Road trips, teenage heartbreak, skipped meals

What I tell my therapist when she asks how my eating disorder developed

TW: This post contains mention of eating disorders. I invite you to take the words slowly and honor your feelings and body if you decide to read on—if at any point you feel overwhelmed or triggered by the content, you can stop reading. I won’t be offended—I want you to take care of yourself.

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Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

this post comes from chapter four in my memoir, “Where the River Flows.”

I’ve struggled with negative body image since I was 11 years old.

I remember from an early age noticing the difference between my body and the bodies of other girls. I’d stand in the locker room at gym time, staring as they removed their shirts, wondering how their stomachs looked so hard and flat. Questioning my own body and feeling that mine was somehow wrong in comparison.

I spent the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school dieting to no avail. I couldn’t seem to shed the belly fat I so desperately despised. I just wanted to be thin like my friends. I wanted a flat stomach like the rest of the girls at school. What was so wrong with my body that it couldn’t take the shape and form of everyone I saw around me?

I was certain that the shape of my belly was preventing me from finding love. That the boys at my school didn’t want a round stomach, and that unless I looked like my friends or the girls I saw on TV, they’d find me disgusting.

One day in summer, right before my sophomore year of high school, I was at my friend’s condo laying by the pool. We were catching the last few rays of Seattle sun and gossiping about the boys we couldn’t wait to see come September. Her younger brother came to sit with us, and within moments of arriving he pointed at my stomach, and with a snickering grin said, “nice pooch.”

I was mortified. He saw it. It wasn’t in my head. The pooch wasn’t some dysmorphic thing I’d imagined—it was real, and just as I feared, it was disgusting.

Weeks later after school began, I found out that Adrian, a boy I’d become romantically involved with, told his buddies , “One day Rachel will grow out of her baby fat.” I sickly took this as a compliment. That he’d seen the potential in my body, hiding under all this baby fat I, too, was convinced didn’t belong.

The boys in my high school were always rating our bodies. Who had the nicest butt. The best abs. The prettiest eyes. We were like show dogs to them, parading in circles around the common area of our school, waiting to be selected and rated, hoping to go home with a ribbon.

I went harder on my diets and started cutting out food groups. I stopped drinking soda, reduced breakfast to a single grapefruit, and increased the times I went running each week.

When cabbage soup and “Slim ‘N Six” DVDs didn’t give me the slim-‘n-six-pack I wanted, I started to grow frustrated with my body. I started to think something was inherently wrong with it—my other friends could work out and get fit, why couldn’t I? What was so wrong with me?

My breasts hadn’t yet developed, and I’d only ever had one period, so I was also convinced my body was somehow behind, somehow not advanced, not ever designed to be fully woman or fully beautiful. I was a pudgy adolescent, doomed to be small, soft, and round unless I found the secret that I was certain everyone but me possessed.