Finding Balance

On Faulty Scales

Alex Beckett

I don’t own a personal weighing machine.

I never have. Weighing machines are the danger-beast — the arbiter of life or death. You get scales: you have another way to measure yourself. Pinching flesh — thighs, hips, ankles, forearms — that’s no longer enough. You become a slave to the wavering of the needle, or the flicker of digits staring at you from below. Is your number up?

Once. Just once, I let a self-aware set of scales get the better of me.

Picture a scrawny, boyish twelve-year-old. Then rub some of the meat off the bones. Thin the hair a little. Widen the eyes and cave in the cheeks ever so slightly, revealing impressive cheekbones. If you look closely, it must be a girl-child. Though you can barely tell.

Look how proud she is of her self-control, of her physical mastery. So proud, she wears a top that is too short, showing off a concave tummy. Her trousers cling to her matchstick thighs that join her protruding hips — without the hint of a buttock to disrupt her straight lines. An odd looking child perhaps, but a lively one. See how she stands apart from her mother and won’t be touched. Such independence and spirit!

Look again …

This child is sick.

This child is me.

How I met Ana

This year, I started at a new school with a poo-coloured uniform and a strange social code. Gone are the lunchtime ballgames and monkey bars. Gone are the ungainly boys (no “distractions”!) Here, they will teach me to be a lady. I will swim in a pool of pert, hairless girls. My own flat chest and unshaven innocence will provoke stifled yelps of surprise and disgust. And, I will learn, girls are as fascinating as they are horrid.

I hear their high-pitched gossip echo in the change rooms and watch their skirts swish round their thighs as they walk. Before coming to this school I had hardly worn a dress. Mine reaches my knees and looks lumpy. And I get this feeling somehow I’m different.

In this high school for girls, difference made waves
that were quickly pushed down, preserving the immaculate surface.

In such still water, my raging twelve-year-old self felt alone and exposed. At night I would escape into the evening air and feel the hard earth under my pounding feet. Running let me breathe in the expanse of a world beyond school and home. I would savour the sting in my quads, knowing I’d sprinted hard enough for the day.

The food pyramid became my idol, my key to salvation. My worth measured by weighing my heart against an ostrich feather.

I started recording what I ate. I convinced myself this was ‘healthy eating’ — not calorie counting. My child-mind understood enough to know calorie counting was bad. I never consciously wanted to hurt myself.

Even so, I gradually began to avoid food, pushing it round on my plate as if to make it disappear. How could I eat? Did I think I’d worked hard enough? — run long enough? — to deserve another mouthful?

I grew thinner, more angular; reclaiming my pre-pubescent body, one discarded sandwich at a time. Soon, my periods stopped altogether. But Ana was just getting started.

The girls at school began to whisper about me in a different way, pointing out my brittle-looking bones as I shivered my way alone up the school steps, my rag-doll body flopping around in my oversize jumper and too-big tracksuit pants. They knew nothing, I thought. And in some ways, I was right.

Lanugo

In the living room, the television is broadcasting images of a skeleton enveloped in skin. The skeleton is standing with assistance, allowing the camera to pan the length of her body — naked save for her flesh-coloured underwear. Yes. The skeleton is a woman. Only the shape of her pelvis, and the barest hint of breasts reveal her sex. She is dying, but she is beautiful.

That’s right, I said beautiful.

Somewhere, a catch in my mind had unhinged and I found a compelling beauty in austerity. Women with voluptuous figures terrified me, filling me with inexplicable horror and shame. Better to stick with what you know — a childlike, sexless physical form that is familiar and more likely to provoke pity than desire.

I was in deep enough that I could no longer recognise
starvation staring me in the face.

And then I noticed it. A fine wispy layer of hair, coating every portion of skin. The television explained that the illness (not the woman — by now, she was no longer human) had a side-effect — the growth of a thin layer of down, or lanugo — like an outer covering — the body trying to protect itself from the elements. Often irreversible.

I returned to the taunts of the swimming pool. I felt the small of my back, where a thin veil of dark-haired down had been growing for as long as I had hair on my body, and I wondered … did I do this to myself?

Tipping the Scales

Off to the hospital we stumbled, mum and I. The dietician — let’s call her Mary — was gentle and sweet. We went through a meal plan. What did I eat each day? A vegemite sandwich? Maybe we could just add a little cheese. Cereal with milk for breakfast? Maybe just try sliced banana on top. No problem. I was doing really well! We could beat this. It would be like nothing bad ever happened.

Then came the weigh-in. (“Just to check, you know, so we have a starting point to work from.”)

As I took off my shoes and stepped — light as an ostrich feather — on the hard plastic surface, I avoided watching the numbers climb. I could do this. It was under-control.

The look on Mary’s face said otherwise.

There was a problem. The number was low. Very low.

This was out of her league.

Straight away, I had blown my luck with the kindly dietician. No begging would get me a second chance. The child psychiatrist was called. This wasn’t a game anymore.

27

I weighed twenty-seven kilos. My BMI put me at death’s door. Thin as a tack. Skinny as a beanpole. In other words, I was done for. They talked over my head at my mother, about hospitalisation and forced feeding. They poked and prodded me, shone lights in my eyes, felt my breasts, ovaries, belly.

At this point I was nothing. I saw myself merging with the woman on the telly. Strapped in her hospital bed. Refusing to eat her birthday cake. Being force-fed through a drip. Dying. Her last remaining act of defiance was to reject solid food — like a toddler. I felt how easily I could become that woman. And for once, I was scared. Properly scared. More scared than I’d ever been in my life. I never meant to end up here. I had to find a way out.

They carted me off down the hall to some magical scales for a final weigh-in — the kind of scales you sit in — like a giant egg chair or a miniature swing set, only you can’t swing and it’s not fun.

But here’s where things get weird.

The weighing chair thought about it for a while … and then, when the whirring and flickering died down on its tiny screen, when the numbers finally stopped, it decided something quite unexpected. The weighing chair, in its wisdom, decided it wasn’t quite game over.

There was one more trick to come.

I’d been under constant supervision. I hadn’t put rocks in my pockets or anything. I was in a hospital gown for god’s sake. It seems inconceivable. But the weighing chair does not lie. Somehow, in the simple act of walking down the corridor I had regained a third of my body weight.

1/3

How?

It turns out, the joke was on me. I’d never weighed 27 kilos, at least, not since I was about eight. They’d made a mistake. I was dangerously thin, but not hospital material. I could trot off home and pop in for a lovely catch up with psycho man every now and then. And all would be well.

…

To this very day, I still can’t be sure whether it was a genuine error or some crazy child psychological juju. (“We’ll give her the old, dodgy scales routine — that should reset her brain-box.”) But whatever it was, it worked.

“Most people with anorexia never fully recover.”

That was the last thing psycho man said to me as I left the building awash with relief. How I would love to smack his smarmy face and prove him wrong, I thought! And so I began to eat. (In hindsight, psycho man was pretty good at his job.)

I channelled all my frustration into beating my illness. I got healthier. I stopped needing to have check-ups. I could manage on my own. The doctor’s catch cry — ‘anorexia will be back’ was a little too much like The Terminator or Inspector Gadget to be true, I thought. And I’ve been proving him wrong ever since.

In some ways, though, doc was right — mental illness is something many people live with for their whole lives. It can rear its head in various ways. Sometimes it takes you by surprise. You get to know your key triggers and protective factors — some habits to avoid, others to cultivate. Sometimes things go wrong and it’s nobody’s fault. But, in my case, it just ticks along and minds its own business like any other biological process.

Hardly anything triggers me these days. But I still can’t think of bathroom scales without being propelled into my childhood. The scaley life-or-death-machine is icky and weirdly compelling.

I will never be able to encounter a human-weighing device without a frisson of revulsion mixed with anticipation — what is the weight of my heart?

I don’t own a personal weighing machine. I never will.

The author recently participated in a cross-continental genetic study of anorexia nervosa (AN). People with and without experiences of AN from the U.S., Australia, Sweden and Denmark can join the study.

For eating disorder support, call the National Eating Disorders Association Live Helpline (800) 931–2237