A "Weighty" Topic

     Weight is something I've wanted to talk about for a while.  Like most girls, I get a bit uptight about my weight from time to time.   When I was younger I used to blame it on all those 90's Calving Klein "Obsession" ads with the bone-thin models draped along the beach whispering "Obsession" in a sexy voice.  But honestly, I think it's a bit more than that.
     Most people find it hard to believe, but as a child I was always the fat kid.  I'll never forget back-to-school shopping before my freshman year in high school.  Shopping for jeans was a nightmare.  At that time I was in a woman's size 14.  At my field hockey medical check-up I was 159 pounds, and a bit shorter than I am now.  I used to be called names like "Bubba" and it made life really tough.  When I was really young I used to attempt to diet and would fall for tricks like my baby sitter telling me peanut butter was really healthy (I know better now, at a whopping 180 calories per 2 tablespoon serving).
     Now, in this post I'm simply thinking about the past and not necessarily saying I have a problem, even though there is absolutely a correlation between my weight and my emotions these days.
      I remember the first time I started starving myself.  That was in high school.  One of my favorite lunches used to be macaroni salad with Italian dressing and a roll to put it on.  I guess it was sort of the cool thing to do amongst the people I was friends with at the time.  But there was one difference between me and them: they were thin and I was not.  At one point, sometime in my senior year, I just stopped eating.  By then I had a car and study hall last period and could leave early to go to the gym.  I remember sitting through lunch insisting that I was not hungry and then running to the gym, working out on the elliptical and then heading back for drama practice.  I only did drama because I had a part time job and therefore couldn't play sports.  Perhaps I was more than a snob than I thought I was because I didn't care about going to drama rehearsal sweaty after working out despite the fact that I probably wouldn't have really gone to anywhere else in that condition.
     Nonetheless, I never really got that thin.  At my smallest, I was still a good ten to fifteen pounds heavier than I currently am.  It was simpler then: I was fat and I wanted to be skinny, so I didn't eat and I worked out a lot.  But, alas, I was young and naive.  I didn't know about starvation mode, or how your metabolism worked, so I didn't realize that I was actually inhibiting my weight loss more so than if I had tried other methods.  It was ok, though, because I still got compliments and was able to buy a size four prom dress.
     Then I graduated, met my first boyfriend, and started college in the fall.  Ever since I started dating seriously, food and boys have always been intertwined.  That summer we went on plenty of ice cream dates and to lots of nice dinner.  It didn't help that when I went away to FIT in the fall, I was faced with the most embarrassing gym on any college campus possible (and therefore went only once), plus the discovery of sushi and having what I considered at the time to be the best Chinese food in the Northeast located right near my dorm.  I gained the whole freshman fifteen in one semester.  Because of my boyfriend, I decided to take the second semester off, work, and then transfer to BU in the fall.  BU was amazing and I definitely don't regret going there, but I can't help but feel annoyed now that I made such a life-changing position for a guy, but c'est la vie.
     When I came back, I started working at a tanning salon and taking a ten-week diet class.  There I learned the healthy way to lose weight.  I was doing cardio in the morning, drinking a gallon of water per day, eating five to six small meals each day, and lifting weights in the evening.  I started losing weight and I was happy.  But, after a little while I wasn't happy with the speed at which my weight-loss was progressing.  Soon after that I started taking diet pills and laxatives.  Diet pills seem logical, but I actually didn't like them much because they just made me feel sick and the only cure was food.  But I remembered a girl from high school who modeled (legitimately, and still does) but claimed to spend her volley-ball practices eating Italian subs and not actually doing anything athletic.  How did she do it?  Laxatives: that was the rumor.
     The added bonus to laxatives was the show you could put on.  You could eat like a normal person, if not more, but just take a pill and all those calories would fast-forward through your system and not actually be absorbed.  It's a bit disgusting, but if you figured out the timing, it worked like a charm.
     But the day I got caught by my Mom was terrible.  I remember walking through my front door, seeing my dad in one living room chair and hearing my Mom say, "We need to talk."  I came in and sat near the chair closest to the door.  She took out the bottles of diet pills and laxatives and said, "I found these, what are you doing to yourself?"
     "I just want to be thin!" I wailed.  I burst into tears over the torment I'd felt for months and then eventually promised that I wouldn't do it again.  And I didn't, for a while.  I started at BU in late August and I received more male attention than I ever had in my life.  I attributed it to my weight loss, sort of broke up with my boyfriend (although I continued to see him) and relished in the attention.  BU has a fabulous gym and going there was a social thing so that worked out very well for me for a while.  I still wasn't as thin as I was today, but for a bit I was happy.
     Then, shortly after my first full year at BU, my sort-of boyfriend started seeing his ex-girlfriend from before me.  I was shocked and devastated.  The anxiety I felt overrode my ability to eat and I got down to a new low weight that I hadn't been at before.  Although I was depressed, the emergence of bones in my chest elated me.  Finally, I was beginning to look like some sort of model.  Nothing else mattered.
     But everything was pretty under control at that point.  The following year I had a roommate who definitely developed an eating disorder at some point while we were living together.  She, however, had a very different frame than me; she was really tall and naturally slender.  When she started eating very little and working out excessively, my friends and I definitely noticed.  We shared a room and I remember her bending over one day to pick something off the floor and the sight of her rib cage sticking out through her T-shirt.
     This created very mixed feelings for me.  On the one hand I was sickened and worried, but on the other I was extremely jealous.  I still recall being very perplexed by this mixture of feelings.  Eventually it was passed on to me and I was behaving similarly.  At the end of that year I met my college boyfriend. I was a little bit heavier than I currently am, but I was the lightest I had ever been by that point.  I felt beautiful.  He was beautiful.  And, I felt beautiful for having him.
     But like most guys, he had the ability to eat absurd amounts of food and still maintain a six-pack.  As I accompanied him eating ice cream and whole pans of brownies, I started to gain weight.  It got to the point where I had gained over twenty pounds and couldn't continue as I was.  But he wasn't very supportive.  While he would eat something fried and I would eat a salad, he'd tease me that I was eating rabbit food.
     But that was a rocky relationship.  From that point, the relationship between food and boys started to change.  Initially, I thought that being thin would guarantee boys.  Then I realized that having a boy meant that I would gain weight.  It was simply inevitable.  Guys like to see a girl who can eat.  I learned that early on.  But at that point in my life I still thought guys liked thin girls so I started dieting again.  When we broke up for the first time I was incredibly depressed.   Aside from losing him, I also lost my appetite.  But I loved it.  I was thinner than I had ever been in my life.  When he came back about a month later, his and his family's shock at my weight loss really took hold of my attention.  I maintained that weight for a while, continued working out, but things took a turn for the worse about a year later when we really broke up.
     At that point I was working at Nordstrom.  Being in the fashion industry, I always wanted to look my best.  Because my hours were sporadic, I had plenty of time to go to the gym and work out.  But eventually I broke down and couldn't work there anymore.  I quit suddenly and got a job at the insurance company where my mother worked.  When I started there I was horribly depressed, not only about my breakup but also about leaving what I thought would have been an exciting career for me.
     I finally had a regular schedule and could go to the gym at the same time every day.  I even had a personal trainer, although he would often comment on the fact that although I always improved the way I looked, I could never actually get stronger or lift heavier weights.  That probably had to do with the fact that I wasn't eating.
     I hated that job.  Everyone I worked with enraged me to the point that I had to appetite.  I was also so busy that I'd often skip lunch just to get my work finished with.  I would go home, skip dinner, and drink heavily.  But, I also met a very important person.  I still see him sometimes today, although it's a bit complicated.  I really, really, really liked him.  The impact of this relationship had myriad impacts on me, but in this entry my focus is on weight so I'll only address that.  One thing that he changed for me was my vision of my weight.  As I got thinner and thinner, he became concerned.
     Now, this "relationship," if you could call it that, wasn't exactly ideal.  He would often get the jitters about committing, run away, and leave more and more distraught each time.  As a result, I'd grow more and more anxious and lose more and more weight.  Eventually I decided to leave the country to teach as a means to escape this cycle.  But before I left I got down to a measly 107 pounds.  I am short, but I've always weighed more than I look, and have decent size shoulders and frame for a short girl.  At 107 pounds, nearly every bone was visible and I looked breakable.  But, I loved it!  My friends would tease me for being so skinny, but it produced a different feeling than the teasing I received in high school.  I think one of the highlights of my life at that point was after I visited a friend in LA (shortly before leaving for Thailand) a friend of ours from college literally texted her to tell me to eat a sandwich.  I was so skinny that I had people from across the country telling me to put food in my mouth.  It was a novel feeling.
     Then I went away.  I wasn't happy there either.  Bad luck seemed to follow at every turn.  Making friends was extremely hard.  My only friend was food.  This is typical for a lot of females, but never for me.  When I came back I was about ten pounds heavier.  I saw the guy I mentioned previously shortly after that, and got one of the strangest comments of my life.  He's never been good at giving compliments, but the first thing he told me was how good I looked after I had gained some weight.  Another thing he told me was how worried he had been about me before I went away.
     This was a game changer for me.  I think this was the point where losing weight became a way of getting care and attention, not just attracting men.  I started to think back to time we spent together before I went away.  One day that I particularly remembered was going out to breakfast with him.  I was pulling my usual "I'm not hungry" routine, but he insisted I ate and actually fed me.  I felt loved and adored.  This may have actually reinforced this behavior in a way that he probably could not have foreseen.
      But this is where I stand today.  My weight and my emotional relationships are deeply bound.  Every time I meet someone new and start dating them I eat like I'd never seen food before. Then I gain weight.  Then something goes wrong.  Then I lose weight. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
     After my most current relationship ended about three and a half weeks ago, I lost nearly ten pounds in two weeks.  I simply couldn't eat.  Before that I had been upset about my weight because between vacations and nice dinners I gained nearly twenty pounds.  I was working out before we broke up and lost a bit of it the healthy way, but part of me thinks that losing the extra weight and getting down to the weight I was at when we met helped me cope a little bit.  At this point I think I'm stuck somewhere between being happy to be thin, but also getting thin for attention.  The last time we spoke I told him how much weight I'd lost.  I think a part of me expected him to run back to feed me and restore my health, but he didn't.
     At this point I'm stuck in a weird juxtaposition.  I know that I find thin females to be attractive, but at the same time I have learned that guys don't like girls that are too skinny.  Part of me wants to feel attractive, but the other part of me wants to ward off men entirely so that I can really be single for the first time in years like I've said I would.  But there's also a third part of me.  There's that part that doesn't want to scare my Mom or make her worried about me, and therefore doesn't want to get any thinner.  It's a daily battle, but for me it's more about just looking like some model in a magazine.  It's a deeply emotional thing that I'm trying to work through.  I guess we'll see how it goes.


      ***This probably isn't something I should have made public, but it felt really good to write about.  Please don't worry about me, I'm okay.  Or at least I'm working on it.