Disorderly Conduct
This morning I weighed in at 192.0 pounds. I’m up half a pound from last Saturday’s weigh-in, and so it appears I’m being punished by my smug satisfaction at sliding down 3.5 pounds last week and hovering just half a tick from my pre-preggers body. I’m annoyed and frustrated, but it doesn’t matter at all, because I can’t stop thinking about Luisel Ramos.
Ramos, a 22-year old model, collapsed during a runway show in Madrid last August and was pronounced dead at the scene. Coroners later ruled that she’d died of cardiac arrest. At 5’9”, she weighed just 98 pounds.
I’ve yanked myself out of the culture in many ways. I don’t wear make-up, I would home school my son if it appeared prudent at all, and I only bought a house this past spring when circumstances dictated that I must stay put for the next several years. I have experimented wherever I could, testing and stretching myself, pushing beyond my comfortable spaces to discover what is really true for me, and where I could improve myself. I believe that this life is It, and so I do all I can to make It worthwhile, even if that means stepping outside acceptable cultural standards. I am still a product of this culture, however, and I remain vulnerable to the culture’s more dangerous tethers –particularly eating disorders. Anorexia is my Siren, and no, this irony is not lost on me.
I look past the sunken eyes and the protruding bones, and I think, ‘wow. That woman controls her body. I wish I could do that.’ Yes, I cringe at the clearly-defined rib cage where cleavage should be. But awe trumps judgment, and I bow to the discipline that this Monster demands. What pain it must be, to feel the hunger and not give in. And what a triumph to lay your heads down at night, having conquered your desires.
According to anorexia.com, a person could be deemed anorexic if her weight is at least 15% below ideal. But to me, it’s not the weight so much as the intention. It’s not that someone is below a minimum standard of “ideal” but how she got there and what she does to curb her eating urges.
I always know what I weigh. I know it, and I recite it to myself all day long. Before I started this loss, I would chant the highest number recorded. Even if I was fresh off my period and down 3 pounds, I would whisper to myself, “251”, rather than the 248 the scale showed that morning. Now I do the opposite. Even though I weighed in at 192.0 this morning, I consider myself 191.50. I figure I’ll swing back down there tomorrow, and hopefully dip a little lower besides, especially since tomorrow is my official weigh-in.
And herein lies my problem. When I started the program, I skipped breakfast before my WW meeting. It’s at 8:30am on Saturday morning, and while I ached to talk about food while my tummy grumbled in protest, I did it. Hey, you never know how much that egg is going to tip that scale, and anyway, the WW scale is as sensitive as a woman during her PMS Angry Day. Why wake the dragon? I could eat at 9:30 when I got home, and since I’d just made it through a weigh-in, I could eat a little more at breakfast to compensate for the ‘lost’ meal.
Well, skipping Saturday breakfast turned into whistling past Friday dinner. I’d make all sorts of excuses to Howard for why I didn’t want to eat. Howard, in his peaceful, gentle-soul way, sighed in concern but abstained from argument. When I didn’t get any pushback, I pressed on.
I came to know the last workday of the week as Fasting Friday. I never actually fasted, understand. I drank my protein shake in the morning, same as every day. But I would have salad at lunch instead of my regular chicken breast wrap, and I refused anything for dinner, even when I was so dizzy and light-headed that I could not stand up without assistance. When I lay down for bed at night, the room spun until I nearly hurled. But I didn’t care. I bolted my eyes shut and waited, whispering to myself that I had only 11 hours more to go before I could eat again.
My body responded to these fasts by yanking the carpet out from under my metabolism. I went from burning approximately 9 calories per pound per day (right in the middle of the range for women), to burning just over 4. Plus, even though I kept things well under program on Saturdays after my weigh-in, I’d still eat more than any Fasting Friday, and so I got to where I spent the whole of the week chiseling off the 1.5 pound “gain” from eating actual food on Saturdays. The fast crept deeper into the week. I cut out all carbohydrates from my nightly stir-fry. For weeks, my daily calorie consumption hovered around 550, somewhere between one-half and one-third of what I could have (should have) eaten.
Week after week, I’d hit Friday night, the Dizzies would hit me, and still I refused to eat. I can’t give up any of my weight loss, I’d protest. I can’t stop this now. If I eat more, I’ll gain weight. Gains lead to other gains, and those lead to fatness. I can’t do it. I had traded addictions: food for starvation. Where once I could not stop eating, now I would not start.
Just one more week, I told myself. I’ll get to 25 pounds off, and I’ll correct this. Just let me get out of the BMI obese category and we’ll add food to my diet. Look, I’m so close to 50, let me go just one more week. But now I’m almost below 200….and on it went. Each Monday, Howard would offer help. He put milk in our breakfast shakes instead of water. He added shrimp to the stir-fry and sprinkled black beans into the wok. I responded by sabotaging the efforts I’d begged him to make. I stopped filling my dinner bowl, and I picked through the wok for the vegetables, leaving the meat behind. After Howard caught on to that, I used smaller bowls. I gave up all solid foods, eating only nonfat yogurt for lunch. When I still couldn’t budge the scale, I started dumping parts of my breakfast shake into the sink. Hunger followed me everywhere, a mangy, rabid dog that growled at other people with such ferocity that my cubicle neighbors heard it. I slurped my coffee to cover the noise.
Then last night, as I logged yet another 400 calorie day, tilting my computer away from Howard so he couldn’t see it, I happened upon the news article about Ramos. She’d been told that she could make it big, if only she could lose ‘a lot of weight’. So for 3 months, she ate only leafy greens and drank diet soda, sometimes going 2 weeks at a time without food. Her father confirmed this, stating she had not eaten anything for several days prior to the show. I saw the angular features in her face. I noted the scrawn of her arms and the protruding nubs of her spinal column, clearly visible through her skin. She’d gone 3 months without eating anything of consequence, and her heart arrested, too drained to hold up her tiny body even one more minute.
I have lost nearly 60 pounds, and I have done it all through deprivation. I stopped exercising 3 months ago for no good reason, and now my hunger and my low-calorie consumption exhaust me so completely that I cannot rise from bed in the morning to work out, nor stay on the treadmill without losing my bearings and balance from lack of food. It’s catching up to me now. This week, despite an average daily consumption of 463 calories, I am up 0.50 pounds. My hair is starting to fall out and I’m bleeding between my periods.
This morning, I lost the support of my buddy. I saw that look on his face this morning, and I acknowledged what I was doing to myself, and still, I persevered. I sat at my desk this morning, stomach rumbling and plucking hairs off my sweater and wondering how long I could make it before I had to go to lunch, factoring in that I couldn’t wait too long or it would spill over into the dinner hour, and I can’t eat dinner on a night before a weigh-in. This is Fasting Friday after all.
Then I found another article about Ana Reston, a 21-year old model who died from complications of anorexia. At 5'7", she weighed 88 pounds, or roughly was a 5'0", twelve-year-old girl should weigh. My fear of failure yielded to fear of death. I don’t want to die early. That was the whole point of losing weight in the first place. I gave up peanut butter and pasta and ate more vegetables precisely because I didn’t want to die of a weight-related disease.
Do I have the disorder? No. But I do exhibit disorderly conduct. I’m an extremist in every form, and dieting is no exception. I took the principles of healthy food and fat-free living and I sprinted all the way to the edges, axing all but the zero-point foods from the approved vendor list. I’m goal-driven to the exclusion of everything else, and now it’s come back to eat me alive-literally.
I’m scared beyond the abilities of my fingers to write it, but I’m going to fix this. If I can’t do it for me, which seems likely, then I will do it for the others in my life. I don’t need to be 140 pounds or a size 6 or anything external that spells success if it means I’m torn to shreds on the inside. It’s not worth it. Even if it feels sometimes like it is.
If there’s going to be any arrest around here, it’ll be me doing the arresting, and it’ll be my behavior, and not my heart, that stops. I swear on my life, on my health, and on the men that I love, this will stop.
A the A(rrested)
Ramos, a 22-year old model, collapsed during a runway show in Madrid last August and was pronounced dead at the scene. Coroners later ruled that she’d died of cardiac arrest. At 5’9”, she weighed just 98 pounds.
I’ve yanked myself out of the culture in many ways. I don’t wear make-up, I would home school my son if it appeared prudent at all, and I only bought a house this past spring when circumstances dictated that I must stay put for the next several years. I have experimented wherever I could, testing and stretching myself, pushing beyond my comfortable spaces to discover what is really true for me, and where I could improve myself. I believe that this life is It, and so I do all I can to make It worthwhile, even if that means stepping outside acceptable cultural standards. I am still a product of this culture, however, and I remain vulnerable to the culture’s more dangerous tethers –particularly eating disorders. Anorexia is my Siren, and no, this irony is not lost on me.
I look past the sunken eyes and the protruding bones, and I think, ‘wow. That woman controls her body. I wish I could do that.’ Yes, I cringe at the clearly-defined rib cage where cleavage should be. But awe trumps judgment, and I bow to the discipline that this Monster demands. What pain it must be, to feel the hunger and not give in. And what a triumph to lay your heads down at night, having conquered your desires.
According to anorexia.com, a person could be deemed anorexic if her weight is at least 15% below ideal. But to me, it’s not the weight so much as the intention. It’s not that someone is below a minimum standard of “ideal” but how she got there and what she does to curb her eating urges.
I always know what I weigh. I know it, and I recite it to myself all day long. Before I started this loss, I would chant the highest number recorded. Even if I was fresh off my period and down 3 pounds, I would whisper to myself, “251”, rather than the 248 the scale showed that morning. Now I do the opposite. Even though I weighed in at 192.0 this morning, I consider myself 191.50. I figure I’ll swing back down there tomorrow, and hopefully dip a little lower besides, especially since tomorrow is my official weigh-in.
And herein lies my problem. When I started the program, I skipped breakfast before my WW meeting. It’s at 8:30am on Saturday morning, and while I ached to talk about food while my tummy grumbled in protest, I did it. Hey, you never know how much that egg is going to tip that scale, and anyway, the WW scale is as sensitive as a woman during her PMS Angry Day. Why wake the dragon? I could eat at 9:30 when I got home, and since I’d just made it through a weigh-in, I could eat a little more at breakfast to compensate for the ‘lost’ meal.
Well, skipping Saturday breakfast turned into whistling past Friday dinner. I’d make all sorts of excuses to Howard for why I didn’t want to eat. Howard, in his peaceful, gentle-soul way, sighed in concern but abstained from argument. When I didn’t get any pushback, I pressed on.
I came to know the last workday of the week as Fasting Friday. I never actually fasted, understand. I drank my protein shake in the morning, same as every day. But I would have salad at lunch instead of my regular chicken breast wrap, and I refused anything for dinner, even when I was so dizzy and light-headed that I could not stand up without assistance. When I lay down for bed at night, the room spun until I nearly hurled. But I didn’t care. I bolted my eyes shut and waited, whispering to myself that I had only 11 hours more to go before I could eat again.
My body responded to these fasts by yanking the carpet out from under my metabolism. I went from burning approximately 9 calories per pound per day (right in the middle of the range for women), to burning just over 4. Plus, even though I kept things well under program on Saturdays after my weigh-in, I’d still eat more than any Fasting Friday, and so I got to where I spent the whole of the week chiseling off the 1.5 pound “gain” from eating actual food on Saturdays. The fast crept deeper into the week. I cut out all carbohydrates from my nightly stir-fry. For weeks, my daily calorie consumption hovered around 550, somewhere between one-half and one-third of what I could have (should have) eaten.
Week after week, I’d hit Friday night, the Dizzies would hit me, and still I refused to eat. I can’t give up any of my weight loss, I’d protest. I can’t stop this now. If I eat more, I’ll gain weight. Gains lead to other gains, and those lead to fatness. I can’t do it. I had traded addictions: food for starvation. Where once I could not stop eating, now I would not start.
Just one more week, I told myself. I’ll get to 25 pounds off, and I’ll correct this. Just let me get out of the BMI obese category and we’ll add food to my diet. Look, I’m so close to 50, let me go just one more week. But now I’m almost below 200….and on it went. Each Monday, Howard would offer help. He put milk in our breakfast shakes instead of water. He added shrimp to the stir-fry and sprinkled black beans into the wok. I responded by sabotaging the efforts I’d begged him to make. I stopped filling my dinner bowl, and I picked through the wok for the vegetables, leaving the meat behind. After Howard caught on to that, I used smaller bowls. I gave up all solid foods, eating only nonfat yogurt for lunch. When I still couldn’t budge the scale, I started dumping parts of my breakfast shake into the sink. Hunger followed me everywhere, a mangy, rabid dog that growled at other people with such ferocity that my cubicle neighbors heard it. I slurped my coffee to cover the noise.
Then last night, as I logged yet another 400 calorie day, tilting my computer away from Howard so he couldn’t see it, I happened upon the news article about Ramos. She’d been told that she could make it big, if only she could lose ‘a lot of weight’. So for 3 months, she ate only leafy greens and drank diet soda, sometimes going 2 weeks at a time without food. Her father confirmed this, stating she had not eaten anything for several days prior to the show. I saw the angular features in her face. I noted the scrawn of her arms and the protruding nubs of her spinal column, clearly visible through her skin. She’d gone 3 months without eating anything of consequence, and her heart arrested, too drained to hold up her tiny body even one more minute.
I have lost nearly 60 pounds, and I have done it all through deprivation. I stopped exercising 3 months ago for no good reason, and now my hunger and my low-calorie consumption exhaust me so completely that I cannot rise from bed in the morning to work out, nor stay on the treadmill without losing my bearings and balance from lack of food. It’s catching up to me now. This week, despite an average daily consumption of 463 calories, I am up 0.50 pounds. My hair is starting to fall out and I’m bleeding between my periods.
This morning, I lost the support of my buddy. I saw that look on his face this morning, and I acknowledged what I was doing to myself, and still, I persevered. I sat at my desk this morning, stomach rumbling and plucking hairs off my sweater and wondering how long I could make it before I had to go to lunch, factoring in that I couldn’t wait too long or it would spill over into the dinner hour, and I can’t eat dinner on a night before a weigh-in. This is Fasting Friday after all.
Then I found another article about Ana Reston, a 21-year old model who died from complications of anorexia. At 5'7", she weighed 88 pounds, or roughly was a 5'0", twelve-year-old girl should weigh. My fear of failure yielded to fear of death. I don’t want to die early. That was the whole point of losing weight in the first place. I gave up peanut butter and pasta and ate more vegetables precisely because I didn’t want to die of a weight-related disease.
Do I have the disorder? No. But I do exhibit disorderly conduct. I’m an extremist in every form, and dieting is no exception. I took the principles of healthy food and fat-free living and I sprinted all the way to the edges, axing all but the zero-point foods from the approved vendor list. I’m goal-driven to the exclusion of everything else, and now it’s come back to eat me alive-literally.
I’m scared beyond the abilities of my fingers to write it, but I’m going to fix this. If I can’t do it for me, which seems likely, then I will do it for the others in my life. I don’t need to be 140 pounds or a size 6 or anything external that spells success if it means I’m torn to shreds on the inside. It’s not worth it. Even if it feels sometimes like it is.
If there’s going to be any arrest around here, it’ll be me doing the arresting, and it’ll be my behavior, and not my heart, that stops. I swear on my life, on my health, and on the men that I love, this will stop.
A the A(rrested)
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 1:02 PM
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Your men love you and will support you in every way we can.
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