Chapter One: Distorted

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.