Almost anorexic (english)
"As far as bad habits go, if I were a pack-a-day smoker who kept
falling off the wagon, I’d probably be getting friendly advice from everyone — use the patch, try hypnosis, chew this gum and if none of those
worked, maybe a smoker’s rights group would work.
Drink too much? Well, as long as I wasn’t driving and it didn’t affect
my job, my friends might simply take it as an appreciation of alcohol,
especially if it was good red wine that had me by the collar.
But my bad habit is one that makes everybody’s eyes widen when they
hear it. It is not socially acceptable, and absolutely no one has a sense of
humor about it. My bad habit is that I like to starve myself from time to
time. The doctors say it must be a psychological problem. Perhaps I should
be looking at what I am going through when I’m depriving myself of food. But I think it is just a very effective and enjoyable form of weight loss, one
that I have had control over for years now.
I think if people understood how good starving themselves feels, they
would understand people with eating disorders a lot better. They would also
do their best to make sure no one ever got an inkling of the feeling,
because once a trip has been taken down that road, it’s a difficult trip back
for most people. And that’s probably why, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, there are 7 million women and 1 million men who suffer from eating disorders. (They report that 6 percent of all serious cases die from the disorder.) I am one of the fortunate ones, because I have always been able to stop before it became a serious problem.
I never made a conscious effort to use starving myself as a dieting
tool. I was always a skinny child because I was utterly bored with food.
But at 16, I discovered fast food. My first taste of a Harvey’s burger was heaven. I used to lie to my parents, pushing my plate away at dinner and telling them I was off to the library, while my friends and I headed off for a cheeseburger with extra dill pickles. After a few months, we discovered a little crepe house downtown and began to frequent it without our parents’ knowledge. I gained a bit of weight, but at 5-foot-7 and 107 pounds, I definitely had nothing to worry about. I had grown quickly and my weight hadn’t yet caught up with me.
My first real flirtation with starving came during my second year at college. I admit that part of my problem was that I was in an up-and-down love
affair. But it wasn’t my first, so why would I start starving myself now and
not for the other romances? At the beginning I simply didn’t feel like
eating. So for the first couple of days I just downed a Coke for breakfast
and smoked a cigarette, the same for lunch and about a half a portion of
dinner. After about three days I dubbed it the “Coke and
cigarettes diet.” After a month and a half I weighed 102, down from the 118
I had weighed when I arrived at the university. Cheekbones had replaced the baby fat
on my face and my hipbones actually stood out. To this day, that is a memory I
cherish.
However, my boyfriend (the up-and-down one) told me I looked awful and
fortunately I believed him. Or if I didn’t, I heeded his comments anyway and
started eating. That summer I gained back the weight and the cheeks during
my job as a waitress at a Rocky Mountains resort.
It was not until about 10 years later that starving myself came in handy
again. This time there was more going on in my life than usual, but
I don’t think that was the issue. It started out with stomach jitters over a
failed romance and a move to a new city. Not eating properly for a few days
gave me that great “high” I remembered from the Coke and cigarettes
days. That was what had hooked me then and what was doing it now.
Doctors who work with anorexics say it’s not unusual. People in
concentration camps who are starving feel euphoric, but apparently it’s a
transient feeling that goes away after a while.
During this little foray into starvation land, I lived mainly on apple
juice and cigarettes. I’d mellowed in my choice of beverages, but the
cigarettes were still an integral part of the diet because they were so
successful at killing my appetite. This time I also started an exercise
program, which helped put me down two dress sizes. In addition to that, I
started what I thought was bulimia, but is known as “normal weight
vomiting.” (It’s only called bulimia if it includes bingeing followed by throwing up.) I simply ate a normal dinner and then threw it up. The only problem with this was that while it was something I initially did on my own, it eventually turned into something my body was doing whether or not I liked it. It got to the point where I would simply eat dinner and then about 15 minutes later, I would feel ill and throw up.