“Today, March 10, 2017, I pledge to start eating less. I need to stop being a fatass.”

 

It was the spring of eighth grade, about a year after I had become practically friendless. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was scrolling absentmindedly on Instagram when I saw a post from Stella, a skinny pretty white girl in my class. She was posing on a bed in a heather gray Calvin Klein bralette, looking all skinny and pretty and white. Shame reached through the screen and shook my shoulders, rudely awakening me to all my round and squishy places. To my heaviness.

I thought about Miles calling me fugly – “fat and ugly” – on the bleachers beside the track. I thought about The Popular Girls bragging about their weeklong juice cleanses in the locker room. I thought about my dad remarking on the width of my face and roundness of my cheeks. I thought about my mom scolding me for my love affair with chocolate chips and braised pork belly. 

I opened my phone to the Notes app, and wrote myself a pact.

 

Three days later, on March 13, I commenced my Food Log, which also resided in my Notes app. Its instructions were simple: “Start writing down what you eat so you can stop being a fat piece of shit!!” And I did, diligently, every morsel, for months. I stepped on the scale each morning, anxiously awaiting the flickering digits to solidify into a proclamation of my worth. I drank gallons of water to artificially placate my stomach, to keep the hunger pangs at bay. I made a game out of testing how far I could shrink my portions, how many calories I could cut. At restaurants, I would dutifully divide my plate in half before eating and immediately ask for a box, making two meals out of one. Like abracadabra. Like mitosis. I was born anew.

I began to learn more about nutrition, which only added fuel to my bonfire of obsession. I pursued “health” with an unhealthy fervor. Foods now carried a moral value: they were “good” or “bad,” and thus permitted or banned. I began to fear the “bad” foods like they were toxic contaminants that would irreparably sully the purity of my soul. My list of new foes was endless: refined sugar, salt, saturated fat, white flour, white rice, fried anything, high fructose corn syrup, carrageenan, hydrogenated vegetable oil, caramel color, sodium nitrite, Red #40, and on and on.

I could not choose my friends’ betrayal, my stepmother’s cruelty, my father’s futility, my brother’s illness, my mother’s rage. But what I allowed to enter my mouth each morning and afternoon and evening – that, I could choose.

Within a few short months, I lost a sixth of my body weight. Victory. I was shedding hair from my head like a German Shepherd, and I was constantly shivering, and I was no longer having periods, and I was blacking out and fainting almost daily, and I couldn’t stop thinking and obsessing and dreaming about food. The vast dimensionality of life flattened and compressed into a tiny little box, walling me into a colorless world where what I ate and what I weighed were all that mattered.

But a girl at tennis camp said I had abs. My dad finally stopped calling me pàng (fat) and instead called me shòu (skinny). The scale continued to report my shrinking in size and growing in power. Victory, victory, victory.

 

Sculptor, oil on canvas, 36” x 36”, 2022

August 12, 2017: The day I first binged

 

Chocolate was usually forbidden, a concoction of sweet and dense and creamy too dangerously potent. But I desperately needed to put on a few pounds, because my annual physical was coming up the last week of August. The doctor would weigh me, and then my mom would see I had been starving myself, and then she would yell at me for engaging in the attention-seeking behavior that was the purview of privileged bratty white girls. I just needed to pass this one checkpoint – to appear “normal” – and then I could resume my anorexia in clandestine peace. 

I had stolen the bow-wrapped chocolate gift box now sitting on my desk from my dad’s kitchen, where it was hidden away high up in the cabinet, along with the red wine and aged sake and more chocolate gift boxes. It was the kind you’re supposed to share with your whole big family and take weeks to finish, the kind replete with gleaming decadent truffles, each filled with caramels and creams and ganaches, shaped as leaves and hearts and medallions. I hadn’t eaten chocolate in months, as it had been banished to my “bad” food purgatory. Now, my mouth watered as I trembled with temptation. A piece or two won’t hurt. 

One piece became two, and then three, four, five…I could not stop. I ate with a ferocious desperation, like this was the last time I would ever encounter food. Enjoyment turned to discomfort turned to revulsion. The saccharine richness of the truffles grew so sickening I needed water to wash each one down. Before I knew it, the whole box was gone, twenty-four little nests now empty of their occupants. 

I sat at my desk in a daze. What have I done? I felt so ill, like I had just disembarked from a small ship caught in a hurricane out at sea. Desperate for relief, I suddenly had a crazy idea. I shuffled to the bathroom adjoining my bedroom, laid the fuzzy green bathmat at the foot of the toilet to pad my knees, and stuck two fingers down my throat. Part of me prayed my scheme would not work. This is wrong. This is gross. I should not be doing this.

I coughed and gagged and squeezed hot tears from my eyes, but…nothing. I gave up, blowing my nose and drying my wet cheeks. I pulled out my phone and typed in my Notes app journal: “I ate a shit ton of chocolate today. I FEEL LIKE FUCKING SHIT. I wanna puke. NEVER AGAIN.” Defeated, I crawled into bed, tossing for hours in nauseous torment, chanting with conviction, Never again. Never again. Never again.

 

***

 

Interlude: a selection of journal excerpts from across the years

 

• “BREAK THE CYCLE BITCH YOU CAN DO IT” (September 22, 2017)

• “Why are you so weak when it comes to food? Are you really not as strong a person as you thought?” (November 19, 2017)

• “Every time you listen to a meditation about letting go or moving on, read a self-help book about breaking bad habits or seizing control of your life, or hear a song about empty promises you make yourself, THIS is what you think about. Always this. You know you have to stop. Don’t you want abs + a flat stomach + to not look like you’re in your third trimester all the time? WELL MAYBE TRY TO STOP BINGEING THEN.” (Mach 19, 2018)

• “Use your fucking willpower you dumb cunt.” (June 26, 2018)

• “I couldn’t fucking control myself again today!!! I thought I fucking had this one in the bag!!! I had it all planned out. I was going to stay on track, be regimented, be super productive, feel good about myself. But I couldn’t. Again. Why??? Please please PLEASE get your shit together. YOU COULD BE FREE. Think about that.” (February 14, 2019)

• “I am so disgusting and worthless. I want so badly to throw up. Not just my food, but everything – my thoughts, my emotions, the contents of my soul. Just heaving until there’s nothing left. Oh how I long to be empty.” (March 20, 2019)

• “2020 and i still have binge eating problems…damn u really overestimated yourself it’s kinda depressing.” (October 27, 2020)

• “the twisted silver lining of stooping to all-new lows is that i’ve shown i’m capable of breaking precedent. i am now determined to break it in the other direction. i will never binge again. i will never binge again. i will never binge again. i beg. i promise.” (December 24, 2022)

• “today actually has to be the last day holy fuck. i am so fucking exhausted by myself ahhhhh i feel like i might die ahhhhh” (November 12, 2023)

• “i am seething with self-hatred right now. like it's so intense that i barely even feel anger. i just feel numb and resigned. like there's no salvation from the pathetic mess that i am. holy shit. why can't i just be normal. what the fuck. why do i fucking do this shit. i'm so fucking tired holy fucking shit why why why why why” (November 30, 2023)

 

***

 

I binged every single day for four years straight, and then intermittently – but still frequently – for the next three. Entire loaves of bread, entire jars of peanut butter, entire Costco bulk packs of Clif bars. I would eat far beyond fullness, far beyond pain – to the point where I could barely move or breathe or think. The bursting agony in my stomach would make me fear rupture; the heart palpitations and chest pain would make me fear cardiac arrest. The binges were so intense sometimes that I genuinely worried I might die. I would envision my lifeless, sliced-open body lying on an autopsy table, the coroner standing over my blown out, overflowing stomach, tsk-ing with disgust. Pathetic. Girl ate herself to death. 

I would eat alone, in secret, like I was committing a crime. I would turn down invitations and avoid social gatherings. I would tiptoe around the kitchen like it was a minefield, lest my mother catch me taking more food and berate me for eating too much. Which would always send me into a panicked frenzy. Which would always make me need to eat.

I ate to escape, ate to anesthetize, ate to fill the emptiness. The pain of my stomach was a welcome distraction from the aching of my heart. When I was hurting, which was almost always, there was nothing I wanted to do but eat. There was nothing I could do but eat, or else I would have to sit with myself and I would have to feel and then the world would come crashing down. 

With every binge, I dug myself deeper and deeper into the pit of shame. And the shame only made me more ravenous. I was ashamed that I couldn’t stay anorexic, that I couldn’t master the game of willpower. I was ashamed of my loneliness, this voracious gnawing thing I failed to out-eat. I was ashamed of my privilege – that there were so many people who were so deprived, while I made pathology of my own excess. I was ashamed that my once-fitting jeans no longer made it past my thighs, and then I was ashamed that I was repulsed by my weight gain, because that was shallow and fatphobic, and I wanted to be above vanity and prejudice. I was ashamed by the dissonance between my pristinely-constructed facade and my utterly collapsing interior – the teachers and peers and friends who commended me for my achievements and work ethic didn’t know the real me. If they did, they would never deign to look me in the eye. 

There were so many vows to never binge again, starting tomorrow: every New Year’s Eve, every birthday, nearly every Saturday, nearly every Sunday. Every last day of summer, last day of school, last day of spring break. Fully aware of the cognitive distortion baked into the “fresh start” effect – the psychological phenomenon whereby temporal landmarks tend to artificially boost motivation – I nevertheless needed the calendar to imbue some external source of significance, some impetus to change. But to no avail. Every broken promise shattered my self-trust, eroded my self-belief. I whittled my sense of dignity down to a nub of nothing.

 

Binge-eating is a common response to trauma, low self-esteem, and stress. It’s also a common response to restriction. Scarcity – real, perceived, or even anticipated – unleashes the emergency response of the limbic system. When homeostasis is disrupted through under-nourishment, the body reacts as if in a state of starvation, seeking out and clinging onto every last calorie it can find. It produces a surplus of ghrelin, the hormone that drives hunger and intensifies cravings for energy-dense foods. That’s why, after their extreme dietary regimens end, the contestants of horrific weight-loss spectacle shows like The Biggest Loser often gain it all back, and then some. That’s why ninety-five percent of all diets fail. 

But I didn’t know any of this at the time, so I just thought I was weak-willed and gluttonous and incorrigible. I had the reins and I lost them. I was hopeless, I was unredeemable, I was too far gone.

I had pulled tighter and tighter, controlled and controlled, until I snapped with brutal force. Newton’s Third Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.