I was six feet tall in college. My Body Mass Index was 16. I won’t tell you the weight that corresponds to that, because this is not a thinspirational post. The obsessive among you probably have the formula memorized and may figure it out. I know I would have. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, a body mass index of 16 is two points underweight. A healthy woman will fall between 18 and 24 on the index. I was not healthy. And yet, I was still too fat. Or that’s what everyone in my life told me.
I ran Division I cross country and track. My coach never overtly told us to lose weight, but he would mention occasionally that someone from another team was “running heavy.” We also had team weigh-ins. The numbers were not posted for our teammates to read, as some teams do, but we could see whose scale slid where. We knew who among us was “running heavy.” I was always running heavy. I was the tallest girl on the team by at least four inches. I had the largest, and therefore, the heaviest frame.
There was a lot of talk in distance running circles at that time about the “Power-to-Weight Ratio.” It was a magical number that supposedly determined speed. The idea was to trim all weight but muscle from the body, so that the only weight was productive weight. Breasts, for example, are dead weight by this theory. I ran 70 miles a week and lived on Powerbars to get there. All the girls had their tricks.
The girls with the most serious eating disorders (who were usually the top five runners) chose to live alone. Roommates tend to interfere with anorexic rituals. We had team dinners a couple of times a month. These were always hosted by one of the top five, and they would fight over who got to host, because if dinner was at your house, you could claim that you ate too much while cooking. The rest of us had to eat, or pretend to. We watched each other’s plates to see who was and was not able to resist the lasagna. At that point in my anorexic career, I was not able to resist. It felt so good to eat! And come on! Free food? I was a poor college kid. But everyone would talk about it later. It didn’t bother me so much. Not yet.
I began modeling after my sophomore year. Cattle calls do not make anyone feel good about herself. A hundred skinny women in high heels, waiting for a turn to be judged, silently judging each other. When it was my turn, I stood, inanimate and pretty as can be, through the same conversation every time.
“She’s a little heavy.”
“But she has a great face.”
“Big legs though. What do you do to work out? You should run.”
I would sometimes have the opportunity to defend myself, but most often, they moved on without explanation.
“What if she drops five pounds before the show? She’s got two weeks.”
“If you want to take a chance on a fat girl, go ahead.”
“But she’s so long! And great hair. Can you lose five pounds by next Thursday?”
I always got the callback, though I don’t know why. They were never satisfied. My agent was constantly on me to lose weight. She was thrilled when I quit the track team, because it meant my quads would shrink. My badonkadonk never did, though. I can almost rest a drink on the shelf of my butt muscle to this day.
I did homework during downtime at shows. The other models did drugs (not all, but most at the very least smoked). They “had to” to keep their weight down. I was the new girl, and they thought it was “cute” that I was trying to better myself. As a feminist, it hurts me to admit that I was ever involved in the fashion industry, but I may not have opened my eyes to the injustices women face if I hadn’t had the experience.
I didn’t see the starving as a problem, because I had a tangible goal in mind. My anorexia was career development at this point. It was a rational thing to do. Back home, people said, “Oh my god, she’s so skinny!” to which my friends or family would reply, “Of course! She’s a model.” And everyone looked very impressed. It was not an impressive pursuit.
I quit modeling at 21 and had two healthy years before my brother died. When he was killed in a car accident, I didn’t know how to manage the grief. I thought it would overwhelm me, that I wouldn’t survive it, so I went back to the habits that had given me so much “control” in the past. But because I was out of control internally, it was very easy for the anorexia to take over.
I began running again. I stopped eating almost completely. I eventually ate three ginger snaps a day, one cookie every three hours, each cookie eaten in three slow bites. This is not self control. This is being controlled by fear.
Eventually, my connective tissue began to break down, and I could no longer run. It hurt to walk. Hell, it hurt to sit because my bones had no cushion. I couldn’t sleep more than ten minutes a night. I couldn’t think straight. I checked into the hospital for two weeks a year after my brother’s accident. I was the heaviest one there, too. It didn’t mean I wasn’t sick.
Part II to follow...
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