Every story has to start somewhere and my story starts at 158.6 pounds. That's what the scale glared back at me in blood red letters just two nights ago. To some, 158.6 pounds might be a perfectly respectable number. To some, it might even be their goal weight. But for me? For me, at barely five feet tall, it screams that I have lost myself. I am lost somewhere behind layers and layers of food and emotions and my biggest and greatest fear of all is that I will never find my way out.
I have struggled with food for nearly as long as I can remember. I began my first diet in the fifth grade. The fifth grade. While other girls my age spent their summer at the pool, I spent my summer riding my bike to the nearest gas station for diet Pepsi (oh horror of horrors) and cans of Slim Fast. In seventh grade a 'friend' kindly suggested that I try a bit harder to lose the extra weight my small frame was sporting. We were jumping on the trampoline in her back yard and she informed me that the tops of my legs should in no way be touching. And the funny part is that I was not even over weight as a child. I was perfectly, perfectly average.
In high school my brother, my only sibling, left home and he did not leave on good terms. My father worked a lot, my mom cried a lot, and I felt a lot. All of the feelings. Our house was quiet and I often felt like the walls were closing in around me. I would struggle to take deep breaths, but should you have asked, I couldn't have told you exactly what it was that I was feeling. All I knew was that I did not feel good. I was uncomfortable in our home and I was uncomfortable in my body. I didn't feel good enough or right enough and often I would eat to feel better. Food filled the hollow places that appeared in my life after my brother left and our house quit feeling like a happy home. But the food never made me feel happy for long. It numbed the pain, but not the feelings of disgust I would feel towards myself after I had eaten far more than I should.
One day, in tenth grade, I watched a movie on television about a girl with Anorexia, and the control and restraint the main character showed, along with her thin frame, actually appealed to me. But it turned out that I was not very good at restricting food, because without the food I only felt empty, so I practiced to become a bulimic. I thought that would be my answer. I could eat and eat and eat, but still remain small. I say that I practiced because making yourself throw up is not nearly as easy as it might seem. I would sit for minutes on end on my bathroom floor and shove my finger down the back of my throat. My eyes would water and I would gag. My finger nail would scratch my throat and I would choke. Sometimes it would work and the contents of what I had eaten would come right back up, but other times all of my effort would only result in fits of coughing and crying. In my mind I was a failure at controlling my food and controlling my body and my entire life felt out of my control.
In college, thoughts of food consumed me. I had friends and went to my classes, but most of the free space in my brain was filled with thoughts of food. Where would I eat dinner that night? What would I order? And if I was eating with friends, thoughts of the food on their plates ruined the enjoyment of the food on my own. Should I have gotten what they did? Would that have been better? I'm such a loser. I can't even order the best foods. It was ridiculous really, how much thought I put into a chicken wrap from Wings N' More.
The summer after sophomore year I came clean to my parents about my struggles. My years and years of struggles. I told them that sometimes I ate and sometimes I didn't. I told them that sometimes I threw up and sometimes I took laxatives for dessert. I told them that I obsessed about food, and that my anxiety was out of control, and that I worried no one could ever love me and I would be alone forever. I told them I was tired and I just wanted to be free of it all. The very next week I was on a plane flying to Arizona and the very best treatment facility that money could buy.
In treatment, I felt like a fake. The girls I was there with were professionals. They were masters at their art of bingeing, restricting, or purging and I couldn't seem to get any one of the three just right. Accept for maybe the bingeing, but that felt like the most shameful of all. I felt embarrassed when people claimed that I obviously wasn't anorexic, and I resented that I had to be put on the exercise plan. I checked into treatment at 103 pounds, but that wasn't far off from my suggested 105 to 115 pound range, so the goal of my treatment was health. Learning to live in balance. To accept food as a normal, healthy part of life. To realize that an occasional treat is okay to be enjoyed, but to understand that food is for fuel and it should most definitely not control me. In treatment I had lots and lots of therapy where I was able to list my fears, and ultimately try and face them. I learned that all of the things I was struggling with really had nothing to do with food at all. I felt lonely, and abandoned, and I feared that was all I would ever feel. People came and went, but food never did. My own family had taught me that no matter your dreams, no matter how hard you tried, sometimes life just did not turn out the way that you wanted it to. But food always did. Food would not let you down, so I had begun to cling to it like it was my lifeline when my world was spinning out of control. I loved, loved food and I also hated it.
That summer in Arizona ended up being one of the best of my life. It was a time out from the real world. I went to therapy and made some amazing friendships. I would spend hours journaling, and reading, and praying. That summer I found hope that maybe I really could be free of all of the crazy. I left treatment at a healthy 108 pounds and had never felt better. I had dreams and I was ready to pursue them.
Not long after my return back to college I began dating the man that is now my husband. We had a whirlwind romance. Two months after dating we were engaged and six months after that we were honeymooning in Mexico. For the first time in forever I felt blissfully HAPPY. We chose to start a family right away and five months after saying I do, we found out that I was expecting. I had always assumed that I would struggle with pregnancy, with the weight gain and with how my body would be required to change, but I loved every moment of my first pregnancy. I loved being pregnant. Every day that I grew my daughter inside of me I felt purposeful and important. I loved the notion that I could eat and it was just okay. I loved that I gained forty pounds and no one said anything. Not one thing.
It took a year after having my daughter for the weight to come back off, but most of it eventually did. A mere five or ten pounds remained, but I was not bothered by that fact. I had a good man that loved me and a darling baby girl. When my daughter was 14 months old we found out that I was expecting baby girl number two. Again, pure joy filled my heart. Another pregnancy, another thirty five pounds, but after I had my second daughter, the extra weight never did come off. Since then I have had two more children, two amazing sons, but my weight has never gone back to what it once was. I kept ten extra pounds with each pregnancy and today I find myself roughly forty pounds over weight... nearly the very same weight I was when I went in to deliver my very first child.
I look in the mirror and don't recognize who I have become. I have a full length mirror on my bathroom door, and just yesterday I realized that I am too wide to see myself fully in it. I haven't worn a dress or cute clothes in years and I avoid social situations that involve fancy attire. I turn my husband down when he wants me to accompany him to formal work functions. I don't restrict (obviously) and I don't purge, but I do binge and I have let the food back into the spaces of my brain and my heart where it consumes me once more. I feel trapped in this body that I hate and I just want out. I want freedom. I want to be free of the food and the thoughts, so that I can find me once more.
I don't know how this story will end, but I am putting it out there. I am starting here, at the beginning, at 158.6 pounds and I will see where the road leads as I struggle towards recovery once more.
