If You Eat Nothing, Do You Become Nothingness?

How Gaining 26 lbs Changed My Life For The Better

This story includes themes of eating disorders and conversations about weight, exercise, and mental health. Read as you are willing or able. 

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My body and I have always had a complicated relationship. There are days when we give or take more than we should and, after the cycles of binge eating, fasting, and exercising on an empty stomach, weeks that end with nothing but debilitating headaches. More than a few times over the past few years, I have told myself that I couldn't eat "x" because I didn't deserve it or didn't earn it. Sometimes "x" was an ice cream cone. Other times it was dinner. 
 
The tendency to hold food over my own head started out rather innocently, in the way most habits do. An essay was due by class the next day and, as motivation, I told myself something along the lines of “If I get to page five by midnight, I can have a snack.” That night I missed the deadline.

I now know this to be an incredibly toxic way of thinking (please listen to me when I say that this is an incredibly toxic way of thinking) but, four years ago when I was trying to figure out how to fit six classes worth of assignments and a part-time job into my schedule, it made sense. Four months ago, when I was living on two or three hours of sleep every few days to finish two senior theses, it seemed necessary. If I got to page twenty or read six chapters or exercised for thirty minutes, then I could have breakfast. If I was too tired to go to the gym or only got to page seventeen, I starved.

During my four years in college, I amassed an incredibly large wardrobe and became the friend to call for an outfit loan. I was proud of my closet but there was also a lot of shame in those clothes. One of the reasons why I had so much clothing was that, when finals or midterms came around and I deemed myself not productive enough to deserve dinner, my typical size 12 or 14 pants would slide right off me. Occasionally, I would get complements.

"Did you lose weight?"

It started with school-related tasks: assignments to type and applications to turn in. Soon, it moved on to exercise and forgetting to do the reading and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

If I get at least an A on this essay, I can have a decent lunch.
 
Am I the type of person that deserves to be full right now?

During my first year at college, I went 36 hours on black coffee and saltines until I finished a script. During my junior year, I went two days with no food and just enough water to not pass out after receiving 10 rejection letters in one week.

I was thriving! I was succeeding! I was so incredibly hungry all the time.

When I graduated from college, I weighed 175 lbs (BMI 29.1; overweight). Four months earlier, at the start of the semester I weighed 190 lbs (BMI 31.6; obese).  I can confidently say that I was healthier and happier at 190 lbs, working for minimum wage at Barnes & Noble than I was at 175 lbs, a college graduate with 2 degrees and multiple accolades.
 
 There is a kind of guilt that I carry about my collegiate journey in that, while I was starving myself to the point of concerning (if not drastic) weight fluctuation, I constantly preached body positivity and standards of confidence that I couldn’t live up to myself. I talked academically, personally, and online about acceptance and the power of loving yourself. Even when I dropped over 20 lbs in the span of a few months and gained it back again even sooner, I was considered to be overweight at every point throughout that cycle. Looking back, I think being a plus sized person made the horrible treatment of my body seem less drastic to me.

For most of my life, I have been so afraid of the prospect of being big, that I turned food into something that I had to earn. From the age of ten, my pediatricians encouraged me to count my calories and use apps to track my exercise that did little more than add to my shame. I told myself that I was not like my friends with skinnier and more desirable bodies and had less of a right to the same nutrition. What a deadly combination: food as currency for achievements, weight-loss as a consequence of being unproductive, and praise when the pounds start to fall off of you. Eventually, through some perversion of the transitive property, I was being applauded for my failure to feed myself and my failure to meet my goals.

I got by in school, completing my two theses, getting departmental honors, even winning a writing prize. It breaks my heart that these achievements are marred by the ghosts of hunger headaches and the faint taste of Ritz crackers and mango Naked smoothies (my only meals most weekends). I find it hard to be proud of these accomplishments because of the twisted logic I used to reach them. Often, there are thoughts of the other, less essential, things I never did because I got too used to being hungry. I never applied to graduate school. I never submitted to any of the publications I planned to. I never messaged her back.
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After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles for a summer internship. It was strange, at first, because no one was expecting me to be constantly working or producing something. I worked twenty-five hours a week and the rest of that time was mine. There were no page quotas to meet before dinner. There was no endless list of neglected projects and obligations. I was also very financially insecure. I payed $700/month to share a room with two other people and a bathroom with 5 others. I ate what I could afford and that was mostly rice, potatoes, and pasta. Inevitably, there was weight gain.

 The clothes I brought with me to Los Angeles started to get tighter. In July, I caught a bad cold and went to the doctor for a check-up. My chart said I weighed 201lbs. I stared at that number for a long time.
 
It was something to be feared, wasn't it? 200+ lbs. The doctor said nothing about it; he just told me to drink fluids and get rest. Those 26 lbs caught me off guard because I didn't notice them, even though it only took two months for them to join the party. 

I learned two very important things during those summer months. The first was that I love food. I love cooking and treating myself to one good meal every two weeks that direct deposit hits. I love feeding people and having them enjoy my cooking. I love photographing food and watching cooking videos. I would die for Claire from the Bon Appetit test kitchen.  The second thing I learned during that time was that I loved making/doing things and that this love still existed when I wasn’t holding food over my own head. For the first time in what felt like (and probably was) months, I could bring myself to write poetry and edit photos regardless of how much food was in my stomach.
 
I won’t lie and say that I quit cold turkey and stopped using food as a motivation to get things done. I’m still actively working on that (and will be for a very long time).  I do know this: despite how the saying goes, you are not what you eat or when you eat or how often. If you eat nothing, you do not become nothingness or even less than you were before. All you become is hungry. An empty stomach is not a clean slate, no matter how flat the belly that covers it. At 201lbs, most people would say that I am too much, but the joke is on them.
 
I have no plans to stop growing anytime soon.