Excerpt

By the time I was in ninth grade, what I ate or didn’t eat, how much I weighed, and what I looked like were almost all I could think about. One morning before gym class, I listened intently as my friend gave me diet and exercise tips in case I wanted to tone up my “love handles”. Seeing her as an attractive, popular, and thin girl, and desperately wanting to be well-liked, I followed her advice. (After all, I believed that she was popular because she was thin.) I grew more mindful of what I ate, counting calories and forbidding myself to eat certain foods. For two or three days I could eat “well” and feel good about myself. Eating well made me feel like I was in control of things; there was no way I’d get fat as long as I ate well. For a few days at a time, I could convince myself that I didn’t even want cake, cookies, or candy. When confronted with such foods, I’d tell myself, “It’s bad for you. Why would you want to eat something bad?” And so I’d survive for a few days without these treats until I ultimately “caved” and ate something I thought I shouldn’t. The first few bites were easy to rationalize: “I earned it for being so good these past few days.” Minutes later, however, I’d begin to feel ashamed, guilty, and mad at myself. In that state of mind, I turned to bingeing. It was both a punishment for having taken that first mouthful (which seemed like “the beginning of the end”) and also a way of packing in whatever I wanted because the next day I was going to “start over” with the calorie counting and food avoidance. (“And this time,” I told myself, “I’ll be really good!”)

Despite my best attempts, staying away from certain foods was not easy. One of my favorite desserts was yellow cake with vanilla butter-cream frosting. It had long ago been relegated to the “forbidden list”, that ever-growing inventory of tasty, but fattening treats I knew I had to avoid if I wanted to stay thin. During the two weeks immediately after my high school graduation, I attended close to a dozen parties and was confronted at each one with a colorfully frosted sheet cake. At the first party, the unusual red and black icing (our school colors) called out to me: “Don’t you wanna know what black icing tastes like?!” After one taste, I knew it was just like all the other colors of icing, sweet and delicious, but with the peculiar side effect of discoloring my tongue and lips. In preparation for the next party I told myself I wouldn’t eat any cake because the icing would stain my mouth. I entered the room, saw the two tables full of food and my eyes scanned over everything, searching for the cake. There it was—in all its white and green glory. “White and green?! Ah, yes. Our senior class colors. I wonder what green icing tastes like. Surely it won’t stain my mouth like the black icing.”

At my own party that weekend I allowed myself to have a piece of cake while a rousing chorus of “It’s my party and I’ll eat if I want to…” ran through my head. Later that night, however, the music stopped. With all the guests gone and no one to distract me from my guilt, I berated myself for having eaten something with “absolutely no nutritional value”. I felt certain that the next piece of cake would make my stomach instantly jiggly, much like the effect a cold fridge has on liquid Jell-O gelatin. I silently vowed to leave the next party before they cut the cake just so I wouldn’t be tempted. But before I knew it, I was reaching for my own little square of perfectly iced yellow cake and telling myself like a smoker trying to quit cold turkey, “This is really the last time.” Two weeks and four more parties later, I had eaten cake at every event and was convinced that in doing so I had lost complete control over my eating. I was doomed to be fat.

Once the party season was over, I swore I’d “never eat cake again”. That promise lasted for about three days until I discovered that much of my own leftover graduation cake was wrapped up in easily accessible single portions in our deep freezer downstairs. I started playing games again, challenging myself to remove a piece of cake from the freezer without making a sound, expose it from within its aluminum foil hiding place, and eat it frozen before my parents came downstairs. There was probably little risk of them walking in on me, but I felt an adrenaline rush none-the-less, similar to the way I felt as a young girl stealing cookies from my brother. This “cake walk” went on every day for a week until I had eaten nearly half of what was in the freezer and was truly sick of cake. What had started in ninth grade as a self-imposed diet and exercise challenge was rapidly developing into a much greater obstacle.