Eating Disorder Talk

Last week, I started writing about my own story. I talked of my thirst for knowledge about eating disorders and ultimately, my quest for love. Here begins the next part…

So picture a seven-year old. A little chubby, pretty introverted, very sensitive and eager to please. This same girl will smile and act how you want her to while simultaneously planning her own descent.

I started restricting slowly. Eating half of the lunches that my father packed for me - I really didn’t enjoy bologna sandwiches that much anyways, and the pudding that was a treat just made it more evident the lack of wealth in our household.

While other kids were trading wagon wheels and cookies, I was left with a can of generic brand chocolate pudding - the kind that had the ring to pull the top off, but that only the ring pulls off instead. I rarely got the damn stuff open all of the way. I would also have a bright yellow thermos of milk. By lunchtime, it would be warm and if I didn’t finish it when I’d gone home for the day, I’d get to have it with dinner, as well.

I found out quickly that throwing out my lunches was monitored by the cafeteria and playground attendants. The threat of calling my dad to report me seemed serious since I’d been raised that we couldn’t afford much and his heavy hand might teach me the error of wasting food. So I learned that the bathrooms would be my new favourite place.

I flushed my sandwiches in a mixture of warm homo milk and toilet water, hoping the toilet wouldn’t overflow and draw attention to my lunchtime rebellion. I purposely pulled the tabs off of the pudding cans, then claimed that I couldn’t open them and therefore they were permissible to toss.

Within a year, I was becoming “harder to wake up in the morning,” leaving little, if any, time to eat my breakfast of (also) generic Cheerios, drowning in (also homo) milk. Flash forward another year and I’d gone through a growth spurt, was nearing my tween height, and was eating only dinner and cornflakes. Cornflakes because Special K was a great diet cereal but we couldn’t afford much more than (again) no-name brand cornflakes.

By the time I was in seventh grade, I was five feet tall and about 80 pounds. I soon hit my lowest weight, 69 pounds.
Flash forward through two years of treatment and “recovery,” which I will not expand upon, and I’m my adult height (5′6″, though I would grown another half inch in my twenty-second year) and a “recovered” 95 pounds. Then I took the big plunge into modeling.

This is by far, one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever made. Next week, I’ll explain why.