment my general anxiety about the world turned into a specific one about food and it has something to do with him.
I remember being on a balance beam at an adventure camp. A dangerous activity but one the school swore would make us into better people and better leaders when to my not so distant side I hard Moses Redding say “I hope Ross doesn’t fall, her weight will hold her down”. I paused on the balance beam. It hadn’t occurred to me at that moment that I could be considered as fat. That anyone could call me fat. This was in an era where even telling someone they had a semblance of a but was a major insult and not a compliment. I did not want to be “fat”. I did not want to be that horrible word and everything that came with it. I wanted to be attractive, I wanted to be pretty; but how can you, how can anyone when in a world in which all your best facial features will be ignored and forsaken if you don’t weigh under a certain amount.
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I paused for a few days, I couldn't handle the idea that people saw me that way. After being put on anti-anxiety medication earlier that year I had already lost quite a bit of weight, but to be respected it seemed the world wanted more from me. More of my flesh, more of my skin and more of my hunger.
The plan began the day after the school holidays, I devised an unsupervised and unpublicised strategy. I would stop eating carbs — completely. Only ever touching the meat on my plate. I would go to the gym for an hour and a half every single day and I would walk there and back to burn off the extra weight. In less than 4 weeks I had lost 15kgs in the most unhealthy way and no one could call me out on it — cause after all — I’d been to the gym — regardless of if I’d overexercised, I’d still exercised and to them that was living a healthy lifestyle. My parents worked in the healthcare sector and were hardly around at mealtimes therefore they could not comment about my sudden avoidance of carbs, the constant rumblings of my stomach, me feeling so hungry at times that I would watch the cooking channel just to imagine the taste of something in my mouth. None of this is their fault. When you’re working to give your child the best life possible some things just fall under the radar and this was one of them.
I returned to school being constantly complimented on my weight loss, 15 Kgs in 1 month is a lot. But to me, it wasn't enough. I looked in the mirror and still saw an overweight girl on a balancing beam. Nothing good about me mattered. I needed to be skinny and I needed to be pretty. As if those two things were interlinked.
I barely ate at school. I remember going to donate blood and having it rejected because I was anaemic. I remember being tired all the time. I remember being hungry all the time. But my plan was not over yet, I still had weight to lose, sitting on the bench for most team sports though due to an inherent lack of coordination — I didn’t really have the opportunity to exercise. The second part of my plan also failed, I had slipped into a level of depression — of thoughts of worthlessness so deep that I had to begin to be medicated for it. And if I didn’t eat when I took those pills I threw up. They also made me gain weight and gain weight and gain weight. But I look back at the pictures now, back at the photographs, back at my collarbones and I realise I still was not even close to overweight.
And even if I was - did that take away the pout of my lip, the darkness of my eyes, the length of my eyelashes? Does carrying more or less weight automatically erase the parts of a person that make them beautiful? It shouldn’t. Not in a rational world.
I was hungry in that picture. And sometimes I still am. It has been a cycle of gyming and binging and undereating and overeating and taking pills that make me gain weight and pills that made me lose my appetite completely until I reached the point where the smell of food would make me so disgusted that I would go to the bathroom and throw up.
If I could back to any point in my life it would be to that 17-year-old girl on the balance beam and I would hold her and tell her, “there’s nothing wrong with the way you look. Please. Eat something”.
