Calorie Chronicles: The Eating Disorder(s)

I’ll never forget the first time I put my finger down my throat to throw up a meal. It was harder than I thought it would be.

The only prior experience I’d had with this was in the form of cop shows and Made for TV movies. My favourite high school show was 21 Jump Street, and I’d watched the narcs puke out drugs on that program several times. They’d had to swallow all kinds of stimulants in order to save face, but always made the obligatory bathroom trip right after to prevent anything from getting into their systems.

The procedure seemed quite simple: kneel in front of toilet, one finger into your mouth, hurl, flush. Don’t forget to rinse and get that barfy smell out of your mouth.

The Made for TV movies designed to educate teenagers about all kinds of adolescent horrors illustrated the scene in pretty much the same way, although the subject matter was different. The most beautiful, popular girl in school hides her anorexic secret, force vomiting every chance she gets in most the discreet fashion: she kneels, holds her hair with one hand, uses finger from the other hand, hurls, and flushes. Then she rinses, but doesn’t repeat.

Easy peasy.

I thought about a lot of scenes like that as I was eating my dinner that night, which I remember was some form of powdered soup mix with barely any calories, and cucumber slices sans salt. Bird food. When I was done, I made my way upstairs to the bathroom, locked myself in, and turned the fan on so the noise could muffle out what I was about to do. I didn’t want my roommates to hear.

The formula was running through my head like mad: Kneel, finger, hurl, flush. Kneel, finger, hurl, flush. I kneeled, took a deep breath, stared at my reflection in the still water of the toilet bowl, then put my right index finger into my mouth, and down my throat.

It didn’t happen right away. I gagged hard and felt the contents my stomach jump, but nothing came out. I would have to try harder. I extended my finger further and gagged again. My stomach lurched, but still nothing.

I was starting to breathe quickly, and I felt sick. I didn’t like any of this, not one bit, but I had a goal to accomplish. After all, there was weight to be lost. I braced myself, extended even further, and scratched at the back of my throat.

Voila. Undigested cucumber chunks and brown liquid from the onion soup mix. One part of me felt awful for crossing that line, while another, much smaller part, was cheering at this small “success.”

Most of me was in awe that I’d actually done it. After a few minutes I stood up, flushed, rinsed, then brushed my teeth to get the acidy taste out of my mouth.

From that point on, my life became very routine. Wake up, do a weighing, write numbers down. Drink lots of water for breakfast. Go to work if called in, if not, skate for three hours. Home for lunch: two or three lean cold cuts, a small piece of fruit, and two glasses of water. Puke. Back to work if necessary, if not, do school work. Class in the evening. Home for dinner: soup mix and small serving of raw vegetables. Puke. To the radio station if I had a show that night, if not, skate for another hour or two.

Go home and collapse in bed, fully dressed. Too tired to change. Spend the night staring at the digital red numbers on my clock radio because those days, no matter how exhausted I was, sleep never came.

But it was working. My weight was dropping like wildfire, and it wasn’t long before I was receiving compliments for slimming down. There was never any cause for alarm, though. No one sat me down for a talk or came rushing to my rescue, because the difference wasn’t that apparent. I always wore baggy clothes.

My family didn’t notice either, not in the larger sense. I was only home on weekends, and those 48 hours freedom from the buzz of my daily life at school, mysteriously, let my body rest. I usually slept two thirds of my weekend away. I’d learned to throw up really quietly by then too, so none became the wiser.

What does it look like from the outside, living like this? Had anyone close to me known what I was doing, what would they have said? Or did they really suspect, but just not say anything?

I’ll never know. But I did know that my insides were feeling bad, awful, TERRIBLE. It was a serious tug-of-war for me, a good versus bad justified by the fact that I’d gone down another waist size. It didn’t matter that I always felt sick, or that I had permanently pulled stomach muscles from throwing up all the time. Sometimes I was too tired to reach for the phone when it was ringing, even though it was on the nightstand right beside my bed, and other times my hands shook so badly I couldn’t fit my key into the front door.

None of that was important. I was getting smaller.

My freedom from this mess was skating. Every single day I’d strap on my rollerblades and skate down the cement path, past the school, then the daycare centre, through the parking lot and out onto the street.

The university was close to some new blocks of suburbs, and every blader’s dream: miles upon miles of freshly paved cement. For hours every day I skated the neighbourhoods, ignoring the stomach pains, and just enjoying what it was like to be young. I didn’t think. I just skated.

I also sweated like a madwoman, wearing two layers of long sleeved, black clothing during these sessions, even though it was the peak of summer. The more you sweat the more you lose, right?

Two moments from that summer stick out: the little girl from the daycare, and the night that I crashed.

I used to love skating by the daycare every day. It was after a long, gradual turn, so by the time I got there I’d worked up enough speed to look sufficiently impressive to the group of three and four-year olds playing in the yard. After seeing me roll by multiple times, they’d developed the habit of standing by the gate to wave at me as I went by. I always waved back.

One time as I was doing my skate-by, right after the kids had waved and I had waved back, I heard one little girl exclaim, “One day I’m gonna be just like her!”

How innocent children are. How deceiving appearances can be. Later that night when I was in the bathroom throwing up my dinner, the only thing I could think was, Kid, I’m the last person in the world you want to be like.

The night that I crashed, I was cooking for a potluck. My roommates and some of the other girls staying for the summer had planned a block barbecue that I’d bailed out on at the last minute. I didn’t want to be tempted with party food, and I certainly didn’t want to eat. The girls were peeved at me and so to appease everyone, I still chipped in with my share of food donations.

Potato salad, a la mom’s recipe. Boil Yukon gold potatoes, slice into rounds, then layer in a bowl with plenty of olive oil, lemon juice, salt and chopped green onions. I made a big one in the wee hours of the morning, when everyone else was asleep, but made the fatal mistake of taking one last glance at the bowl before going back up to my room.

I was starving. I had been starving for a long time, and the salad looked so good. One slice of potato can’t hurt, I thought. Just the one.

My lips actually shook as I was chewing. It was marvelous, and it was real food. Maybe just one more, I thought, and reached in for another slice. Then another. And then another.

You know where this is going. In no time flat I’d finished off the potato salad. It was an amazing satisfaction, finally having a stomach full of food and the aching at a standstill, interrupted by this sudden glaring, brutal thought:

Pig.

It couldn’t stay with me. I went up the stairs and to the bathroom, and did what I’d done so many times before. It was easy by then. I got up extra early the next morning to go to the store for more potato salad ingredients, and had another one ready hours before the party began. No one had even noticed.

That month was an eternity, but like all things, came to pass. The day my sister and I boarded that plane to Europe, I weighed myself one last time. In four weeks, I had lost a total of 32 pounds.