I went to UMass to visit Daniel during his last week of the semester. He knew how much weight I’d lost, and I knew how hard he’d struggled to do the same despite all our old temptations. It had been nearly six months since we’d seen each other last. I waited outside his dorm, hoping someone would exit the locked building so that I could slip in before the door swung shut. I did manage to sneak in—I wanted to knock on the door to his room, to reveal myself as he opened it. It seemed more personal than meeting outside. As he opened the door, a look of utter surprise enveloped his face. It was clear that he’d lost weight—perhaps another thirty pounds. He looked healthier. His face was thinner; his clothes hung looser. Reaching out, he pulled me into him, not saying a word for the first moments that he held me. I remembered the strength and familiarity of him. Our bodies were closer in that embrace than I could remember them being before. Without my belly as a barrier, his arms wrapped fully around me. “You’re so small!” It felt good to hear him say that, since he knew how much I’d struggled to reach that size. Raising his hands to hold the sides of my face, he kissed me.
There were days during the first weeks of being home when I just wanted to be out and about. I wanted to do all the things I hadn’t done before with any measure of grace. I crossed my legs casually, coolly; I walked even more. I bought new clothing in sizes like eight and, unbelievably, six. I discovered how much cheaper it was to be thin—the way clearance racks practically shout your name, since they’re loaded with smaller sizes. I found pacing the mall insanely fun. Browsing, trying on clothes just because; it was exhilarating to pick an outfit—any outfit—and know that, at the very least, it would look okay. Not necessarily perfect for me, but decent. I began emerging from behind the curtains and walking barefoot to the tri-fold mirror at the center of the dressing rooms, an act I had detested before. Now I fit better into everything. Shirts, pants, dresses, life.
When June arrived, I rejoined that old YMCA where I’d spent the previous summer with Kate. In no time, we were at it again: taking aerobics classes with the rowdiest of fifty-year-olds, Jazzercising, being debaucherous with exercise balls and an open weight room. And laughing. Laughing so much.
I’d almost call it fun, if the range for experiencing fun were a ladder on which the bottom rung was still kind of adjacent to low-level torture. The whole process of losing weight was easier now, a year in. I was used to the meals I prepared, the way I moved my body to the point of profuse sweating day in and day out. I still faced a sense of dread before some workouts, and, naturally, I still lusted after cake, but at least I was getting there. Envisioning myself at the goal I’d set for myself—140 pounds—was easier. Mere miles from the finish line of my marathon, I broke into a sprint.
I lost another 22 pounds over those next two months. And on the final day of summer, just as I was saying good-bye to Kate and the Y, and heading back to UMass for senior year, I saw a number I didn’t think I’d ever see: 133.
On our first day back, Daniel, Sabrina, Nicole, and I drove to campus from our newly rented apartment and walked to our film class. The stares were unnerving. Is my fly unzipped? I looked down to check. My eyes met those of others walking past us. Each seemed more aware of me than I’d known people to be before. With guys and girls alike, I felt more accepted, respected. Not simply thin, but valued. Desirable.
People I’d known since freshman year—who’d come to know me big—were stunned. Mouths hung gaping as they took in such a transformation. I was applauded and admired. And Daniel, who loved me all the way through, looked so proud when guy friends of ours would smile from me to him and whisper, “You are unbelievably lucky, man.” I knew from the way he nodded and looked at me that he’d love me regardless. Daniel himself had lost weight—a total of 75 pounds since the previous fall—and I admired his dedication. He seemed to gain more confidence. Now at 225 pounds, he looked better than ever.
It was thrilling going out in Amherst. Nights at bars, parties, even just walking through campus to class—it was all exhilarating. For the very first time, I was exactly the girl I’d always wanted to be.
Those first few months when I inhabited a new, hard-earned body were a raw, explosive high. A high unlike any other experience I’d had.
But after all highs comes a low.
I LOOKED INTO THE MIRROR AND LOVED WHAT I SAW so completely that all I wanted was to snap a picture of the girl within the frame. I wanted to replace the default picture I held of myself in my head—that of the fat girl I’d always been—with the new one. Swap out fat for thin. I scanned my body, gave myself the kind of admiring up-and-down eye that few guys had ever given me. I saw a jawline. Collarbones, two pronounced collarbones. And both were mine. A waist. A waist. I found my knees and, with them, an understanding why anyone might refer to knees as knobby. Staring at my body, pinching my love handles, I struggled to absorb that these changes were real. I wanted to stay this way.
Without that mirror, without any way of physically seeing my own form in plain sight, I still believed myself to be the fat girl. My mind and eyes were in opposition.
A part of me was disdainful of the newfound attention I was receiving. You see me now? I’m attractive now? Receiving the congratulations, the praises in some small way felt like accepting that what I’d been before—all of my life—was wrong. Even though I’d often felt that way myself, I resented that the size of my body was correlated to my value, my worth as a person. The praise was a confirmation that thinness made me the better version of myself. And since something about it still felt foreign and unnatural to me, the outside praise made my insides cower. I’m not ready for this, I’d think. I’m not better now just because of this body. I don’t even know how to stay here. What if I can’t stay here? If I gain it all back? In a way, it all felt like a trap. Before, when I was fat, no one spoke aloud about my body. They couldn’t. There’s no decent way to bring up someone’s obesity. And now the thinness was the centerpiece on the table of conversation. It was out there, aired and allowed to be its own entity. Something we could point at and discuss.
With all the compliments I received for my weight loss, I feared returning to fat. An intense anxiety settled into my bones. I felt pressure. This was different from striving to do well in school, wanting to please Mom, wanting to fit in. They’re watching me now. Unhelpfully, a friend of the family reminded me, “You know, Andrea, losing weight is the easy part. It’s maintaining it that’s really hard.” This sentiment made me seethe. How dare anyone minimize that struggle, that agonizing journey of losing weight? I was shocked that they’d deem losing 135 pounds “easy” and, worse, that they’d want to instill a fear in me about keeping it off. Of course losing weight wasn’t easy. Ten pounds, 20, 50, 100-plus—any amount is challenging. It all requires discipline and an absolute desire to change. Losing necessitates feeling terrible now so that you can feel better later. I thought back to the days when I cried desperately, almost giving up on losing weight altogether. I remembered the writhing, the feeling of hopelessness and withdrawal of coming down from twenty years of food addiction. Perhaps those people simply wanted to remind me that the journey wasn’t over, that maintenance involved the same vigilance over what I ate as losing did. But I hated to hear the work diminished, relegated to ordinary. Yes, I get it, I wanted to tell them. It looks like I’ve just moved into a new home, a very desirable and thin one, and now you’re reminding me that I have to come up with the mortgage payments. I’m terrified, too. But just so you know, I worked to purchase this house myself, and somehow I’ll figure it out.
What worried me almost as much as letting myself down if I gained it all back, was letting everyone else down. Being a failure. The pressure, the foreignness of it all caused the welling up of a deep, deep insecurity.
The months that followed—in fact, that whole year—were dark. I was scared all the time. I felt as though the tips of my fingers were moments from losing their death grip on the cliff I clung to. Life wasn’t what I’d thought it wou
ld be. This wasn’t the light and free, casual and content life I’d expected to start.
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 f
illed 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.
It Was Me All Along Page 14