it’s national eating disorder awareness week, and a lot of my friends are posting about it on facebook, but i don’t want to do that bc it feels weird so here

i had disordered eating for the last 2 years of high school. it seems more severe now than it did back then, maybe because back then i thought it was normal. okay maybe not normal--i knew it wasn’t normal--but i’d hear about the girls who dropped 60 pounds and got so sick they had to be hospitalized and fed through an iv tube and i knew that was never going to be me so i thought mine wasn’t that severe. looking back on it now, i’m honestly amazed that any part of me thought what i was doing was in any way rational. 

i never wanted to say i had anorexia; i read stuff online saying you could only have anorexia if you were underweight, so i never used that word about myself. it was just a diet, or, at worst, unhealthy eating habits. i didn’t tell anyone except three of my closest friends from other schools, because i didn’t want anyone from my school to find out for fear that they’d try to stop me, or worse yet, tell my parents. one of my friends from my school noticed something was weird and she actually reached out to one of those people that i told and it was one of the scariest days of my life even though i know it was coming from a place of love.

it was worst at the beginning of my senior year. college applications and schoolwork and honor societies and extracurriculars and band and my job and everything kind of came crashing down at once, and i wanted to feel like i had control over something at least, but i guess i overdid it. i have some strangely specific memories of that time, almost like vignettes: sitting in my first period ap gov class, not paying attention, writing out on the little calendar in my planner how many calories i would eat each day and meticulously calculating how long it’d take me to drop six pounds (according to my numbers, 25 days.) recalibrating my daily calorie counter in my head each time i took a bite of something to make sure i wouldn’t go over 700. i was obsessed with myfitnesspal; i would literally measure out half a cup of granola, weigh the amount of blueberries i put on it, to make sure i was getting accurate counts. i had the same thing at lunch every day: a handful of spinach topped with either a few berries and walnuts, half of an apple and a bit of crumbled cheddar cheese, or, if i was feeling extravagant, maybe slices of boiled egg. i drank a lot of those zero calorie fizzy water ice things for energy. i can’t even smell them anymore without feeling revulsion. 

i would flip my shit over the smallest things. i’d never eat everything that was on my dinner plate; one night, i came home from work, where i’d had a leftover salad for dinner, and my mom wanted me to finish my steak from the night before. it was three bites. i knew automatically that was about 100 calories. i’d already gone over my limit and eaten 750 that day. i couldn’t fucking eat anything else. i ended up crying over a piece of goddamn steak and making up something stupid about failing a quiz in school. whenever possible, i’d throw food out sneakily, or not eat meals and then tell my parents i had. 

i was never bulimic, which i’m really thankful for. i remember the closest i ever got to making myself throw up: after my interview at barnard, my family took me out to an indian restaurant to celebrate. indian was--is--my favorite kind of food. my dad told me i had to order everything. i did. i tried it all. i ate so much that i felt sluggish. in retrospect, it was a normal sized meal for me now, but to my artificially shrunken stomach then, it was way too much to handle. i knelt on the tile next to the toilet in the single-stall bathroom staring at the toilet water like it was taunting me. i dry heaved a couple times, stood up, brushed off my tights and walked out. 

vomiting would’ve been a step too far. later on, while i was beginning to ‘recover’ (i didn’t fully get over my issues with food until this summer), i would stand over the garbage can in my kitchen, take bites of brownies my mom made, chew them up, savor the flavor, and then spit them into a paper towel and throw them out. if we ever went out to eat, i’d look at the menus online beforehand to figure out what the lowest-calorie option was. we went to cheesecake factory once; i remember being thankful they had calorie counts for all their items online, then disgusted when i saw how high those counts were, then breathing a sigh of relief when i found an appetizer-sized portion of vegetable tacos that replaced the shell with a leaf of lettuce. it was 300 calories--half of my daily total. 

the closest i ever came to telling a medical professional was during an annual checkup during my senior year. i’d plummeted from 162 lbs, my highest weight in the summer before my sophomore year, to 134. she asked my how i did it: was it exercise? was it being on my feet at my job? i couldn’t give her an answer; i just started tearing up. i’m sure somewhere on my record there’s a note about risk for an eating disorder, but that’s all it ever was: a note. 

there was no clear-cut recovery process for me. there was no one moment where i stopped and said ‘i need to fix this.’ it was kind of just gradual; i had relapses, of course, but it generally wasn’t that bad since i came to college. i did gain a ton of weight my freshman year; it fluctuated a lot because of the all-you-can-eat meal plan, which was designed to help prevent eating disorders and food related anxiety for the students at my women’s college, but ironically ended up giving me more anxiety because of the lack of autonomy i was given over my choices of what to eat. but at some point either at the end of my second semester or the beginning of the summer, i finally stopped tallying up calories in my head. 

my weight has stabilized since then. i haven’t been on a scale in a year, but last i saw, it was something around 140, which is probably where it still is. i’m fine with that. it’s weird: i’m finally the size 6 i’d always wanted to be, but i’m not even sure how i got there. i looked in the mirror this morning and realized that somewhere along the line, i’d developed the thigh gap i’d always dreamed of; weirder yet, i found out i didn’t really care that i could see light shining through a tiny gap between my legs. i bought a crop top this summer. i still have flab on my stomach. it pokes out over the top of my jeans. i don’t care, though; i like the way i look in crop tops. i still don’t own a single pair of shorts, a remnant of my battle with my most detested body part--my thighs--but maybe this summer, i’ll finally get there. 

i don’t have tips for recovery, unfortunately. i don’t even know how i did it. i just stopped caring at some point. i have better things to worry about than some arbitrary number that’s supposed to quantify my physical being. the best thing i did, i think, is that i stopped comparing myself to other people.

it still comes and goes in waves. some days i think i’m beautiful; some days i’m fixated on my acne, my fat chin, my saggy tits, the pouch of fat above my pelvis, the cellulite dimples on my thighs. there’s nothing i can do about it. the society i live in has programmed me to notice these things. the best i can do is remember that it doesn’t define me.