I’m gaining weight. In fact, I’ve been gaining weight all my life, but I had actually been starving since I was fourteen years old. The past four months on the Race have been the longest period of time in over a decade that I have been able to view eating in a healthy light.
I am convinced that eating disorders plague about 85% of the female population in the US. It’s an epidemic, and it’s real. I never thought that what I went through was ever serious enough to be a case study for the labels that my health textbook in eighth grade described as “anorexia” or “bulimia,” so I ignored what I was doing and lied to myself for years. In keeping my secret, I also lied to my friends and family.
In my most extreme stages, I would go to great lengths to avoid having meals with people so that I wouldn’t have to explain why the only thing I wanted to order was water. Days would pass, in which the only thing that I would eat was an apple – sometimes if I felt confident enough, I would have a cup of coffee. This became my life, strategizing and making sure that no one would find out. It was agonizing. I restricted myself into day after day of fatigue and depression – but at least I was what I thought people wanted me to be, and what I wanted myself to be – “beautiful.”
The first time I forced myself to throw up after eating an ice cream cone, I cried. I cried because I had reached a point where I couldn’t deny that I had a problem. So I promised myself that I would never do it again. I told myself that I would solve things the healthy way, so I started exercising. But I would exercise eating the same amount of food, if at all – and before I knew it, I was exercising a couple of hours a day and eating only one small meal. And the purging continued anyway, from time to time when I got desperate. Hunger became a comforting feeling to me – because I eventually trained my body to view it as normal. The longer the days became in which I didn’t eat were just gold stickers in my mind. Examinations in the mirror were what I obsessed over. Voices followed me everywhere I went saying, “If you take that extra bite, you will become worthless.” I felt beyond salvation in this area of my life, because it was one that I just couldn’t give away to Daddy. I felt ashamed, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what to do with the fat girl I saw every time I looked at myself. I really felt like I was not far from deteriorating from the inside out.
You’ve probably heard of this before.
But have you ever heard that God does want to redeem that area of your life? Have you heard that He can chase those voices away and bring peace in that chaos?
Yesterday, I was talking to Anna about the discussion she had with Paulina, her thirteen-year-old adopted Mozambiquan daughter. She told me that her daughter was actually upset that we were only eating one hot meal a day. She was upset that we weren’t eating 2 heaping bowls of rice and only eating one baguette for breakfast and one baguette for lunch. According even to American portions, we eat pretty heartily. I’ve probably eaten more in the past 2 weeks than I would in a month of eating at home. Yet Paulina was telling her mother that she wasn’t eating enough and that girls were calling her “skinny.” She was upset. . . that she was thin. In my confusion, Anna explained that in this culture, if you’re thin, it means you have a disease, which most likely translates to having AIDS.
Millions of women, myself included, spend almost their entire lives battling with their bodies and desiring to make themselves an image of skin and bones – not realizing all the while that millions of people drink their own urine for sustenance and cannot help their perpetual state of impending death.
