body talk: part 5

read previous body talk posts:
part 1

part 2

part 3
part 4

I woke up on the morning of Saturday, February 23, 1996 with a tight and stiff neck. While sleeping on the floor of a college dorm room certainly could not have helped this state, the memory of the day before came flooding back. Crunching metal. Speeding across wet pavement. Police cars. Phone calls to worried parents. Shock.

On our way to Seattle Pacific University for a preview weekend designed for high school seniors, P and K and I were deterred by the unexpected. Just a mile away from our exit, the car in front of us stopped abruptly. P was driving a large yellow Plymouth from the 1970s. When he slammed on the brakes they locked and we slid, fifty miles per hour, into the car in front of us. The long front end of the car folded like an accordion and steam rose from underneath the crumpled hood.

Oh crap, was all P said.

No kidding.

And so there I lay on the floor of the dormitory the next morning, barely able to move my neck, feeling a tight soreness in my shoulders that I had never before experienced. Any movement to the left or to the right produced sharp and piercing pain. I touched it lightly with the intent of attempting to coax relaxation into my soft tissue. But I winced at the lightest touch.

I was accompanying K in her cello audition later that morning. I was glad my accompaniment was on the piano and not on the viola; I couldn’t stomach the thought of lifting my stringed instrument to my chin, flexing the stiff but tender muscles of my neck to hold it against my shoulder.

My dad came and picked me up later that day; my mom had already arranged for me to see her chiropractor so we could begin the initial assessment of what kind of injury I might be dealing with. Dr. H touched me lightly, palpitating my spine and massaging my muscles. He gave me a soft neck brace that I affixed with Velcro at the back of my neck. It would be twelve weeks before I would take it off.

The relationship I bore toward my body changed entirely. My focus changed from keeping a thin body to managing its pain. There were many times where I would lose all feeling in my face and my arms. I learned that my nerve pathways where so overwhelmed with pain that they would shut themselves down.

I soon learned the full weight of what multiple physicians told me: I would have been better off breaking my neck. Soft tissue injuries were slow to heal. I had third-degree whiplash and it would be months before my life would assume even the appearance of normalcy. My piano lessons had stopped and plans for a senior recital were all but canceled. I had to give up my first chair position in the orchestra and instead sat and listened to music instead of participating in it. Every afternoon after school was spent at the chiropractor, the massage therapist, and the physical therapist. After a few months, I was referred to a neurologist. Eventually, the stress and the strain caused me to seek out a psychotherapist. That made for five health care providers I saw on a regular basis.

At first, I maintained a sense of humor about my circumstances. I made a show of wearing the neck brace and deliberately dressed myself in such a way so as to coordinate with it. I joked about making note cards with an explanation of the accident and my ensuing treatment so I wouldn’t have to tell the story again and again. But after weeks of worsening pain, I was not able to maintain the humor. In my spirit, I was so broken. When I prayed, it seems every word hit the ceiling and came crashing down to the floor with a leaden thud.

I followed the rules. I gave myself over to every prescribed treatment. I trusted my doctors. And nothing was getting better. In fact, it felt like it was getting worse. I was trapped. I was a victim and my body was holding me hostage. For the first time, I admitted to myself that I hated it. I hated my body.

What I didn’t know at the time is that this accident was precisely what was saving me.

body talk: part 4

read previous body talk posts:

part 1

part 2

part 3

summer 1995
(i'm at the far right)

I came to the end of my junior year of high school in June of 1995 and went straight from school into working as a counselor-in-training (CIT) at the summer camp I grew up attending. An unpaid position, being a CIT was all about service: setting tables, prepping food, washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, cutting the occasional trail, and generally whatever manner of grunt work the leaders determined needed to be done. As a camper, I had always looked up to the summer staff and was really looking forward to the opportunity to see the working side of a place that was already so deeply entrenched in my personal history.

By this point in time, I had already earned a reputation amongst my friends for the strict dietary rules I had imposed upon myself. I limited my consumption to a total of 1,200 calories and would permit myself just 20 grams of fat on a daily basis. I never veered from this regimen. A typical school day lunch included an apple and a slice of bread with jam on it, sometimes occasionally splurging with a thin layer of peanut butter. I was expert at taking small portions at dinner, filling up on water just beforehand to ensure I felt full before I had consumed too much. These and other habits of exercise kept me at what I had determined to be an acceptable shape and size. I was staunchly vigilant about maintaining it. The nutritional and caloric content of every food that passed my lips was tattooed in my memory. Keeping a daily running tally was easy. My mind was constantly digesting these numbers.

This reputation is what earned me my camp name. What could be more antithetical to my regimen than pure fat? And so I was named for Saffola margarine.

One thing I hadn’t considered going into my CIT summer was camp food. This was going to pose a major problem for me. I hadn’t considered how the kitchen served loaves of bread at dinner with melted butter over the top. I hadn’t memorized the caloric content of tater tots and there was no way I was putting something as fattening as ranch dressing on my salad. That I didn’t know these things was a constant source of tension for me. It seemed that everything that came through the camp kitchen was swimming in oil or butter or cheese. As my rules strictly forbade these things, this was the source of some unparalleled anxiety for me.

So I ate salads without dressing. I ate raw fruits when they were available. If there were any protein sources or vegetables not swimming in butter or oil (rare from a kitchen accustomed to people eating these things only if butter or oil was an accompaniment), I’d have those. I’d have cereal with nonfat milk. And that was about it. I couldn’t eat anything else they provided. My frame had already thinned out given my year of continuously cutting back on calories. Given a caloric intake that was further diminished and spending the bulk of my days in strenuous physical activity, what pounds remained melted away quickly from my body. A pair of jeans that had fit well going into the summer soon slid up and down over my hips and thighs easily, even when fully zipped and buttoned.

While I did not object to my thinner shape, I also experienced the truth that I couldn’t sustain the physical activity the CIT position required of me without additional nutritional support and energy. So on my weekends off, I bought yogurt and bagels. I bought dried fruits in bulk. I bought things that didn’t give me anxiety and that I could eat safely. But damage had already been done. I wasn’t eliminating normally anymore. My periods had stopped completely. People started looking at me like I had escaped famine somewhere, especially when I donned a bathing suit. And they started to tell me: you are too thin. I thought they were lying, being nice. I would examine myself in the mirror from the side to see if they were telling the truth and decided that they weren’t. Five more pounds, I thought. Just five more pounds.

The summer was about one-third gone when one of the members of the leadership team came looking for me. Hey Saffola, he said. Bubba (the camp director) wants to see you. Though I knew that Bubba knew who I was, it wasn’t altogether common for a CIT to be called to the camp director’s office. All the same, I didn’t think much of it and went to see him.

I stood in the little trailer with my hands clasped in front of me and when he asked how things were going, told him I was having a good summer.

Are you okay, Saffola? he asked.

Yes, I’m fine, I said, smiling.

(Why wouldn’t I be?)

You’ve lost a lot of weight, he said.

Yeah, I agreed and I explained about the increased physical activity and the sensitive stomach that wouldn’t allow me to digest the customarily rich foods that our kitchen produced. I was used to answering these questions with ease.

Really? he asked. Is that true?

He looked at me intently, his full attention toward me. I looked at my feet. Escaping this inquiry wasn’t going to be as easy as others had been.

Yeah, I’m just trying to be healthy. Still looking at my feet.

I’m just really concerned about you. A lot of people are, you know. You’re just too thin.

There it was again.

I told him about how I had started bringing my own food, about how I knew I needed to eat more. This seemed to placate him.

Okay, Saffola. Just please take care of yourself.

His gaze was intense. Disarming, even.

Okay. I replied. I will.

And I’ll see if I can talk to Pat in the kitchen about setting aside some food that you can eat.

I thanked him and walked away, determined to maintain and hide my supposed thinness from prying eyes. I was resolved again to be invisible, every bit as much as I did in the days I carried the soft, round body that I hated. It would be just seven months later that I would receive a physical shock unlike any other, one that would call me out of hiding and force me to face myself in a way I never had before. I would have to face the disappearing girl in the mirror.


To be continued ...

body talk: part 3

Read Part 1
Read Part 2

IMPORTANT NOTE: I cannot stress enough how this is not intended to be a “how to” for someone seeking to lose weight. I now recognize the patterns described below as self-destructive and all too common for women who use extreme and unhealthy means in an attempt to achieve the cultural standard of beauty. I share these details because I think it’s important to recognize how slowly and seemingly innocently these patterns can develop, how they can snowball, and how all-consuming they can become. In order for my recovery to mean what it means, this ugly piece is vital to the totality of the story.


Those sheets of paper were magic. They were what I had never known I had always wanted.

I studied the nutritional content of bread and pasta, of cheese and fruits, of meats and sweets, of cookies and peanut butter and parmesan cheese. I studied it all. I filed these facts in my brain, cataloging them to recall them later. For those foods I didn’t know, I referred to a book on a shelf above the cookbooks in my mom’s kitchen. It had been my grandmother’s before she died and was a proverbial catalog of every food, the detailed breakdown of its nutritional content spelled out in the most finite detail. I was in heaven.

As per the project requirements, I wrote down everything I ate on a piece of paper and estimated how much I was eating. At home, I pulled out my mom’s food scale so that I could get an idea of what four ounces of turkey looked like. I visually cataloged what a teaspoon of peanut butter looked like. I measured out mayonnaise before slathering it on my turkey sandwich and was elated to learn that mustard was virtually calorie-free. I deliberately took smaller portions so I wouldn’t have to write down a large number of calories. I didn’t want my tally at the end of the week to say that I was going to gain weight. In my mind, I was already pudgy and round and soft enough and I was worried about what Mr. F would think if my tally said I would maintain my weight, or even worse, if I would gain some. I was academic about my calculations and my consumption. I was vigilant. I was a voracious for that information.

I remember tallying up my daily calorie totals for the project. My number was higher earlier in the project and by the end of the week, my daily totals were in the 1200-1300 calorie range. In my final assessment, I said that if my eating trends continued, I would lose weight. I was proud. I felt as though I deserved a medal or an achievement badge. A gold star, perhaps? I remember when he handed back our graded assignments. I saw his comment, written in his characteristic block letters, below my final assessment of the project: You don’t need to lose any weight, Kirsten. He followed it by a smiley face.

But he had no idea. My tall, lithe, athletically-built biology teacher was sweet, but in my mind, just didn’t and couldn’t understand. He couldn’t know what it was to be a teenage girl whose soft, round body had been an object of torment. He couldn’t know how out of control I had felt my whole life with my allergies and my sinus infections and getting the flu every year and a set of DNA that had predetermined such a soft and solid body as mine. He couldn’t know how much worse puberty had made these things and how desperate I was for some semblance of control. He couldn’t know how much I wanted to silence my accusers, to prove something to those who had ever made an offensive comment about my weight and my shape. In my mind, he was simply being kind. It was his job to say things like that.

Long after the project for class was over, my personal quest continued and picked up speed. It became my primary mission. The control I felt was intoxicating and liberating. I saw my body as a project, a challenge, a wild thing that had once held me captive, but now that I was equipped, that I could tame. I would look at an apple as large as my fist and recall perfectly calories, carbohydrates, fiber. A bowl of hot cereal (how much did one cup look like in my bowl?) with skim milk. I made a mental note of my sandwich: 2 slices of bread, mayonnaise (how much? I didn’t measure), cheese. I mentally made notes of which foods had the highest caloric content and made plans to reduce and finally eliminate them. I kept track of everything I swallowed, keeping a mental daily tally of calories and fat grams.

Around this same time, my mom also started exercising more, going for walks around the neighborhood. I joined her. I also sought out other forms of exercise. I would dance or jog in place in my room, getting as sweaty as I could, challenging myself to go for increasingly long intervals. I would grab the jump rope and if the weather was bad, head out to the garage. I’d plug in the old black radio and turn on the local rock station while the green rope rhythmically slapped the floor, as I jumped and skipped and kicked my legs out, imagining myself defeating every last fat cell in my body.

Clothes became looser and others began to comment on my increasingly lean shape. People began to look at me as though I was attractive. I walked down the halls more confidently, looking up instead of at my feet and the dirty white tiles below them. I smiled more. Shopping became less of a drudgery and more of a pleasure when I took smaller sizes with me to the dressing room. I would turn to the side in the mirror and take pleasure in my shrinking belly. If feeling as in control as I did was intoxicating, then the feeling of being in control and attractive and complimented was intoxicating and powerful. The feeling was like a drug and I was addicted to the euphoria it produced.

But I wasn’t done. Hmmm. They think I look good now? I thought. I will show them that I can do even better.

The growl in my stomach was already a mark of victory in my mind, a herald announcing that I was succeeding.


To be continued …

body talk: part 2

Read Part 1

easter best photo

(i'm the one in pepto pink and polka dots)
taken by dad

I was never a skinny girl. Especially as a child, I was blissfully unselfconscious about the soft, round shape of my flesh. Since it had been that way for the majority of my young memory, there was no reason to direct much thought toward it. I could swing my leg over the fence in the backyard and I could ride in the neighborhood big wheel races like nobody’s business. What else did I need?

This happy ignorance ended about the same time that I imagine it did for a lot of people: middle school, junior high, whatever you want to call it. Puberty strikes, a cruel combination of hormones and acne take over, and you are never the same again. I was especially blessed also to be dealing with some severe allergies and chronic sinus infections which left me completely lethargic most of the time. My body was stuck in limbo somewhere between childhood and adulthood in the awkwardness of puberty (otherwise known as the third circle of hell), and I had an incessantly snotty nose and itchy eyes to boot. Because clearly, adolescence isn’t mortifying and painful enough.

I realize now that everyone around me must have felt equally strange about the changes they were experiencing inside them and observing around them. At the time, it felt like I was the only one under a microscope, every miniscule aspect of my appearance magnified and occasionally used as fodder for thirteen-year-old boys to point and laugh at. These things didn’t happen frequently, but it was impossible to forget when they did. I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear, just dissolve into the dirt and cease to exist. At the time, it seemed like the best option.

And so I carried myself in such a way as to try to be invisible, to blend in. I’d wear gray sweatpants and a soft, white Washington Huskies sweatshirt at least once a week. In class, I’d bury myself in whatever subject was at hand. I’d ride home on the number thirty-nine bus and if I didn’t have a particular friend to ride with, would set my large rectangular viola case beside me, my way of warding off anyone who might find me a convenient opportunity to make themselves feel less awkward. On those days, I’d bend my knees, rest them up against the back of the seat in front of me, and settle in for the ride home.

My habits of invisibility were hard to unlearn, and so I carried them with me into high school. I continued to excel academically, making me a star to my teachers. Socially, I did my best to blend in, rising barely above the surface of my desire to be invisible. I found a few friends to each lunch with, people I felt safe with, who shared my penchant for excelling academically.

It was my sophomore year that I wound up in a biology class with Mr. F. I quickly became fascinated with the science of living systems. I could tell you all about mitochondria or the precise path blood took through the heart and the names of all the valves through which it passed. I didn’t get queasy dissecting the lamb brain, the frog, or the cow eyeball. It was a cakewalk for me. At one point in the semester, we had a unit in which we learned about nutrition. Mr. F talked about different forms of energy: carbohydrates, fat, and proteins and the calorie counts per gram. I was no less fascinated, even though this unit did not require me to wield a scalpel or handle a cow heart as large as my head.

We were given a chart given the approximate nutritional content of a variety of foods: the total calories, as well as what types of calories those were. I studied it voraciously and was thrilled to learn that we’d be tracking what we ate for a week, recording all the foods we ate and their nutritional content. At the end of that week, we’d figure out the average number of calories we consumed on a daily basis and make the determination that if our eating habits continued, whether we’d gain weight, maintain our weight, or lose it.

Given my academic discipline, I knew I could excel at this project just like I could at any other. But unlike other projects, I knew I could really make this one work to my advantage in a personal way. I knew exactly what I could do armed with this sheet of information.

body talk: part 1

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows that my body and I have been on quite a journey over the last few years (if not, this post aims at giving you a very broad retrospective). As the journey continues, I find myself revisiting and in some ways, reliving these previous experiences, turning and returning to what I’ve already learned, letting to truth drive deeper (but not always without a fight).

I’ve aimed to be as transparent as decency and the ridiculously public nature internet will allow, and it is my aim to continue to do so. The journey is one that has included periodic peaks, a whole lot of valley, and the occasional precipice over which I have frequently been tempted to throw myself. Amidst the extremes in weight loss and weight gain, digestive complications and accompanying physical pain, nutrient deficiencies, extreme fatigue, and thyroid issues that have vacillated between both hypo- and hyper- with some antibodies thrown in for variety, there were days I desperately wished to trade in this tired old body for a new and improved model. But I continually and repeatedly bumped up against the fact that I was stuck with the body I had, woefully in spite of every attempt I made to improve it. That’s how I thought of it: stuck.

I have yet to find adjectives to describe adequately what this experience was. Frustrating. You bet! Infuriating. For sure! Powerless. Certainly. Empty. Yep, that too! Betrayed. Oh, yes. Mix them all together into one large, unruly, and homogeneous lump, then amp up the volume. That's kind of what it was like.

While I am [mostly] better these days, I still have a few lingering issues that my body seems perfectly content to hang onto, but which still have me scouring the internet from time to time in a frantic search for any possible remedy I might not have yet tried. For the record, I’ve only found one remedy I’m not willing to try. If I told you what it was, I would bet my next paycheck (heck, why not the next 10 paychecks?) that you wouldn’t try it either, no matter how dire the particular ailment. As a result, I find myself toting around a few extra pounds around my midsection that I had gotten accustomed to going without.

And I’ll be honest: I don’t like it. This is where people will typically interject, But you look good! If appearance were all this was about (it is a factor for me, but not the whole story), I could probably become content with that. In my mind, however, I’m still in earnest pursuit of good health, the perfect kind of health I enjoyed all too briefly but left me a little over a year ago.

I still miss it. And frequently, the frustration at its loss becomes consuming. I’ve learned that given my appearance, most people will roll their eyes and groan if I let loose that things aren’t as I’d like them to be. Should I allow the frustration bubbling beneath my sweaty, fresh-from-the-gym surface to escape, I am almost certain to receive the requisite groan and eye-roll.

I don’t want to hear it. What are you and your little size X butt whining about, anyway?

And I understand where they’re coming from. But like many women, I also do daily battle with certain aspects of my appearance and inwardly loathe the ailments that I believe are at the root of them. I look at the other women at the gym and envy their slim arms and fuller chests, their flat bellies and the tiny waists that look as though they were carved from marble. There are times that I’m so caught up in my own battle that it baffles me utterly to realize that others might view me with similar envy. But then I look at those women and imagine saying to them: I don’t want to hear it. What are you and your little size X butt whining about, anyway? and I wonder if they have stories that are anything like mine.

I remember when I was still in the thick of the worst of my illness. I constantly felt sharp, stabbing pains in my stomach. I was in the middle of the elimination diet. I constantly had something my naturopath referred to as leaky gut, which is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. I was fatigued no matter how much I slept, oftentimes passing out on the couch before 7 p.m. and not waking up until it was time for work the next day. I was severely anemic, had a diminished red blood cell count, and with sadly subpar adrenal gland function, felt like a zombie. My calcium and vitamin D levels were ridiculously low. And I had an underactive thyroid to boot. I was miserable.

I remember being at the gym once at this point in time (trying desperately to maintain some semblance of my normal life), coming slowly down the stairs one leaden leg at a time. I saw two women near the water fountain who were leaning in their heads toward one another, chatting animatedly and looking my way. As I made my way toward the fountain to fill by blue Nalgene bottle, I learned that I had been their topic of discussion, specifically my recent and very noticeable weight loss.

We’ve just noticed how much thinner you’ve gotten. You look fantastic! What’s your secret?

I gave them the Reader’s Digest, large-print edition version of what my weight loss “secret” was. In broad strokes, I described incessant stomach pain, constant fatigue and sluggishness, a variety of deficiencies and bodily malfunctions, and a severely restricted diet.

Oooh, that sounds awful, one of the women said. I could never go without bread or cheese!

[Pause.]

But you look fantastic!

I was concurrently profoundly disgusted and inexplicably sad. It hit me all at once: the way I had viewed skinny women, the deep wrongness of the mindset that thinness is desired at any cost, and just how much I had missed (and still miss) the point.


To be continued …

mirror self-portrait by kirsten.michelle