Thin

I lie awake and try to clear my mind of the day’s events long enough to find sleep. As an author, I think of my writing goals and achievements of the day, and wring my wrists in thought, touching my thumb to my middle finger and wrapping them around my wrist.

I freeze, and my heart discombobulates momentarily, like a cascading car on a slippery road. I could never wrap my fingers around my wrist like that before. Have I changed that much?

It all started with the Britney Stomach Club, or BSC. It’s an online message board successful for helping people turn their bodies from flab to fab. Like every teenage girl, I hated my body and wanted to change it. I wanted to lose weight (I couldn’t have been more than 105-110 lbs), and I wanted abs. BSC was a great place to get advice and information, share techniques, and achieve my ideal body in a healthy way.

But I didn’t go about it in a healthy way.

After exploring the board just once, I knew that excess sodium was Bad. On that particular day, we had nothing in the house but Top Ramen. Salty, sodium-drenched Top Ramen. ‘I shouldn’t eat it,’ I told myself, but I was so hungry. After cooking it, pouring it in a bowl, and looking at it as if I was waiting for it to get up and sing and dance, I took a bite. I took a few more bites. What I had always liked eating, and had even been my (and a lot of other seven year old’s) favorite food sometime around third grade, was suddenly the most disgusting thing I could consume. I got up and put it in the sink.

My disgust with the Top Ramen, and all the Bad components of it soon spread to... Everything. The next day I ate almost nothing. I didn’t want to even think about all those disgusting calories and fat grams and calories per fat (yes, I had spent quite an amount of time analyzing every food label). I was proud of myself for my stamina. Late in the afternoon the next day, I had been feeling perfectly fine, when suddenly I was dizzy and lightheaded, and a little bit nauseous. My friend told me to eat something. I poured a cup of orange juice, which had always been my favorite drink. After examining the label, I took a few sips. It was hard. I couldn’t bring myself to consume anything. With a lot of willpower, I brought myself to drink it all, but it was like that one cup was too much for me, and made me feel sick.

My mother had already been working out at the YMCA in the mornings. I had decided to join her. We did the Treadmill together, and it was fun. Not only was it fun, but I loved seeing the amount of calories burned go up and up on the monitor.

Exercise and no food made me weak. Mum noticed. She found out one morning on the way to the Y, that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. She headed for Burger King, which was on the way, and said she’d get me chicken tenders. I didn’t know how to get out of that one. Well, it turned out that the line for the drive through was very long, and when I said I didn’t feel like going out, that was that.

"You’re getting skinny," was what I often heard Mum utter. I otherwise wouldn’t have noticed, but I looked in the mirror and realized that yes, my legs were skinnier, my hip bones showed, and so did my cheekbones. I liked it.

"You’re getting skinny," wasn’t supposed to encourage me, but it did. I liked to hear it, because that showed my tactic was working.

In my eyes, I looked better... But did I feel better? One time, I was so exhausted that I lay on my back atop my bed for a moment. When I got up, I felt very dizzy and stumbled, crashing my head into my mirror in my stupor. Suddenly my eyesight began to fade, just the way a movie scene fades into darkness. I couldn’t see! I opened and closed my eyes, rubbing them and opening them as wide as they could go, trying to see anything but blackness. Then, as simply and as quickly as it had left, my eyesight returned. I was in such a panic that it had seemed to last a long time, but I know it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. Still, I was scared.

Markie told me, "For goodness sakes, just eat!" It wasn’t that easy. "You don’t understand," I told her. Nobody really understands unless they’ve been through it. The feeling of disgust at even the idea of food sitting in your stomach. The absolute self-loathe and nausea when I actually did eat. The desire to go throw up anything I ate (though I never did). I ate occasionally, like when my mum was watching, but it was never more than a broccoli head, a string of chicken, or a few slices of an orange.

I decided that I couldn’t go on the way I was. I didn’t feel that I was greatly harming myself, but I was vaguely aware that starving myself might be a little bit bad for me in the long run. So I went back to Britney Stomach Club. I told them what I was going through, ending it with, "The desire to stop all this is there, but not all that strong, because I'm seeing results." One girl told me she had gone through the same thing, and pointed out, "You will never be satisfied." It was true. I would never be satisfied with how I looked. I’d always want to be thinner, thinner, even thinner. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

I learned to eat more and more. My stomach had shrunken, and didn’t hold as much food, but I gradually was able to eat the less fatty food, like fruits and vegetables (which I was somewhat less afraid of), and moved on to anything, like macaroni. I gradually made myself go back to eating.

Today I had felt awfully gluttonous. I had eaten slice after slice of fruit, a few brownie bites, two grilled cheese sandwiches, and chicken with string beans, more than I had eaten in a long time combined. Although I eat nowadays, I still pay attention to fat and calories, I still eat very little, and I still try to go as long as I can until I eat. I still work out and still love to sweat and burn calories. Because of it, I eat healthier now, and exercise is always good, so I know I’m not hurting myself anymore. At least... I think.

I wrap my fingers around my wrist, feeling the bone that easily bumps out. I wasn’t like this before. I touch that bone again, and all I know is, it scares me. Part of me likes it, but part of me is saying, "This has gone too far."

I wonder which side of me I’ll listen to. I don’t have to wonder long, because the Cheyenne that loves looking in the mirror and seeing bone every day is so much more dominant in me right now. Don’t ever starve yourself... It’s too hard to turn back.