It Was Me All Along

Can you do it today? The notion of just trying to take each day as it came. The commitment to the present moment, and only the present moment, without worrying about the big and daunting picture of all the days that followed.

I was trying to lose weight on the surface, but deeper, I was acknowledging that I’d been wrong for sixteen years and had to work to right myself. How do you walk away from all you’ve ever been?

The wanting to be different in order to be perceived as better, yet wishing I didn’t have to try so hard.

A part of me was disdainful of the newfound attention I was receiving. You see me now? I’m attractive now? Receiving the congratulations, the praises in some small way felt like accepting that what I’d been before—all of my life—was wrong. Even though I’d often felt that way myself, I resented that the size of my body was correlated to my value, my worth as a person.

Can you do it today? Can you make it through today without bingeing? Just today, and tomorrow we’ll reconsider?

I will always know that the grass, though it seems emerald and glowing in that field on the other side—it isn’t. Flowers grow here. They grow over there. Weeds do, too. But both are wide, and they’re open. And I can lie and cry in one and move and spin in the other, all while knowing this: they’re the same field. And they’re both mine.

Can u exercise today? Not tomorrow or the next day!

I want to quit, I want to quit, I want to quit. And when I’m done quitting, I’d like to quit again.

But after all highs comes a low.

I realized that I couldn’t knowingly look to food for a way out when it had so clearly led me here. It wasn’t hunger that beckoned me to eat more. It wasn’t my stomach that needed to be reconciled. It was shame. It was guilt. And food can’t remedy such things

i rearrange the jagged stars of your past

like taking one bite into something I couldn’t quite place. It was layered and complex, an unfamiliar taste I liked enough to crave more of instantly. Perhaps what lured me most was that it was never enough to feel sated. There was always a gentle nuance to him, something new I’d just begun to discover.

In all of my life, the friends I’d kept had always been eaters just like me. We were second-serving-grabbing, lick-your-plate-clean, can-I-get-an-extra-scoop-of-that eaters. We wore our affection for food as a badge of honor, as though eating wildly indicated fearlessness. As though eating big meant living big.

Time and mood were always regulated by Dad. Our whole family was set to the thermostat, boiling or freezing, inside of him. When

What worried me almost as much as letting myself down if I gained it all back, was letting everyone else down. Being a failure. The pressure, the foreignness of it all caused the welling up of a deep, deep insecurity.

…there was no more that I could do to make myself look better in that moment than smile and be kind…

For the first time, I appeared healthy on the outside. I wanted so badly to conceal the fact that, despite a radical transformation, I remained as screwed up as I had ever been.

Unhelpfully, a friend of the family reminded me, 'You know, Andrea, losing weight is the easy part. It's maintaining it that's really hard.' This sentiment made me seethe. How dare anyone minimize that struggle, that agonizing journey of losing weight?

I was ashamed that I couldn't just feel better.

I am a lifetime practitioner of secretive eating, after all. As a kid who entered an empty house after school each day, I felt a desperation to eat. I knew no way other than eating to alleviate the loneliness, to fill in the spaces where comfort and security could have been. Food poured over the millions of cracks in the foundation of my family; it seeped into the fissures; it narrowed the chasms.

The thing is- It's easy to find the bad. I'm cynical at times. Pessimistic and realistic. I can, and do, look at situations in pros and cons.

A really frustrating part was realizing that being boy crazy wasn’t even a worthwhile pastime. You can’t be boy crazy if no boy would ever be crazy for a girl like you. You can’t fantasize about your first kiss if you can’t even imagine that a boy—any boy—would kiss you.

I knew no way other than eating to alleviate the loneliness, to fill in the spaces where comfort and security could have been.

I struggled between wishing away all the food that had collected on my body as fat and fiercely missing every morsel. I hated the binge last weekend, and I wished I could do it again. I wanted to eat less, and I wanted immediately to eat more.

n an ideal world, a child learns eating as intuitive practice. She seeks out and savors what she wants when she feels hungry. She stops when her stomach sends signals to her brain…Gentle bodily sensations are the sole system she needs to rely on.

Having always struggled with consistency in dieting, I began journaling what and how much I ate. This single act changed the way I viewed and valued eating, teaching me accountability and an awareness of my own hunger and fullness.

I resented having to live differently, just so that I could be the same.

How do you walk away from all you've ever been?

The change I’d undergone—from someone who ate to capacity to distract her mind, into someone who purposely tasted every morsel—was not unconscious…I put my fork down between bites instead of making like a shovel and digging in. I let a forkful of food sit on my tongue in order to observe its flavor, to savor it. I paused often during the meal to check in with my hunger and fullness.