Where to begin? It will sound trite if I say I understand how you feel, but you must believe me when I say I do. You are at a very vulnerable time of your life – it’s an awesome time of life, but open to so many pressures, in particular to look a certain way. Which, in our society often means being thin. This is nothing new. However much we try to fight it, there will continue to be images in the media of thinness and a mindset that thinner is better. What doesn’t need to continue is our willingness to believe it and, in the process lose our self-esteem and acceptance of ourselves as perfectly imperfect beings. I succumbed to the pressure at a young age, believed I had to be thin, believed I had to be ‘perfect’ to have any chance of being loved and believed, overall, that food was the enemy. The result? I was a prime target for what came to be an almost constant presence in my life – anorexia.
Anorexia is sneaky, it’s sly and it will make you think it is your best friend ever. And for a while it will be. Why? Because it will give you everything you’ve always wanted. It will give you thinness. It will build your self esteem by telling you how beautiful you look, how desirable you now are, how superior you are to all those other poor people who obviously lack all will power when it comes to food. Discomfort when sitting on anything hard will seem pleasurable as will sticking your fingers down your throat to rid your body of the enemy. Anorexia will cause you to act like a crazy person in the grocery store – obsessively checking the nutritional content of everything you pick up – and usually replace on the shelf. It will convince you that anything containing more than 1 gram of fat per serving is taboo and make you Google which vegetables contain less carbohydrates than others.
Anorexia will dominate your thoughts from morning to night and, if it’s really doing its job, invade your dreams too. It will challenge you every single day, dare you to eat less than the day before. And, heaven forbid, your morning weigh-in (likely the first of many throughout the day) proves to be a disappointment, it will berate you relentlessly for the whole day. Don’t get me wrong, Anorexia will let you eat, but it will dictate when, where and exactly how much time should pass between ‘meals’.
Anorexia has an amazing ability to turn any concerned comment about your thinness into a compliment. It will convince you that it is your only friend – that all the people who claim to love and care about you just secretly want to make you fat. That they’re jealous. That they wish they had just an ounce of your self-control. That the only solution is to stop listening to them, cut them out of your life. It is at that point that Anorexia knows it has got you. And it is at this point that it will turn on you. You think it has a presence in your life now? Just wait until you try to leave it. It will grip you tighter than ever and have a louder voice than that of your concern over the fact you are developing osteoporosis, your teeth are breaking, your heartbeat is irregular, you live a solitary and lonely life. You will die.
I’m not going to tell you not to want to lose weight. You might go through your whole life wanting to lose a few pounds. Most people do. Just make sure that if Anorexia ever sidles up to you, with all its promises and hope, you inform it that you already have enough real friends.
