Smaller Me
- Miss
- Mar 10, 2017
- 7 min read
Hey friends!
This post is a little different than anything I've posted so far. This one is personal and painful. Everyone that has known me more than twenty minutes knows that I am not embarrassed of my past or my choices. I have some crazy stories to tell, and I am a firm believer in sharing my stories to help others. The way I see it, the more I share my stories the more lives I could help. More often than not, when I tell someone about my past they reply with, "Oh my gosh me too!" or "I have a friend in that situation right now, tell me more". I have never once been ridiculed for my past or my choices. I have been questioned, but it has always been from pure curiosity rather than judgement. I do not think we, as a society, give each other enough credit. Our people truly are a compassionate people, but we have decided to judge ourselves for them rather than give them a chance to know us. I decided about two years ago that I would not hide my past from anyone, because it has made me who I am today.
I am a fairly small woman. I measure in at 5'1" and am right smack in the middle of the average American woman's build. I am pretty happy with the way I look today, even though I am about thirty pounds heavier than I have been in my entire life. When I was a child I was robust. I had a plump belly and chubby cheeks. At around nine years old, I noticed I was larger than almost all my friends. I remember the exact day my weight issues began. My friends and I were all on the playground. They began a conversation about their weight. They were comparing who weighed the most or least. I had never weighed myself before or even been curious about my weight until that moment. So, when I got home, I weighed myself first thing. My friends had been saying they weighed around the 80s or 90s, and I weighed 109 pounds. I immediately noticed my thick thighs (I have always been blessed with strong, thick thighs), my pudgy tummy, and my flabby arms. I was incredibly embarrassed. I decided, that moment, that I had to lose weight. I wanted to look just like my friends.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
The next day, I stopped eating breakfast. My amazing mother noticed this pattern trending for several days and explained to me the importance of eating breakfast. So, after that I pretended to eat breakfast to avoid being scolded. I wanted to be skinny. So my journey with eating disorders began.
As I approached my teens, I began the weight watchers diet. This is an extremely safe and healthy diet when implemented correctly. I did all the research and calculated exactly how much a person my age and size should eat each day. Each day I made sure to eat under that amount, even if it was just one point under. By age thirteen, I was embarrassed of my body so badly that I almost always wore sweats and a sweatshirt to hide what was underneath. I almost always stood with one arm straight down to my side with the other arm clutching it around the forearm. I was trying to hide my tummy. It nearly drove my mom up a wall. I could not walk past a mirror without scrutinizing myself. I loathed my body. The picture to the left was taken when I was fourteen; ten years later, I am able to see how wrong I was.
As I grew older and moved onto high school, I developed a disorder called body dysmorphic disorder. This is when a person looks in the mirror and sees a false image. The brain actually distorts the truth and changes what is processed from eyes to brain to create something completely untrue. I remember the very day the next step in my journey began. I went to a rather small high school. One where you know all the people with whom you graduate, their birthdays, and their siblings. At fifteen years old, I could not take a joke. I definitely could not handle it if someone spoke about my body. If they spoke well of my body I thought they were patronizing me, and if they spoke ill of my body I internalized it and allowed it to eat away at me. There was a joke going around in my grade where some of my classmates would call me the michelin man.
You know him. The tire dude that is basically a walking marshmallow. Yeah. My classmates thought it was hilarious to compare me to him. I have no idea how this started, but it took a year or two to finally die. It embarrassed me horribly, and seemed to make some think they could freely discuss my body size and shape in any way they pleased. There were some harsh and painful statements that I took to heart and allowed myself to believe. This, however, was not the game changer for me.
At the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, one of my classmates brought me a book. He handed it to me in the middle of an area crowded with other students and started laughing. When I read the cover I was highly confused. The book was called Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. He said, "Here, read this and maybe you can learn a few things about how to lose weight." I was so embarrassed. I took the book, threw it in the trash, then proceeded to speed walk to the bathroom where I sat in a stall and cried. I didn't tell anyone, because I agreed that I needed to lose weight.
After that day, I began skipping almost all meals. I made sure to never eat more than 600 calories each day. I became an amazing actor and liar. It was actually easier to skip meals without anyone noticing than I thought it would be. I had athletics during first period each day, so breakfast was the easiest meal to skip. No one knew if I ate before or not. The kicker was lunch. I don't know about everyone else, but I loved school lunches. I had to convince myself that I wasn't hungry. I still went to the lunch room every day and sat with my classmates. I still went through the lunch line and took my lunch. But each day I would pick at it, take one tiny bite, and announce to everyone around me that I DID NOT like how it tasted. I would then proceed to chat during the lunch period and let my food sit and turn cold. No one ever questioned this. Dinner was particularly easy to skip, as I played softball every afternoon. We hopped on the bus almost every day around 3:30, played two games, and returned home lucky to be in bed by 10:00 pm each night. My parents would bring me two Reese's cups to eat before every game and a Rain Gatorade. I always took a small bite from one Reese's then gave the other to someone else while throwing away the remainder of the bitten one sneakily enough that no one would notice. The only times I ate a meal were when my family and I would go to a restaurant. And this was my life. For two years I lived this way. Every waking moment was centered one what I had to eat to survive and thriving on all the compliments I received from losing so much weight. Each compliment made me want to lose more, so they would compliment me more. I could never lose enough weight. No matter how much I lost, I always wanted to lose 2, 3, 5 more pounds. All the while, I still loathed my body. Complete disdain for this vessel that carries me around.
As I transitioned from high school to college, I began to binge eat. I was around different people that thought I was naturally tiny and didn't know my eating patterns. I was buying my own food and eating in the campus cafeteria. I would consume more calories in one setting than I had during any one day the previous year. Throughout the next few years, I would binge for about three months until I completely hated myself. Then I would restrict to about 600 calories each day until I got back down to the size I was used to. This is an atrocious way to live, by the way. It's painful and filled with more downs than ups. Later, I began losing control of the restricting times and was binge eating more often than not. It was around this time I taught myself to throw up. It became extremely easy for me to binge then purge. I cried after every purge, but I needed to do it.
Today, as I said earlier, I am about thirty pounds heavier than I have ever been, but it's okay. There are days when I am not overly excited about how I look, but I do not spend every waking moment thinking about what I just ate and feeling guilty for eating it. Or thinking about what I need to eat next or worrying about my weight. My life has been shaped through this (as has my body). It affected me physically, mentally, and emotionally. I have finally learned to love myself, and that has been the biggest accomplishment of my life. I don't need to be a smaller me to love myself or to receive love. I have never lost a friend because of my body size or shape. I have, however, lost friends because of my obsession with my body size and shape.
I guess, I just urge anyone reading this to choose your words carefully when you talk to others. Think cautiously the next time you want to compliment someone on something physical about themselves. DO NOT EVER talk down to a person because of the way their body is shaped or sized. I read a quote recently that I adore, "Do not point out something about a person that they cannot change in 10 seconds." This, I believe, is a good rule of thumb for how to talk with other people.
If you struggle, like I have, please seek help. You deserve to be healthy. Your body does not deserve that kind of treatment, and you deserve to love yourself. The world needs your unique self.
Sincerely,
Miss
