I was positive, like almost every girl, that if I could lose ten pounds, I would undergo this miraculous transformation and suddenly be the most popular and beautiful female on the planet. Since sixth grade, I had experimented with endless crash diets and short-term weight-loss schemes. At the end of my freshman year of high school, about a month and a half before summer vacation, I started a new diet: fruits and veggies only.
It worked fabulously at first. I lost five pounds in two days and decided to continue until I went from my unacceptable 145 to 125 pounds.
Unfortunately, as most diets do, this one slowly stopped working. So I gradually had to cut more and more calories out of my diet. Meanwhile, one of my good friends, Kayleigh, also began to diet. Her diet was more of a fast, and it caught everyone’s attention. People were talking about calling her parents, and everyone gossiped about how Kayleigh skipped lunch again. I secretly wished I could be her; I thought the negative attention was better than no attention at all.
I had never been popular in middle school. While I wasn’t an outcast, I was a wallflower and kept to myself. When high school started, I vowed to change everything and tried as hard as I could to get attention from my peers. I did my hair differently, laid out in the sun on weekends to get a tan, and got a job so I could buy cool clothes. I had friends, but I was never satisfied. I wanted to be popular. I craved attention and I finally saw a way to get it. Even if people didn’t notice my fasting, they would notice the eventual weight loss.
So the next day my diet turned into a fast. I sat in my ballet studio, sipping on a Diet Pepsi and waiting for class to begin, wondering how long I would have to hold out until someone noticed the fact that I, too, was starving! After three days of consuming nothing except diet sodas and water, I decided that I had had about enough. That afternoon, as my mom drove me, coincidentally, to my doctor’s office for a physical, I told her that I thought I was anorexic.
Her reaction was not what I expected. Instead of a rush of concern and immediate scheduling of therapist appointments, I got a lecture on how my body was not a toy and how anorexia was a serious disease and not something to joke around about. I remember sitting in my doctor’s office holding back my tears of embarrassment as he asked me, ironically, if I was eating all my fruits and vegetables.
That night my family and I went out to dinner and I decided to go all out and abandon my diet, which hadn’t exactly had the desired effect anyway. My mother, watching me scarf down piece after piece of bread, pizza, an ice cream sundae, and more Dr. Pepper than most people could drink in a month, commented, you know, after not eating anything for a few days, you should probably slow down a little.
Oh, shut up, I thought, with anger pulsating through my veins. Like you even give a damn about my fasting anyway.
The whole situation left me feeling humiliated and as fat as ever, the two things I was trying to avoid. I knew that a serious eating issue could get me the attention I craved, but I needed to do it right. It was a few months later when I started throwing up in another desperate attempt to be accepted.
I wasn’t perfect, but until the year I turned fifteen, I never got into very much trouble. This changed my first year of high school when I started experimenting with alcohol at a few parties during the school year and smoking cigarettes with friends when I claimed to be at the library. That summer, I lost my virginity to a guy that I knew from my job at a local coffee shop. I remember silently crying as he spent the fifteen-minute drive home making me swear over and over to never tell a soul so his girlfriend, whom I had never heard of, wouldn’t find out. It was incredibly painful and a horribly humiliating experience, one that I vowed I would never get myself into again but I didn’t keep that promise.
