The One You Feed
I slip off my sneakers at the heels to avoid the extra pound or two added by their weight. I have grown accustomed to not looking at the digital screen that reflects back my quantified worth. I am 20 and I have decided that I am over the years of teenage starvation. I have not looked at a scale intentionally since I was 16.
The scale at the doctor's office was the manual sliding scale or sorts, so I was unphased by stepping on its cold metal base. I look up at the popcorn textured wall as the young male doctor teases the alignment of the knob to center its balance. I step off the scale, my eyes moving from the wall to the dizzying carpet pattern in one intentional motion.
“141 pounds, that is such a healthy weight!” He repeats back to me.
My head spins as I struggle to slip on my tied sneakers over the bulk of my ankle. Though I have done everything in my control to avoid attachment to that number, I cannot help but to spiral. While waiting for the male physician to enter the small white room, I pull up the Body Mass Index calculator on my phone. I enter my sex, weight, height and age as I have been so familiar with this software before. I skim through meaningless percentiles to the bolded transcription, You are neither underweight nor overweight according to health experts*. Your weight is in the healthy range for your height and age.
I stare blankly at the screen. My eyes well up with tears and I am gripping my left wrist with my thumb and index finger as a habit. I know that healthy is a word associated with positive connotations and I should be happy, but I am not. There is the voice in my head that has not emerged in a while. It tells me that I am fat. I am unlovable. I need to purge.
The thing is, I have been doing everything right. Recently at least. I have been playing the game the right way this time. I have been eating my protein in grams equal to my weight. I have been drinking enough water to piss out the niagara falls and still I did not compare to the woman I see walking down campus.
I was in the best shape of my life. I was running on weekdays. Doing the “10-minute abs” Youtube videos for core circuits that left my abdomen sore as I hunched over the toilet seat. Drinking protein shakes and eating clean. I really felt like I had been doing better. But this too is an illusion that perpetuates the incessant voice regressing me towards my days of disordered eating habits.
California birthed a new era of “health and wellness” for the young girls who inhabit its sunny mirage. Matching workout sets. Pilates and clean juice after morning cardio. Drinking supplements and whole foods that restore gut health and reduce bloating.
Orthorexia Nervosa is defined as: an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.
As a girl who crossed the country from Michigan to Southern California to go to college, I was elated to join the fandom. It was a fad endorsed by fitness models and bikini pictures at the beach that populated my instagram feed. I would eat acai bowls and run long distances for fun. I would cut out unnecessary processed foods and only eat the essentials. This is how it starts of course. Because when you have a goal, there is never moderation. There are actions that yield results.
It took me a while to conclude- but from going to parties and interacting with girls my age here- no one looks good here just because they work out. That too is a lie we choose to believe.
They are all hiding their dirty secrets of suffering to make their beauty all the more effortness. These are the girls that I hear throwing up in the bathroom. Shitting out their nutrient intake with health supplements that are nothing more than glamorized laxatives. The really skinny ones almost always have a nicotine addiction to suppress their appetite between meals. Some have become so detached that they forget to eat. All of these girls have eventually become me in one way or another. I swallow the thought.
It did not take long for this information to derail any progress I theorized in my cross country escape to California. Within the three semesters of classes I attended, I was right back to where I was mentally as a teenager, with a sneakier and more evolved skill set.
My parents don't call often. They pay for my tuition that is left over from all of my applied scholarships- but have refused to help financially support me in any other endeavor. Though they have money to give, they hold onto their wealth with white knuckles- as if having children was their worst financial move possible. Incessant guilt comes from asking them for money, and shame for medical bills required. I have never felt deserving of their money, time nor will.
I have money left over from summer jobs, but in reality, I am dirt poor. Not having money tends to make not eating even easier. In fact, it is actually financially beneficial to my situation. I spend my grocery money on drugs and nicotine to suppress the gnawing hunger that resides in my insides.
I have never once thought about asking them for help.
I suppose it started at home. When I lived in Michigan, just 30 minutes outside of Detroit. I grew up in a family spawned of athletes. It was their athletic ability and fixation on bettering their body that led them to pursue a higher education through athletic scholarships. My mother was a basketball player, trained by her father before her, while my dad wrestled physically, to avoid processing anything internally. Their tall genetic framing combined created my lanky stature that outgrew my peers rather quickly. I was 5 '8 in the eighth grade while most of my peers talked to me with their heads tilted slightly up. I was an awkward kid with knobby knees and long arms that drooped past my asymmetric hips. I was bullied for my flat chest and lack of ass, but even this was better than the all consuming fear that was being overweight.
I vividly remember the transition of weighting triple digits. Somewhere between fourth and fifth grade the scale would teeter between 98 and 101 pounds- and this is when the parasite unhinged its jaws and clung into my flesh. It was an irrational thought of course, that I could stay little and light forever. It only got worse with age-when I realized it was impossible to grasp onto the past versions of my prepubescent body.
My parents made it very clear through their behaviors and words that skinnier is better.
My mother looks in the mirror and curses her reflection, though her hips have always draped exactly like mine. She calls her abdomen her “problem area”, as if her entire thorax was a walking wrongdoing. She traces her stretch marks from childbirth and reminds me that before she had kids, she was under 120 pounds in college.
I give her the satisfaction of nods and assurance that she looks great for her age, though I feel her eyes hot on my skin with envy. As a teenager my mother would come up from behind me, and place her hands at the small of my waist creating a makeshift ruler. She would proudly present the distance between her hands and announce,
“My skinny-mini-me!”
The inflection in the syllables gave her great joy, and everytime those words left her mouth it felt like love.
My mother sat at the edge of the kitchen table, hunched over in a bird-like posture. Her elongated skeleton fingers slowly chipped away the shell of a hard boiled egg as if she was torturing her prey. As she delicately laid the ivory fragments onto a napkin, I knew the truth that she was really torturing herself.
Torture. Shell. Cracking.
My father’s relationship to food was perhaps worse than my mothers, in its own kind of way. His mood was completely dependent on if he saw himself as skinny or fat- which seemed to fluctuate to an extent much greater than his weight logistically could. He would appear manic on days where he would educate me about the benefits of intermediate fasting: where he starved himself during the day until dinner.
He grew up wrestling. From elementary school throughout his undergraduate years in college, he was well versed in techniques on cutting weight. He would enlighten my sisters and I during dinner, the methods he employed to “stay skinny” as tips he assumed we would appreciate:
Work out on an empty stomach, and put on as many layers of clothing as possible- you will sweat more out this way. He told us about laxatives and how he would throw up in the bathroom before weight trials to really give him the advantage. Nothing feels better to me than an empty stomach he would accentuate, over and over again-as if the person he was really aiming to convince was himself.
There was a side to my father that was all consuming. Gluttonous and resentful towards a child's metabolism which we could not control. Many tears fell as a result of his unbreakable rule that you must finish your plate. Salty tears fell upon the mosaics I swirled across my plate, as an effort to distract him from force feeding me by hand. My sister’s and I would at times get creative: stuffing our cheeks with mashed potatoes and greens just to spit them out in the toilet and mischievously return with progress made on our plates. When my dad found out about this trick, we weren't allowed to go to the bathroom during dinner.
Advantage. Gluttonous. Empty.
The thing about food is that it is a sort of relationship between you and yourself. But this too is not really true when you trace it back far enough. It is the relationship your parents had with themself, and how you observed their behaviors as normalcy. I engulfed and digested their thoughts as my own until eventually I forgot their origin.
Feeling worthy of food is the question of if you are worthy of life and love itself. It sounds hysterical to even question if one deserves these basic needs. Deserves is not the right word. Perhaps punish. Because that what this really boils down to: Punishment of self. I used to wonder if punishment could be just. Maybe I was doing these small acts of cruelty in a way of repentance for my sins.
But there was no justice in torture. That is tyranny, kneeling before a hateful ruler and accepting what you feel is enough to equate to the bad feelings inside. But that depth is unquantifiable, a murky bottomless well that we can only throw coins into in order to assess its bottom.
The task of blaming my parents for influencing my disordered eating habits has been my default mode of processing for quite some time now. But it yields hopeless results that ultimately piles into denial from both parties. Even if they did apologize, I know that they would not change- and neither would I.
Things were getting bad again. From Michigan to California, the parasite followed me across the country. I was the perfect host that sacrificed all nutrients in an effort to care for the exact thing that was killing me. Perhaps I needed to travel further. Cross oceans. I found myself in Italy.
The first time I remembered throwing up and liking it was in Rome. In all of my years of teenage starvation- I had never stooped to the realms of bulimia. That seemed to cross a boundary that felt like cheating in the realm of suffering.
I was 20 and broke. Surrounded by a group of girls who threw money at appetizers they didn't care to finish, and overpriced wine they sipped on out of casualty.
I hated these girls in this way. For the fact that they ate until they unbuttoned their pants and wanted drinks after. I had $400 dollars in my bank account, and rationed the amount of cheap sandwiches and cigarettes that would keep my body conscious throughout the day while I attended classes during the week.
On this particular night, I was whisked away by the gaggle of girls who were strangers to any of the thoughts going on in my head. The most frustrating battle with disordered eating is how eating tends to be the placeholder for socialization. We were in Italy after all, the land of pasta, pizza, and bread was a dream shared by everyone except me. There is a luxury to drug addicts and alcoholics that is not afforded to those who struggle with eating. Alcoholics collect coins and celebrate being able to avoid the substance of their cardinal desire, yet I will die without mine. I needed to eat to live after all, which seems like an obvious fact, yet is debilitating when I realize these thoughts will follow me each time I must unhinge my jaws. I felt stupid and spoiled for having such a first world problem while I walked past homeless people cradled in feces ridden blankets.
I came to Rome to avoid going home to my family in Michigan. I was financially cut off, and spent the majority of my summer paychecks funding this trip to go abroad to escape. But there was never really an escape from the way I felt. The echoes that rang in my head and manifested in the bile that brewed in my stomach. I came to Rome because I felt unlovable at home. Somewhere along the way, this feeling packed itself into my suitcase and crossed the country with me.
My randomly assigned roommate was kind yet strange- unaware of the social cues my face signaled, begging her to stop talking. I felt completely isolated from the community I felt in California where I attended college. The life I had worked so hard to build for myself was slipping through my fingers. I felt 16 again. Empty and alone looking for approval from strangers that I had nothing but spite for. So when these girls asked me to get drinks with them on my third night in this foreign country, I agreed without hesitation.
The bar was dimly lit with a green aura painting the walls. A wooden plaque read the drink costs in euros that were disgustingly over priced. I began to drift away, thinking about the calories but was undermined by the anxiety pounding at the back of my head- telling me it would be worse if I didn't order anything. That they would think I am cheap. That I wasn't playing by the rules.
We ordered 7 Aperol Spritzes for the table. I ran my fingers across the condensation of the glass, waiting for someone else to start drinking but they didn't. I threw the drink back ignoring the straw while my tonsils caught the icy liquid. An aftertaste of licorice radiated throughout my mouth, clinging to the ridges of the roof of my soft palate. The girls took a few sips and complained about the licorice taste, sliding their drinks away from their proximity. I offered to drink them.
And at this moment is when I saw the obvious divide: I was raised to finish my plate, and they were not. It is hard not to hate them at this moment. I drink the entirety of their drinks- crushing the ice between my back molars. The night began to feel a lot more tolerable from that point on.
From the fuzzy memories of dinner that I remember- I licked my plate clean. Buttery starch from the carbonara pasta waltzed around in my stomach, guided by the concoction of wine and spritzes I slammed throughout the night.
I had never eaten so much. It felt just as bad at not eating at all. Something fed that guilt inside me regardless of substance or absence. I repressed those feelings successfully enough to earn the laughs of the tipsy girls at dinner. Their approval felt like kisses down my spine- as if I was worthy of love-underneath all of these ugly feelings I harbored within myself.
I kept eating. I kept drinking. I kept hurting, but convinced myself that this was for the greater good of connection. So long as the bad never came up.
I drunkenly walked the cobblestone streets of Rome back from the restaurant staggered behind the group of girls. Amanda, a tall effortlessly beautiful blonde girl, aligns her drunken path with mine, and we hobble side by side back toward the hotel
“I have never felt so fat” she laughs
I lit a cigarette for the both of us and touched ashy tips with her.
“This can be our dessert” we laughed selfishly as we watched the rest of the girls twirl around blissfully to the gelato shop across the street.
It felt good to be seen- but more than anything I felt sorry for her. Imagining that behind her soft angelic face were thoughts of self-hatred as putrid and spoiled as my own.
I fumbled my key into the lock of my hotel room- missing the hole three times before penetrating the hole successfully. I slipped my shoes off my ankle- not bothering to untie the knots that choked the forefront of my feet. I fell asleep with my clothes still on.
My body shot up in the middle of the night and projectile vomited liquor and cigarette smoke from the contents of my stomach. My roommate, mortified and upset, left me alone gagging on my spit while I hobbled over to the bathroom to make it to the toilet. My vision blurred and my head pounding left me with a body fighting for its life. Extracting the poison from itself through a programmed gag reflex. Hot spit eclipsed my lips as I layed on the rim of the toilet bowl, and for the first time I understood what my dad meant when he said that it felt good to be empty.
I woke up to an acidic taste that crusted around the corners of my mouth. I checked my phone battery to see that it was 4am, just two hours after I began throwing up. I felt surprisingly alert from the quick turn around of sobriety. I flashed my canine teeth in the mirror, as I meticulously brushed my teeth in repenting swirls.
I wandered the ominous hotel, dizzying carpet patterns assaulting my eyes the further I looked down into the hall. The loose handle on an unmarked door opened, revealing a storage closet piled from floor to ceiling with towels, cups, and cleaning supplies. Just my luck.
I snagged a new set of sheets to replace my spoiled ones, as well as a couple towels and bleach to sanitize the room.
I returned to the room with fresh eyes, seeing the throw up soaked sheets and splashes of bile on the wooden floor where I reached for the bathroom door. No wonder my roommate, no, that stranger, ran away without looking back. I was a mess.
I placed little plastic bags over my feet so I could keep my soles safe from the bleach I slathered the entire surface of the floor with. My vision fogged the more ammonia I inhaled, and I felt disgusting for what I had done. Shameful. Nauseous. Empty.
These bad feelings sat in my stomach sloshing around, creating a debilitating gravity that brought me to my knees and to the toilet bowl yet again. I reached for these demons with my middle and index finger in the back of my throat, hoping to pull at them by the root. A scratchy heave emerged, followed by the acidic spit that evolved into a substance I wasn't convinced I had never entered my stomach to begin with.
I went back to sleep in my clean sheets, clean room that reeked of bleach, knowing that my roommate had fresh towels to welcome her home to.
God it felt good. To be pure again. To be rid of that guilt. To be forgiven.
Once I had discovered the pleasure of that purging cycle, I never looked back. My trip in Rome was categorized by the beautiful pictures of food immortalized by my camera, only to be flushed down the European toilet within the night.
No matter where I go, there seems to be a new variation of the same problem that follows me, infects my body until it self-destructs. I am 16 in Michigan forced to finish my dinner while I go the rest of the week skipping lunch. I am a college student in California spending my grocery money on nicotine to suppress my appetite. I am in Rome purging the glory of a false escape. I am everywhere except where I need to be: within myself.
The truth is I’m navigating the world as a young twenty something with the same ideas and beliefs ingrained in me as a disordered teenager. My hips are wider-and I try not to fight it. The shift from girl to woman has been the most hopeless battle I find myself fighting.
It is the illusion of choice. You are to eat or not to eat. Absence of choice is just as valid a choice as any. But even when you don’t eat, you are still feeding something. Feeding that feeling of emptiness that you feel you deserve. As your stomach yearns and acidic claws climb up your internal lining- you know something isn’t right. That you would feel better if you had just eaten but you cannot. Eventually eating feels like the wrong choice too. As if that food isn’t really nourishing the body you want it to reach. It feels like a losing battle that everyone manages fine over their lunch breaks.
I think about the battles going on within the people I love. My father battling between losing the youth of his athletic body and coming to terms with his increasing age and decay. My mother cursing her figure for carrying the life of three children and not looking the same. Amanda as she lights her cigarettes between meals. I am trying to hold onto the same body I had as a 16 year old. It all feels wrong, but it doesn't feel right to fight it either.
I ask myself who or what I am really even fighting for.
I write this with no food in my pantry. I am hitting my nicotine between typing, and I am certainly not better. I have given up on the concept of better because it has proven to be impossibly unobtainable. I know my relationship with food will never achieve normalcy. We are far beyond that realm of simplicity. I propose an alternate choice of thinking. One that grounds me in free will.
(Put an into in here somewhere)
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, "My son, the battle is between two "wolves" inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
“The one you feed” is a phrase that lingers in my brain. It twists inside me like my small intestine- and I cannot unhear it now that it has entered my radar.
I first heard this parable on my Instagram explore page- sandwiched between my algorithm saturated in thinspo and discreetly photoshopped images of girls my age. It incited me to reflect on all of the microscopic ways I engage with the world, and what purpose they seem to feed
I knew that I had been fighting a losing battle.
More than anything I have been wondering if these internal battles ever leave us. Or eventually we just successfully dulude ourselves into thinking that the motivations buried deep within our subconscious will forever remain dormant.
The only hope to be realized from this situation I found to be in the recognition of my bodily autonomy. That the same mind that has kept me caged for years can be the same tool for liberation. My body has done nothing but ever listen to the voice upstairs. It is a loyal dog that will only feed itself when the mind directs it to. Its nerves absorb the collective throb of hunger, unable to overpower the tyranny of the mind.
The lie that we tell ourselves is that we cannot control it. That it is happening to us- rather than identifying as the tyrant we possess behind our eyes. It begins as realizing that you are an active agent within the battle of your own being.
The battle between the wolves within may rage on, but I am no longer a bystander—I am an active participant, choosing to nourish the goodness within me and starve the darkness that threatens to consume.
