Yay!  I made it through the week!  Now for the next one...less hectic, but more work.  (2 abstracts and a 12 pg research paper due by Wednesday.  Have I started yet?  Only barely.  Plus 3 meetings and yet another scholarship application.)

I figured I should do some sort of special post, it being my 100th and all (eeks!  I am officially a Blogger veteran!)  So here are a few moments and memories that I think play a key role in my ED. A history of my disorder, if you will.

This could get long; feel free to skip it.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't weight-conscious.  I was a competitive gymnast from a young age, so weight was a huge concern.  I have a muscular build (when I'm in shape at least, and not all flabby like I am now), and I always felt huge next to the skinnies in my gym.  When I look back at photos, I can see that I was not fat at all--in fact, you can see my ribs through my leotard in some of the pictures.  But I still felt like a whale.  My mother's attitude didn't help--she'd tell me that I was the largest in the gym (except for this one other girl, poor thing) and that I'd do so much better if only I were a little skinnier.  She would vacillate between calling me a skinny minnie and lamenting that I'd inherited her weight issues (my mother is morbidly obese), at times within the span of 5 minutes.  I suspect that this is the primary source of my body dysmorphia.

So I always felt like Gigantor in a room full of ballerinas, but that wasn't really the start of my food issues.  I think I ate relatively normally as a child--I really can't remember.  My parents raised me & my 2 siblings vegan (with the exception of honey), and my mom was hugely strict about food.  I remember that sometimes she brought treats home and the sibs and I would fight over them.  The thing about my house is that if you had a treat, you had to eat it right then and there or it might get taken away from you later.  There was no delayed gratification.  It was always a contest between us three kids, with my mother as the arbiter of justice.

The food issues started in high school.  Gym class, freshman year.  We were being weighed and having our BMIs measured.  Why do they do this, anyway?  It's humiliating and uncomfortable all around.  At the time, I was 5'2'' and 106 lbs.  Normal weight.  But I felt huge.  They told me my BMI was 24 (which, I'd like to point out, was WRONG.  5'2'' and 106 lbs is a BMI of 19.4).  I felt enormous.  My friend was 98 lbs (she was also just barely 5 feet, but I didn't consider that at the time).  I vowed to get under 100 lbs.  I started a food diary.  I started restricting.  Nothing too drastic; just a little diet.  A little food monitoring.

Sophomore year.  I had ankle injuries and wasn't working out as much.  I conditioned a lot; gained muscle mass.  I started dating M.  Defining body-moment of that year: M and I were sitting on the band bus, on our way back from concert festival.  It was dark and he had his arms around me.  He pinched my waist and said (jokingly, I think?) "Love handles!"  I didn't eat for the next 3 days.  Then I binged.

Junior year.  Everything turned to shit.  I was still injured, but I was working out anyway.  Lying to the physical therapist and to my coaches about how much I was doing and how much pain I was in.  I couldn't make it through a full practice.  I hit puberty (and OMG BOOBS).  Freaked out.  In gymnastics, your career is pretty much over when you get boobs and a butt.  Not only does it become much harder to get the height and rotation you need, it also shifts your center of gravity lower.  I had to relearn so many tricks.  I felt like a complete beginner.  Even the easy stuff was hard.  I didn't want this excess flesh, excess fat on me!  I didn't ask for this!  Defining body-moment: at the first meet of competition season, the judges wrote comments in little green books and then gave us the books so we could improve our routines.  The bar judge's comment: "Lighten up!"  I started restricting more.  And binging more.  I'd make it through school and practice on nothing, start feeling weak and dizzy during practice, go home and binge.  My mother always made me eat dinner, whether I said I was hungry or not.  So I'd eat and then not be able to stop eating.  And there was no purging--I've never been able to puke.  Needless to say, I gained weight.

Then M broke up with me (for the first time...we'd get back together later that year).  I started having headaches every day all day.  My mother took me to doctors.  No one knew exactly what was wrong.  They put me on muscle relaxants and steroids.  I don't remember much of this portion of my life.  I wandered around in a daze.  I slept a lot.  It's a wonder I still got all A's that year.  I don't know how.  I couldn't work out.  I couldn't even condition.  I quit gymnastics and began coaching.  I got very fat very quickly.  145 lbs.  People tend to do that when they do nothing but eat and sleep.  I was miserable.  My eating got much more erratic.  I remember fasting once for 3 weeks.  I got back down to 111 lbs.  Binged a lot and the weight returned.  Plus more.

So that's my early ED history.  The rest up until this point is just more of the same.  Going on 8 years of disorder and what do I have to show for it?  Neuroticism, low self-esteem.  Self-hatred.  A distorted self-image.  A fear of food.

I would not wish this on anyone.

Happy Valentine's Day/Single Awareness Day!  I hope it is a good one for all of you!

(D and I went dancing last night and it was fun.  Also good exercise.  :)  And he brought me a gorgeous bouquet of flowers.  Today I am not sure what we are doing...but I have a pretty new corset to wear!  (I like corsets.  So does D.)  This is the first one I have ever owned, and I adore it.  It is red silk with a black lace overlay.  Soooo pretty!)

Here is a picture (not of me, obviously):

Ok.  Time to go shower and try to get some work done before D texts.  Love you, skinnies!