The Back Story Part I

I wasn’t heavy as a child so I can't say I've had a problem with my weight all of my life. As a matter of fact, I was incredibly scrawny. I know I’ve said before that I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person. I took it to the extreme my sophomore year of high school. I wasn’t over weight by any stretch of the imagination. I played three sports per year and ate like a normal teenager; probably didn’t make all of the best nutritional choices, but I had a youthful metabolism on my side. That was the year I lost my beloved grandmother. This woman had practically raised me since my mom was a teenage mother. She was a very central part of my life. She died at the age of 55 of a massive heart attack that came out of the blue. I was devastated to say the least. I didn’t know how to handle my grief and I felt like everything in my life was spinning out of control. At that age, the only thing I had full power over, was what I put into my mouth. I began to restrict my food intake drastically… and it felt good. I actually grew to like the feeling of being hungry and the reassurance of my stomach growling. As I started dropping weight, I continued to limit my intake more and more. Eventually, I was down to a swig of orange juice and half a saltine in the morning, some grapefruit juice at lunch, and not very much else throughout the day. I had practice every night after school and this helped with avoiding the dinner table at home and keeping the full truth about my eating habits away from my parents. My stepfather had always been a dictator when it came to food (and pretty much everything else as well). He filled your plate and you didn’t get up from the table until you finished. It didn’t matter if you were full or not; you did not waste food…the end, no compromise. When my weight loss started to become an issue at home, as it eventually had to be since it was dropping it so quickly, his solution was to force me to eat. Not a very bright move; he thought once he started making me eat, I’d just start eating regularly again. This is when I began purging. I wasn’t a binger, I didn’t like the feeling of being full, and I had to take the control back that I felt I’d lost at the hands of my stepfather. I think eventually he thought that he’d “cured” me and started leaving me alone a little bit more. I was able to go back to my usual restrictive eating, which pretty much put an end to purging.

I also started exercising excessively. On top of the sports practices, I would run for long periods of time with unnecessary amounts of clothes on. My parents worked 11pm-7am so I would wait for them to leave for work and take off for a run. This also led, of course, to a massive amount of sleep deprivation. The combination was making me a pretty sick and unhealthy young lady.

What strikes me as most unsettling is how little the adults in my life took notice, or should I say, took action about my eating disorder. There was another girl in my class who had to be hospitalized for an eating disorder during the time that I was dealing with my anorexia. Eventually, the principal of my high school called me into his office. Our school was a very small, rural high school and the principal was like a father-figure to the majority of the students. He questioned me very gently about my weight loss, and if I was having some trouble that I wanted to talk about. I don’t remember what I said, but that was the first time somebody directly called me on my behavior. It’s downright scary how insane eating disorder behavior was ignored in my case. I was a chronic weigh-er. I would to go the nurse's office when I got into school and weigh myself. Then I’d weigh myself again just before lunch. Then again after I had drank my lunch (grapefruit juice), and again at the end of the day. I was in that office four times a day on that scale and she NEVER confronted me… never raised the alarm to anybody. In hindsight it’s unfathomable how this could have happened.

Months later I went to the local Planned Parenthood to get put on the pill. The testing that they did showed that my electrolytes were extremely messed up and I weighed in at 105 pounds full-clothed (I still wore my old clothes so they were huge and hung off of me) and I was 5'6". The nurse practitioner confronted me and I broken down, telling her all about my issues with eating. She told me how badly I was jeopardizing my health and about the damage that I’d already done to my body. She also refused to put me on the pill until I had dealt with my issues and gained some weight. I’m not sure how, but shortly after that appointment I began to eat a little more. I started out really slowly, going from a half of a saltine to a whole one at breakfast. I missed the empty feeling, but I had to get my health back. I had gotten to a place where I could barely make a sufficient pass on the basketball court. I was weak and sick, and I was ready to get better.

I fully realize that mine was a very mild case of anorexia and there are millions of gals out there who are literally dying from eating disorders. Obviously, I hit the other end of the spectrum eventually. I’ll post about that at a later date. I think that most people who know me now are unaware of the trouble I had with anorexia. Gosh, I haven’t really thought about this is a long time.