Sugar Shock

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die, so, let us all be thankful. - Buddha

I used to dream of anorexia. No, seriously, all I wanted when I was a teenager was to be anorexic and I quite nearly got my dream or some form of it at least.

I started getting a little chubby as puberty started to kick in. I got breasts long before any other girl got them and I hated them. My grandmother started to inform me at a very young age that I was getting fat and that this was a very bad thing. So with my humiliation I just ate more and more. The breasts didn't help my self-esteem either.

I don't know exactly when I decided that anorexia became a goal, probably around 8th or 9th grade. In 9th grade I started taking laxatives, all the time and too many of them. I am not sure they ever made me lose weight and after a while they started having the opposite reaction to my body. Then I got into diet pills, you know, back when they had ephedrin in them and made you a bitch, yeah those.

The breaking point or rather the point where I felt I finally decided to take control of the food around me was after my first breakup. It was bad, it was a kind of pain I don't even know how to express. I won't go into the details anymore but I went into a severe depression.

At that point I just stopped eating, almost entirely. At first it hurt and my body was begging for food but I ignored this feeling and soon I started to enjoy the anguish. Whenever my body ached I knew I was "in control" and I loved that feeling.

In 2 weeks I lost 20 pounds. I went from being 160 pounds at 5'1 to 140. At the time I was in colorguard in the marching band and we were practicing almost every night. I was putting my body through a lot of physical activity and putting no food in my system.

People started to notice, deep down I really enjoyed that others worried about me because then they could see on the outside the kind of pain I was in on the inside. I hated when they tried to give me food and I really hated when they threatened to take me off the colorguard if I didn't start eating again.

My mom started to notice so I started hiding the food I didn't eat. I continued to take diet pills like they were candy, I felt I was in control but the only control I had was being completely out of control. Within a few months I lost like 50 lbs but to be perfectly honest I was not happy, in any way shape or form.

I haven't done anything drastic like that since college but it is something I still think about, as an option but then I remember how much it hurt me both emotionally and physically. This is still something I'm learning from because being thin should never hurt that much.