It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (19 page)

I had known that losing weight would be difficult. For the thirteen months that I doggedly pursued a smaller self, I promised myself that one day it would all be over. I was certain that with thinness came release, relief. I imagined happiness just behind it. I expected all the hard work I’d put into losing to be rewarded. I imagined that the journey, long and arduous as it was, would lead me to some peaceful paradise. I’d finally be able to shed the backpack that burdened me, every last pound, and I’d sit in ease. There contentment would just seep into my skin like humidity in the air.

I was the smallest I’d ever been. For the first time in my entire
twenty-one years of life, I was not obese. I should have been rejoicing in such an accomplishment. The world was supposed to be my oyster. I suppose I thought I would wake up on the morning of my first day in a new body, and life would exist in Day-Glo. Neons, brights, music booming and boisterous, faces smiling, doors unlocked and opening, a fan blowing on me like the ones you see in photo shoots, a sense of purpose, a lightness of spirit.

Instead, it was rain. It was nothing like I’d imagined. The sadness, the isolation, the loneliness, the dullness in color palette. The heaviness of being.

My thoughts were consumed by food. What I’d eat, when I’d eat, how I’d eat, and how much it all cost nutritionally filled the entirety of my brain space. I found it hard to focus on anything else. I became obsessed not only with counting calories and trying to stay at the exact same number each day, but with the healthfulness of the foods I consumed, too. I’d enter a grocery store and browse for sixty minutes, internally screaming at myself for not being able to even choose what I wanted. I couldn’t manage the decision between what was healthiest, what sounded best at the moment, and what I could “afford” in my calorie budget. All I wanted was to eat alone, in quiet, in secret. I needed to avoid eyes, speculation, and judgment of what I’d chosen to put on my plate. Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t—I felt as though everything I ate in view of others was wrong. A salad made them think I lived in a cage of diet and restriction. “How boring it must be to eat only lettuce,” or “Salad’s for the birds,” and “Maybe that’s why I’m not thin … I can’t give up taste just to be skinny!” Or if the salad was big, voluminous but certainly lower in calories than, say, a sandwich or soup, people would comment on its enormity. “Wow, that’s huge!
I can’t believe you weigh less than I do and you eat so much!” Or they’d remark on the fruits and vegetables I chose, warning me of all the gobs of sugar in pineapple and the loads of fat in avocado. Both are perfectly healthy but come with misperceptions of their nutritious virtue. And if I dared have a slice of pizza—alongside a salad, no doubt—they looked at me with worried eyes. “Careful. You don’t want to put that weight back on.” Nothing I put into my mouth went without comment by someone. I imagined myself under a microscope, with everyone gathering closely to see what I’d do next. I begged silently to be left alone. Paranoia set in and, with it, a greater need for compulsive control.

Save for Daniel, I felt isolated. I told him every last detail of my unraveling. I let him into the obsessive downward spiral of my new world. His support, his unrelenting belief that “it will get better, kiddo” held me together just enough that I wasn’t falling apart. He stayed home with me when I couldn’t bear to be out. He was patient. He tiptoed while I stomped, whispered while I screamed. But the comfort wasn’t without its own set of problems. Pouring my inner turmoil onto him left me empty and him drowning. There wasn’t room for him when our home of a relationship was filled to the hilt with me and me and me. As I began to feel guilty, I started retreating from even him, my sole source of peace.

I still missed eating the foods I’d shunned while losing. The gooey cookies, the cupcakes, every single candy bar—I hated the part of me that wanted them badly. I dismissed her as weak. My body felt as rigid, as tight, as my whole life had become. And while my weight hadn’t dipped to an unnatural low, my mind had.

I felt myself withdrawing, and my friends, my family, they saw it, too. I began staying home more, not wanting, not even feeling
able, to stray from routine. Being social was exhausting, as though it were taking something out of me, an energy I didn’t have in the first place. I made excuses to stay at home on Fridays, on Saturdays. What I tried to display as a natural decline in my desire to go out partying was a cover for my fear of the calories that came with drinking and late-night eating. I couldn’t save up enough calories in the day to waste on alcohol; they were far too precious to be used frivolously. I couldn’t bear the thought of how hungry I might be after a night at the bars, when we’d return home and everyone suggested takeout pizza and calzones. I would not, could not, commit to coffee dates, mall trips, movies, anything before I’d completed my workout for the day.

I weighed and measured every morsel, never straying from my allowance of sixteen hundred calories a day. I panicked at restaurants when I was out of my own kitchenly control.

One Friday night, after a week of convincing on Daniel’s part and careful deliberation on mine, we ventured out to dinner and a movie. We went to the Amherst Brewing Company, an old favorite of ours, where I had never missed an opportunity to order one of their specialty build-your-own burgers and sweet potato fries. Daniel was hopeful that being in a spot we once loved would remind me of the fun we used to have, when dates were casual and eating was easy.

The moment we were seated, I felt a cold sweat break out all over me, like hives. The menu. The options. The decisions. The hidden calories. What I wanted. What I should want.
How much oil? Is that a fancy way of saying fried?
I was lost. Daniel reached across the table and put his hand on mine, smiling and reassuring me. “Please, get whatever you want most. One meal won’t do any
harm.” I looked at him and nodded, not believing a word of it. I was grateful that he chose to eat healthy with me most of the time. But he struggled with consistency, often limboing between either eating restrictively or bingeing. The weight he’d lost over the summer and the semester before was slowly starting to creep back on.

“I think I’m going to get this salad,” I offered. His face dropped slightly, as if he’d anticipated handmade pasta and instead got packaged ramen noodles. He urged me to reconsider, to order exactly what sounded most delicious to me in that moment. Trying to fight against the obsessive voice in my head, I did.

I ordered the meatloaf. And then, instead of enjoying our date, I agonized over my choice all the minutes before our meals arrived. We barely held on to the thread of a conversation, because I couldn’t concentrate on Daniel. My mind raced around like crazy, regretting the meatloaf.

“Can we cancel it?” I asked him.

“Just try it,” he said softly.

I saw our waitress walking toward us with two solid platters weighing down both of her hands. When she set mine down in front of me, the smells of seasoned beef and buttery mashed potatoes hit me hard. Hunger, desire—they came to me like old memories. I wanted them.

Just as I began to give in, my new form of obsession sounded off like an alarm in my head. It shattered my reverie. In seconds, I pushed my plate away from me. It was as if the control system in my brain had sent out emergency signals. I wanted no part of that plate. I wanted to leave.

The hour that followed is a memory that exists with such a halo of shame that I have tried to block it out. On Daniel’s urging, I
rigidly ate half of that meatloaf and a quarter of the potatoes. I chewed each bite hatefully, painfully, as though even enjoyment would add extra calories. Outwardly, I was angry at him. For wanting me to eat it when he knew how much I struggled, for urging me to order it in the first place. But inwardly, I was angry with myself for allowing my obsession to ruin not only our date, but my life, too.

Finally, I threw my napkin over my plate and walked out of the restaurant. Daniel quickly paid the bill, not having eaten more than half of his pulled pork, and rushed out to catch me. We drove home in a car filled with the shrill sounds of my hysteria. Sobbing, I shouted the most brutal, hurtful things I could muster in my mind at Daniel. He argued back, the volume of his voice gradually rising. Over and over, he tried to get me to see that the meal wasn’t nearly the big deal I was making it. But I couldn’t believe that I’d eaten all I had. How many calories had I consumed? I hated him for the whole meal. It was his idea, after all. I wished, desperately, to erase the entire night, to wipe clean the slate of my calories as if they were scribbles on a chalkboard.

When we got inside our apartment, I’d reached a breaking point. Daniel wasn’t acknowledging how much the meal had affected me, or at least he wasn’t willing to accept it. In no time, it became a fight about our whole relationship and not simply the meatloaf I’d eaten. Every wrongdoing, every past hurt, everything faulty between the two of us was dredged up. And when I couldn’t handle the mounting discomfort inside me any longer, I slapped him across the face.

I then collapsed against him in hysteria, simultaneously seeking support and lashing out in pathetic violence. He swallowed me in
his embrace, holding me tightly, offering comfort and protecting himself from my flailing limbs.

I slapped him because I couldn’t slap myself as easily. I slapped him because I couldn’t contain the rage coursing through my veins. I slapped him so he would feel pain, the way I did. I slapped him because of my own cowardice, because of my inability to accept my own actions. I slapped him because of meatloaf. And even a thousand apologies will never change it. I slapped him.

The next day, I found myself sitting in a corner of Daniel’s and my bedroom, feeling a kind of hopelessness that I’d never known before. There weren’t enough apologies to give to Daniel. Regret spilled from my eyes. I recognized the cold, hard floor as what it was: rock bottom.

Daniel urged me to seek help—a nutritionist, a therapist, anyone who could help. His suggestion didn’t make me defensive. I knew the love and concern that informed it. Together we searched online for nutritionists. I called the first one that popped up in my Google results.

Three days later, I had my first visit with a registered dietitian. I told her my history—the whole long journey from there to here. And when I was done, she paused to think a minute before speaking.

“You know, Andie, many people can think of at least one time in their lives when they felt at ease with food, or at least that they had an appropriate relationship with it at some point. They probably didn’t have to think too hard about what they’d eat and how it would fuel them; they just had a trust in themselves and their hunger and fullness cues. Children are excellent examples of having a natural food intuition. They eat when they are hungry and
generally stop when they are full. But you have never had what one can consider a ‘normal’ relationship with food. For you, it seems the earliest memories involve overeating or eating for some other reason than hunger. So, then, I cannot tell you to return to a place of trust with food, a state of normal eating. You have to learn that now at twenty-one.”

She made sense. Perhaps walking in the door that morning, I’d assumed she would give me a meal plan, something prescriptive to help usher out the anxiety. I thought she’d tell me to eat more, or I at least wished that she’d tell me something that concrete. What she gave me instead was a frame of mind, a clue that the work would be much more than what to eat and when. It involved changing how my mind worked. She encouraged me to think less about the food itself and more about the ways I was using it as something other than physical nourishment. An hour into our session, she sensed how broken I was.

And then she told me, almost apologetically, “We’re going to get through this. But, my dear, you’ve developed a form of eating disorder. Not traditional anorexia or bulimia, no. But your intense fears, your preoccupations and current obsessive thought patterns are in line with EDNOS, which stands for ‘Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.’ ” Her eyes scanned my face, the expression in hers soft and compassionate.

Hearing her describe the category of disorder, I realized that all of my life was an eating disorder. No one who reaches morbid obesity is without a disorder of eating. No one whose weight preoccupies their lives for two decades. Only now, I’d swung sharply from a lifetime of overeating to extreme restriction. Both sides of the same obsessive coin.

She suggested I see a therapist. I was apprehensive about the idea at first. Not because I thought therapy was only for the deranged, the semi-screwed-up, but because I worried,
Can it even help me?
I was certain that I was beyond therapy.
There’s nothing I haven’t openly admitted to myself, nothing I don’t already know about myself
. I thought of Mom, who had gone to the same counselor for years and never seemed to find any relief for her aching mind.

And yet I went anyway. It was desperation that practically escorted me through the office door.
Save me
, I thought upon seeing the therapist’s kind face.

I wish I could say that the therapy saved me, but it did not. It simply could not. Nothing on its own could fix everything. But the talking aloud helped. Being forced to verbalize my feelings and anxieties changed a part of me at least. I realized that so much of what I thought about myself and about life in general was slightly askew. My perceptions and the things that seemed truest proved false many times. She suggested journaling, simply putting pen to paper all the times I felt anxious about food—anytime I found myself wanting to tear into three king-size Reese’s peanut butter cups while also wishing that Reese’s went out of business.
Why are you so uncomfortable in this moment? What is it that makes you want to dive into a chocolate fountain?

The writing was familiar. Not because I felt I was penning some important piece, but because it forced an articulation of feelings. I wrote in a black Moleskine notebook, mostly at night. And though not all the entries led me to some greater understanding, I believed I was working toward something better. Even without getting to the absolute root of my discomfort, I knew that simply the act of writing—and many times, rereading—the stories I consistently
told myself about who I am as a person shed light on how I handle stress and emotion. Oftentimes, as I grudgingly wrote when I’d rather have been eating the contents of my nearest 7-Eleven, I realized patterns in my pain.