What I Learned About the Women I Love on the Other Side of the Battle With My Body

I sat on my ankles in the less overstuffed of the two chairs at my therapist’s office, sipping lukewarm tea in the only sweatshirt that fit.

Do you feel like you’ve lost something?

I shrugged, exhaling sharply. It was February, a few weeks before my thirtieth birthday. It had been over four months since I felt hunger. No growling stomach, no pangs, no physical sensation whatsoever of the need to eat. No matter how long I would go without food, I felt full. Swollen, almost. And yet I ate compulsively, watching my body change, my mind fall victim to frightening urges I didn’t recognize.

*

I grew up in a naked family. My cousins and I showered together at twelve, laughing and sharing lavender shampoo after a full day in the sun. Shoulders slightly red, different colored nipples in brown, tan and pink, lathered in soap, our bodies sticky from sweat. My father walked around the house naked, his large belly mostly covering his penis, getting cold water from the fridge before getting dressed. It never occurred to me to be shocked, to avert my eyes.

I was raised in Brazil—a country where nudity is not only celebrated, but commonplace. Vanity rules there, but so does acceptance; love for your body, optimistic views on its changes and phases. This approach to nakedness, this lack of embarrassment or modesty from a young age tends to force a certain confidence—a certain acceptance, an ease within one’s body, a comfortable curiosity towards the bodies of others, of different sexes and colors and shapes. Seeing my sister’s thick thighs in the pale pink shorts I coveted, or my mother’s huge breasts flop lazily as she bent to pick out a white t-shirt from the bottom of her closet, undaunted and comfortable, was habitual and familiar. I’d look down at my much smaller chest and skinnier legs without concern. I thought their bodies were great. I thought my body was great. Not lovely, not perfect, not fat or skinny or too much of one thing, too little of something else. Just plain great. Perfectly fine. My childhood was peppered with images of bodies laughing, happy and at ease, just as much around the dinner table or at the beach. It held memories of eating—of bodies as unremarkable. There is no tone of trauma to those memories.

It took me almost thirty years to learn to hate my body. To examine it the way many women surrounding me examine their own. To see it overtake my life, something to be reckoned with, an enemy to be overcome.

*

My mother was a creative, talented cook who threw together gorgeous meals from the pork we took home from the previous nights’ dinner paired with the spare vegetables rolling around noisily in the fridge drawer. I was her biggest fan, and she watched proudly as I’d devour her beautiful dishes. My father was an avid connoisseur of good food. He took us on trips to India for the saffron, to France for the Camembert, Mexico for the elote—monuments and historical sights left unseen. I’d hold the list of restaurants we curated together tightly as we walked. I was always hungry, the fruits of a fast metabolism. Infamous for inhaling heaping plates of steaming rice and beans throughout my teens, eating for pleasure and for sustenance, oblivious to what it could feel like to eat emotionally, to shovel food into an empty void. I’d always leave behind what I didn’t want if I felt full.

My younger sister, among many things, is beautiful. She has enviable thick black hair, cascading in waves down her back. While I struggled with braces and acne as a teenager, her straight white teeth shone, her skin smooth like her calm voice. But she was always heavier than me. By no means overweight, compared to my bony, skinny frame, hers looked different. She was as passionate if not more so about food as the rest of us, a natural in the kitchen, always the best sous-chef. But sometimes I’d notice her watching me closely at dinner, a much smaller portion on her plate.

Food was a healthy presence for me, a significant part of my identity. When I lost that perspective, in its place I gained the unrecognizable, fiercely non-negotiable pull, the compulsion to eat.

*

It’s understandable you’re hurting yourself. My therapist said, her legs crossed neatly.

April. By then she had said this many times.

I’m not hurting myself, I’d say, rolling my eyes as I pulled the sleeves of my shirt over my hands and shifted in my seat.

It’s just a practical solution! I laughed darkly.

She made a note.

The previous winter, I had ended a nine-year relationship. An abusive, volatile, all-you’ve-ever-known kind of deal. He had green eyes that changed color near the ocean and brown skin that glowed. He had a booming laugh. He was an excellent dancer. He was horrible to me; I reciprocated. We’d get kicked out of bars for our screaming matches. I thought it was romantic. It took me almost a decade to get out, and when I did, I felt manic, free. I booked a trip to Europe, skipping the therapy sessions my doctor dutifully scheduled on Skype, feeling cured as I ate mounds of garlic shrimp and clams in Portugal, all the cured meats of Spain, sleeping with the waiters in Seville, drinking all of the wine in Barcelona’s late summer. I gained ten pounds.

I hardly noticed. I felt almost amused, practically bragging how weight-gain from a wild summer was an important step in the breakup process I was facing at long last. I noted the number when stepping on a scale absentmindedly in a pharmacy, weeks later back home. I had put on the white slacks I always wore to work that morning and noted an uncomfortable tension, cellulite pocketing my thighs in the mirror of the vast office lobby.

Oh, I thought. These don’t fit.

I had been the same size since I was fifteen. Clothes always fit.

You’re filling a void. My therapist said.

*

A few weeks after that weigh-in, I noticed the first clear red flag. I was staying at a hotel in Montreal on a work trip and they had put out glass bowls piled high with shiny red apples in the lobby. Decorative purposes, mainly. It was early fall—they were in season. I had eaten a few, and after an urge that felt vital, I took another. Something drove me to bend down and count the cores in the bin under my desk, removing the crumpled paper around them. Six.

I ate six apples, I thought. Strange.

Soon I was up twenty pounds in only a few months. On a small frame, it was significant. Most of it went to my face, my arms, my belly. After not recognizing my life without my ex, a drastic shift from one reality to another, I didn’t recognize my own body, how it looked, how it acted. These unfamiliar urges and fractious compulsions.

*

You don’t look much different at all, Mona.

My therapist pushed her glasses back up her nose.

The way you are seeing yourself is not real. You have goggles on. Try and be accepting of change, that your weight or your appearance do not define you.

I looked out the window at a sparrow in the grass, saying nothing.

*

I’d glance sideways in the mirror in yoga class and see a shape that didn’t resemble the one I always knew. My new uniform of an oversized t-shirt and new leggings still a size too small, as I couldn’t face buying the right size, stared back at me.

Who is that? I thought, kneeling into a child’s pose.

I craved chocolate, though I had never liked it before. It gave me the shivers to imagine eating the Mars bars my sister would devour when we were kids. But now I needed it. Obsessively, compulsively. Preferably with peanut butter. How terribly cliché it was. I always imagined if I ever fell apart, at least I’d be original about it. But here I was, certain this new version of myself could never be loved, struggling with weight gain, lack of acceptance, craving chocolate, counting calories.

Took you long enough, my sister would say, kindly.

*

Fingers don’t actually work if you’re trying to purge, it turned out. Perhaps in the movies, or for whoever wrote the beginner’s tips in the toxic online communities I’d plunge through deep in the bowels of the internet, other terrified disordered people trying to perfect their methods. Perhaps my gag reflex wasn’t sensitive enough.

It took me almost thirty years to learn to hate my body. To examine it the way many women surrounding me examine their own.

At twenty-nine, my battle with my body started far, far later than most. It made it more shocking, more difficult to expose. I quickly realized my friends, siblings, and cousins had already been through this: They were old veterans by my age. The acceptance I had seen in them many times was just a mirror of my own. They could relate to the feelings overtaking my life, but they could not relate to the sudden onset of it, to the shock.

*

I noticed so early we weren’t the same.

My sister sat at her dining room table as we picked over lettuce wraps, a few months after my struggle began.

You were completely oblivious. My whole life I compared my body to yours while you strode through comfortable and confident. I would look down at myself and think, why am I so soft?

She poked her tofu, mine long finished, as I sat quietly.

I didn’t feel ‘fat’ necessarily, but I looked so different than you did. I was soft, round. You were so . . . straight and hard. Thin.

I looked down at my empty plate, trying to re-shift my perspective as I realized our childhood narratives had actually been entirely unalike.

You ate so much. I wouldn’t eat half of what you did, I made a point of it. And still I was always heavier.

She told me how, when her breasts grew, far earlier than when my wee ones came in, even though she was the youngest, she was thrilled.

Finally, something my body did better than yours.

But soon they kept growing, past a double D cup, and she resented them.

They just made me look even bigger. Boobs were just more fat.

How had I missed this?

When we went to our grandmother’s house, she would pretend to snap your arms, complaining about how skinny you were, asking mom why she wasn’t feeding you, but me?

She smiled.

She’d pat my arm approvingly. ‘So strong!’ she’d say. I knew what ‘strong’ meant.

*

A toothbrush is the easiest tool to sneak into bathrooms. It also had the best reach. I’d throw up in restaurant restrooms, at work after eating only butternut squash for lunch, in my parents’ neighbor’s half-bath after a barbecue, the sink on high so my mother wouldn’t hear. Between sessions at a conference, wolfing down garlic bread and gin and tonics, filled with guilt, with hatred. I’d throw up far more comfortably in my apartment. It was difficult to breathe after. That part felt good.

*

I’m in control of this. I told my therapist, I know that sounds naïve. But I can stop at any time.

She looked up at me from her notes, a flash of something I didn’t normally see in her eyes.

*

I ate massive bowls of popcorn compulsively, using a large black Tupperware bowl my sister left behind once, the guilt lessened by the low calorie count. I felt a brief sense of relief as I shoveled it quickly into my mouth. I drenched it in hot sauce to defer a second round. It never worked— I’d have seconds, thirds, but I’d throw it all up anyway.

It wasn’t the food that felt good, but the act of eating. The motions.

You’re filling a void.

I did juice cleanses I couldn’t afford. Unable to work while light-headedness reigned over my body for days, lucky others picked up my slack. The sticky glass bottles stacked up on my desk, leaving multicolored rings on the wood, a cheerful handwritten note hung from each bottleneck. I clung to the hope that they’d make a difference, proud of how I could starve, egged on by the pound or two lost at the end of the week. I bought a scale and weighed myself daily, sometimes multiple times, acutely aware of my exact weight even at different times of the day. I had recurring dreams about the black boxy number on its small digital screen.

My best friend related, but didn’t know how to help. My sister sent helpful links of similar stories, welcoming me into a club I didn’t want to be a part of. My doctor prescribed Zoloft. I didn’t take it, preferring to suffer through depression with no aid to gaining the possible ten pounds it warned.

I saw dietitians with good posture who wore pearls and didn’t eat gluten. I counted calories. I stopped counting calories. I spent a week at a health retreat: The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp, I joked. I lost eight pounds and worked out obsessively, egged on by enthusiastic professionals. I wrote a journal. I read about Buddhism. I tried to meditate, tried to be accepting of my new self. I wasn’t. I gained all the weight back in a week. I’d put cinnamon on everything, having read somewhere it reduced appetite. I can’t even smell it now without the fierce memory of that time rushing back.

For an entire lifetime of the freedom I enjoyed, the payback was quick and merciless.

*

My mother worried. Trying not to stare as I picked greedily at the chocolate cake I would normally never touch, smiling without teeth when I looked up.

I gained the same amount of weight once. She says suddenly. I raised an eyebrow. Surely an exaggeration.

My first job, when I was a secretary at GE, I gained ten kilos. She picked up the plates and put them both in the sink.

It was the first time my meals were not home cooked. On Secretary Day, we were each given a rose and went outside to the courtyard for a photo. I’m short, so was in the front, and I remember thinking I looked quite nice that day.

She looked up, as if searching for the memory.

I’ll never forget seeing that picture, not recognizing myself. I went to a doctor who gave me pills for killing my appetite. She sat on the high stool, pulling her t-shirt down over her leggings.

I don’t even remember what was in them, my mother was so worried. I only stopped when I lost it all.

My mother, fierce, confident, a fearless eater and always the same size, who wore borderline inappropriate jeans with slits all the way up the back of her legs, held together by crisscrossed suede to the school fair. Taking pills. Starving.

I used to dream of getting a breast reduction. I was so small, and they were so large. More than once, strange men on the street would just grab them, as if they were compelled, as if they were entitled to.

*

My previous ease, my nonchalance as my friends in high school would complain about their thighs before the dance, as my sister would tug at our matching cut off tees while I modeled mine proudly, was not strength, it was oblivion. The discovery of my naiveté was almost as shocking as how quickly I embraced the same mannerisms. Now I could relate to their guilt, knowing it was unnecessary and cruel, but feeling it all the same.

My body had been a port of safety. It served me well, and I counted on that luxury. When it turned on me, it was like looking down at the kitten you’ve been stroking all your life and realizing it was a rat.

*

It took about a year for me to understand the bulimia was an expression of my anger. A way to hurt my body and myself, and a desperate attempt to regain normalcy. I had been brave, removing myself from a bad relationship, so why was so much taken from me? Why did I feel like a victim of my own escape? I thought if only the weight would come off, I would feel happy again. If only the weight would come off, I could concentrate at work. I could sleep. I could eat normally again. I could forget the look on my ex’s face when the elevator doors closed that last night in August. I could live with myself. I could be alone.

It wasn’t the food that felt good, but the act of eating. The motions.

This is not a hero’s story. The ending I imagined was one where I would tell this again with the wisdom learned in the battle with myself, my body a little softer, but my mind enlightened. At peace like a peanut-butter-cup-loving monk. Knowing and admitting my body and my weight does not rule who I am.

But it did, and it does.

The weight came off only when I fell in love again. It dropped shockingly fast, my body returned to the way it looked before, as if oblivious of the dozens of diets and tricks I had employed for two years, desperate to get myself back to someone I recognized. My self-worth was only established by a new relationship, and the compulsions stopped as suddenly as they came. The void my therapist spoke of had been filled by being loved, an entirely dangerous and volatile solution masking the anger with which I treated my body and myself. I got rid of the scale, the sight of one still instills fear and anger in me. The guilt around food still lingers. Podcasts and doctors say that too will pass with time, but I know the total freedom, or privileged ignorance, I enjoyed is a thing of the past. Because now I know.

*

That’s a lovely dress. My therapist says as she opened the door. I was wearing a backless dress with a bright green floral print. It hadn’t fit in years.

Thank you! I said, fluttering in and collapsing happily on her couch.

I feel like myself in it. I smile widely.

It was you before, too, Mona.

*

My sister keeps her t-shirt on as I sweat through spin class confidently in a sports bra. I remember her as a child, borrowing my clothes and returning them sheepishly to my room, realizing they don’t fit, keeping her shorts on at the beach. Moments that hadn’t registered at the time. My mother struggling into high waisted pantyhose under her jeans, a deep breath out as she zipped them up. Those beautiful bodies I loved and admired, seen so differently from the other side.

Before getting in the shower, I turn different angles naked in the mirror, sucking in my stomach, twisting my arms, confirming that my old self looks back at me. I know I am just searching for that previous sense of serenity, of acceptance, but you cannot unsee the truth. The truth that the void remains, that the rat is only dormant, disguising itself as a kitten once more, one eye open as it waits.

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