Ghost

The funny thing about anorexia is that it follows you around. When you've broken free of its control and killed it, it's ghost hangs about you, threatening to re-materialize with every morsel. It's hoping that you will become overconfident so it can slip behind the driver's seat when you aren't looking. Counting calories has been like erecting a staircase from it to me. Always the whispering at me, "Less. Less." 1400 calories a day kept feeling like a starting point and that of course it would diminish more and more and that hopefully I, then, would diminish as well. You see, an eating disorder eats you bite by bite, slowly making you smaller and smaller under its control. The weight of the person affected by it is irrelevant. Because, you see, when afflicted you act out in rebellion and eat in its sight, an act of pure defiance. And then, riddled by guilt, you relent again to its wise control, despising your own lack of control for eating and for what you ate. Sometimes you don't buy certain foods at all so there is no risk. And others you haughtily send it down the grocery belt because you consider yourself strong enough to have it around and to only have a bite of it now and then. Until the container is empty and you are shamed by it because for a few minutes you gave in to the taste, the texture, the freedom, the ability not to care. The promises to yourself how long it will be until you eat again to pay for this misdeed. The constant fear, the constant pinching at the fat on your body in disgust, the long looks of loathing in the mirror as you picture in your mind how you should look and what a pathetic being you are because you can't make yourself look that way when it is obviously so easy for some others to do so. Counting calories walked me back to that place. "It's just math, I am in control." However, I wasn't following the meal plan anymore. I went back to two meals a day. I knew that would slow down my metabolism, like Denise Austin talked about, but it felt good. The hunger pains were deserved because of my weakness. Portia de Rossi's book, Unbearable Lightness, was such a comfort to me - she had lived in that place. That world of not allowing yourself to eat something unless you no longer wanted to so desperately. That other voice that inhabits your mind and counts everything. The voice that wakes you up in the night demanding what you ate and ordering out of bed and onto the floor to exercise it away. Life being focused about when you ate last and when and what you need to eat next. Knowing that your metabolism had slowed to the point that if you start eating normally again you will definitely gain weight immediately because your body feels it must hold on to everything it is given.

I can think of no torture worse than what it felt like to gain weight so quickly and constantly while I was taking the anti-depressants from hell. To be helpless to it no matter how little I ate or how much I exercised, the ghost screaming and sobbing from the pain of it. All the hard work and discipline that got me to the point that I was actually beginning to like my body was for nothing. I hate to move at all because I can feel that fat all around me. The feeling of hopelessness encasing me, feeling like the only place to turn is to that trusted ghost that helped me before. That ghost that knows best how to fix this problem. How to make me become myself again. I've wanted to give myself back to it so much. To just shed this horrible fat, to run away from that word overweight. Diets are for the gullible, eating is for the weak. Anorexia is how I become the master of myself, how I force my body to bend to my will. I refuse its pleas of hunger, I enjoy the pain and dizziness and shaking, I laugh at food, only I control what I eat and no one else can tell me what or how to do that. I became very angry at Denise for trying to control me, for introducing me to all these numbers that mix up in my brain. Numbers on the scale, numbers on the package, numbers on the measuring cups and spoons, numbers on my clothes announcing my fat fat size to the world and showing them how much less I need to be to be beautiful, to be acceptable, to be sexy. I have been ashamed and afraid to go out in public because others can see it. I want the starvation back. I want that reliable constant hunger and pain to help me feel better and feel in control and silence my worries because soon I will be less. Soon I'll be skinnier than the others. They'll see how strong I am and how much pain I can take to get where I want to be. My goals have always been clear: size 0 and 100 pounds. And now there's the number of calories for each day that I have the power to make smaller and smaller.

But I won't. I eat. And I refuse to count anymore. I will not count anymore. I will exercise and run, run away from the ghost and hope it never catches me. I know I can do it because Portia did it. She broke away. She no longer "diets and exercises." She eats and is active and enjoys her life and has fun. The voice asked her what she ate and she said to it what someday I will be able to say to that voice: Go to hell.