Anorexia: Survival of the Thinnest
I have spent the last 14 years competing for one title – anorexic — playing a game to see just how low I could go; my demise the final prize. At first it was a single number I sought – 104 lbs. Once I reached my goal, however, the stakes were raised and 104 no longer sufficient. The number dropped to 102, then 98, and so on down to 86. I became aware of a slow fissure of the self, a separation of body and mind. I peeled off layer after layer, hoping to purge that which festered within. What a thrill it was to annihilate each unwanted ounce of flesh.
My weight, for a girl of 5’2, has soared and plummeted in pounds from the high one-twenties into the mid-eighties. Regardless of the nutritionists who tell me 125 pounds is fine for a girl of my age and height, I do not believe them. It is not fine; I am never fine. My inability to accept fineness means I cannot live with average and that this will eventually destroy me.
But let me not mislead. I did not wake up one morning harboring a big, bad desire to starve to death. Rather, I started a diet and was sucked in by its power.
On the surface a diet is harmless – you have no intention to starve forever. Everyone diets. You just want to lose a bit a weight; you just want to look good in that bathing suit this summer. But without warning, a few pounds can become ten, ten can become twenty. And there the game begins: it sucks you in; it never ends; it becomes you. What was it that Hemmingway saidâÂ?¦ “You never had time to learn. He threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.”
I took up the game in the fifth grade. We were lining up for lunch. Anne told me she was fat. I looked down at my legs, suddenly huge in their Limited printed white and black leggings and thought “Fat pig.” Kelly, southern, blonde, and blue-eyed, announced she was on Ultra Slim Fast.
A battle was joined right there. I began staring into the mirror for hours on end. I’d look at my front, my right side, my back, my left side. I’d lift one leg over my head to see how fat one particular thigh was, bending my knee to see if fat had accumulated around the knee cap. Then the other thigh. I’d turn to my side and check my butt, running my hands down from the small of my back to my thigh to see how big the hump was. I swayed my hips vigorously and jumped up and down to see how much flesh moved. If any at all moved it was simply Too Much and it had to go. I poked my rear end, looking for the dimples of cellulite. I’d cup my breasts in my hand to see if they were getting bigger. I’d hug myself to see if my arms could reach around. I’d step on the scale at least 128 times a day. I wanted to eradicate any curve, any excess of flesh. It seemed as if I were sentenced to have hips, branded with breasts.
Naomi Wolf believes that the girls of the Ronald Regan presidency carry a common factor in common – they lacked childhoods. Born to compete, from their earliest memories they associate femaleness with deprivation. This is, after all, Twenty First Century America, the game is everywhere. We live in a pressure cooker. We live in all-or-nothing times, where stakes are very high and the outcome of our race to succeed histrionically fatal. In our failure to settle comes a failure to accept adequate as good enough.
For me, I became a pro at the game. I could clear my entire plate without ingesting a single bite. Food would be shuffled off the side of my dish, onto the placemat into a napkin, from the napkin into my shoe or my pocket or my underwear. I probably stained over a dozen placemats, and twice that number of underwear, soiled with drippings from food, marks of my foulness. I’d get up from the table, saying I needed more soda or tea or water, and spit out whatever food I held hiding in my mouth. I had to be careful, quiet, impish. I had to listen to be sure they weren’t getting up and coming into the kitchen. I’d throw out the napkins hidden in my pants, shoes, shirt sleeves, pockets, underwear and go back into the room, ready to reload.
I’d overlook the food hidden all over my body, crumbs would drop to the floor. I’d take off my shoes later that evening, undressing, chunks of food, forgotten in my absence of thought, would fall. But my mother just didn’t vacuum up these particles with her Electrolex, heeding no attention; no, with her keen eye and sagacity she found my evidence and went ballistic. I couldn’t blame her. But when my secret was discovered I hated her. I hated them. I hated them for doing this to me, for making me hate food, for controlling everything, for shouting, shouting so loud, for being depressed and for being so old, so unlike other kids’ parents.
The weight flew off. My mother started to worry. Don’t worry, I said. Do I look fat? A wealth of physical problems ensued – migraines, constipation, upset stomachs, fatigue. I saw doctor after doctor after doctor. And until my parents figured out just what I was doing, no one – no medical doctor, therapist, friend, or counselor — could render the correct diagnosis. No one understood why I couldn’t get out of bed, why I got tired crossing the room, why I would cry for no apparent reason. No one could tell that I had been reduced to the effects of bodily starvation — an immune system shot, anxiety and depression that were overwhelming, an inability to sleep, an all-consuming preoccupation with food, a secret and disturbing penchant for foraging. After all, I didn’t look anorexic. I “looked good”; I had “lost weight.”
Once I started to loose weight, the attention I attracted from men was overwhelming. The thinner I got the more men hit on me. Who wouldn’t want to play such a game? It seems like a win-win situation. A girl goes from a nobody to a somebody? And then one day you realize how pathetic you really are.
A woman’s obsession with food, our society’s notorious mockery and promotion of eating disorders, with its “Ooooh! You look terrific, you’ve lost so much weight!”, is merely a reflection of our culture. As a culture we have become bulimic – we take in, we spit out; at once adoring, later rejecting. As individuals, we are anorexic — we crave the finer things, and yet, feeling we are taking more than our share, limit ourselves in what we consume. It is a precarious split: we tread a wire of consumption, trying to stave off the fall of reduction. Entering a world predicated on notions of acceptability that are almost impractical to fulfill. As time progresses, so do the notions of what is or is not acceptable or desirable; in fact, the standards are getting higher, harsher. Our fixation with thinness, with maintaining standards, says less about beauty and much more about obedience. We are all running on the same treadmill.
When you realize how sad it is to pick leftover scraps out of the trash or to scour the floor for crumbs, it becomes a difficult task – resurrecting the pieces of a body, and even harder, a soul. I bought with interest and ease the cultural party line that thinness was everything, that my worth was directly proportional to my decrease in size, that will power was a terrible thing to waste. It is the most dangerous ideology I have ever consumed, for if I had thought otherwise, perhaps what I know of my childhood would not be reduced to the counting of fat grams or the allotting of calories. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so soulfully without. And perhaps my life wouldn’t be so dichotic — body and soul, ego and image.
Diets have become a source of connection for women, a commonality to be prattled about over coffee at PTA meetings, while eating disorders have become jargon to our lexicon. Anorexia has been abased into an adjective and bulimia excused as a habit, herded into that thing that women just do, conveniently spitting on the diagnosis itself. Girls in elementary school bathrooms slap their thighs in disgust and executive women pick the raisins out of bran muffins in board meetings.
In a culture so obsessed with material goods as inflections of status and worth, the refusal of food is only the most recent attempt at self-assertion; the body has become the final hope. If a woman can conquer the body, overrule nature in her attempt to control self, she will finally make her way in the world. She will finally dominate the material realm that says her body is a commodity and consumption a no-no. She must view her body with a wary eye; she must live from the outside in. And sadly, in reaching this view of success the woman who doesn’t stop, who becomes addicted to her drug, finds that soon enough, the high is no longer a high, the fix is no longer as good; the junkie will eventually die. And what will society say? “Wow, She has so much will power.” The woman who has perversely turned her body into a different kind of consumption will go home, empty and pale eyed, and hiss, “I showed you.” She’ll say it to the grave. And again we will be faced with words only.
It’s called an obituary.
Eating disorders are the backward crawl from the fork in the road between girlhood and adulthood; they evolve into a hellish passage into a netherworld, a slow walk into a mind come undone. We must turn the focus from an infatuation with martyrs to a respect for survivors, from worshipers of sickness to bearers of health. And in the end, only one thing is clear: until we welcome our bodies in any shape, until we stop seeing fat as foul, eating disorders will continue to rise, women will continue to hate their bodies, and little girls will continue to lift their swollen faces from toilet bowls and scrutinize their reflections in the mirror, eyes wide shut.
