ANDI

My body and I have come a long way. We have braved many a trouble. Turbulent seas. Terror-filled nights of loneliness. It was a battle between my mind, my body, and the food in the pantry. Most of the time, I didn't want food to be any part of my life at all. I wanted to be thin. Thin like a supermodel, thin like the cheerleaders I'd always hated in school. Jealousy, natch. My mind convinced itself it wanted that thinness more than life itself - at the cost of nearly everything. My body didn't really have a say. The food was the enemy.

Yet I kept sneaking across enemy lines. I ate, and I ate, and I ate, until I got sick and choked a little on each bite, yet I kept on eating and eating and eating. Fritos, Pringles, Little Debbie snack cakes, Rice Krispies, Trix, Cocoa Puffs, strawberry shortcakes - anything I could get my hands on immediately got opened and crammed into my mouth. I would wake up in a food-induced stupor the next morning to find that I was actually sleeping on the kitchen floor, with the pantry door wide open, with wrappers and boxes strewn all around me. I ran out the door and flew into the gym, confident that I could immediately work all that fat off. I stayed in the gym nearly the entire day, running on the treadmill until I almost fell off with exhaustion.

Then I would go home to an empty house and a full fridge. I kept buying food, mainly to keep up appearances so that my friends and family wouldn't go crazy and think I was starving myself - which, ironically, was what I was actually doing.

I wouldn't eat for days on end, weeks maybe even, and I know for a fact that I tried to go for a month without eating a single morsel - not even a grape. And then there it would be again - that innate urge to just eat, eat, eat. So I did. I passed out in front of the fridge. I threw up too many times to count. It was binge, purge, binge, purge, binge-purge in an endless, undeniably dangerous cycle. I could not stop.

Finally something inside me just quit. I guess my body couldn't take it anymore, or I couldn't take it anymore - I felt like my soul was dying, or already dead - perpetually dead. I lay in bed for two days until my best friend came over and found me - half starving yet with food wrappers everywhere. She had had a very close encounter with Mia herself so she knew the signs - and she freaked out on me. She shouted for close to an hour about the damage I was doing to myself, my SELF, and my body. She shouted about proper health and nutrition, proper exercise, and the anguish I would cause myself down the road. She shouted about halitosis, about bones getting brittle and bending, until I finally broke down and cried. Then she scooped me into her arms for a little while and insisted I go to a hospital. So I did. After that, I went into a rehabilitation clinic. It's now almost eight months later and here I am - I'm alive and I'm actually eating healthy.

I gotta say, it's a start - and an improvement.