Am I doing it again?

By

Allie Lane

Yesterday, my size six jeans felt a little loose and I thought, “Am I doing it again?”

It started off, innocently enough, with nutrition. The head track coach had all us girls sitting on the grainy locker room floor on a drab afternoon in early March for his yearly lecture. Our bodies were the vehicles of our sport, he said. We had no balls or nets or sticks, only ourselves. Maximizing race potential was about the right fuel; he used the metaphor of gunking up a high performance engine with cheap gasoline to describe junk food. It was my junior year and I’d come off of my first successful indoor track season. More than anything I wanted the improvement to continue, to finally harness that potential all the coaching staff seemed sure I had, so when Coach V. talked about the “junk food junkies” I assumed he was talking to me. In retrospect it was probably directed at those girls—mostly those freshmen who looked like they were made out of matchsticks—who hated school lunch and opted for pop tarts of pizza pretzels from the school store, not me who packed a parent approved lunchbox and would sneak a couple store bought cookies before dinner or eat cheezits while I played Risk with my brother and his friends on the weekends. That’s it, I thought, those foods are reasons I haven’t had a breakthrough race yet.

 

I cut them out all together—a systematic annihilation of even mini chocolates, baked tortilla chips and mid-afternoon snacks. I had a slice of wheat toast with peanut butter and a glass of orange juice for breakfast every day because I’d read it was the perfect fuel for starting your day in some teem magazine. I made a mental contract with myself that I would have one junk food splurge a week. It was completely reasonable; I wasn’t a saint and I was running something like forty miles a week, more than I ever had up until that point. Once a week I could order heinously artificial Chinese food from the mall food court with my friends, munch on a few soft baked bakery cookies at team dinners or happily indulge when my mother couldn’t resist the caramel swirl ice cream on sale at the grocery store. That’s what the health gurus tell people to do now: have a cheat day! It works, they say, it’s the way to find a healthy balance. Restrained indulgence is the name of the game. I followed that creedo. I took my weekly splurges, sometimes shamelessly took two. I did what millions of men and women do every day and somehow it went wrong.

Last month, I tried on a dress my roommate gave me because it didn’t fit her anymore. It was an Express size 2 which meant a 4 at normal stores. Expensive brands inflate sizes to boost people’s self esteem. It worked. The dress zipped on the first try and I felt victorious.

To this day I’m not completely sure how calories even entered the equation when I began by simply curbing junk food consumption. It snuck up on me in a backwards way. I never knew how much or how little to eat before a race, how much food left me burning out on the third lap of the 1600 and how much was heavy in my stomach after less than 300 meters. I decided it was something like 200 calories an hour before the starting gun. That meant a banana with a few crackers, a granola bar and an apple, a bag of dry cereal. I suppose that from that moment everything became numbers and when there are numbers you cannot help but count them.

I remember silently panicking when I went to make my toast one morning and realized my mother had bought a new type of bread. It was a delicious, slightly sweet, almost cake like 12 grain bakery bread with 130 calories a slice—40 more than normal, 80 more than normal in a sandwich, almost an extra slice of bread entirely. I stood in front of the toaster before school wondering how much I could trim the total by leaving the crust.

I can still rattle off the calorie figures for half the produce section: 1 cup grapes-100 calories, one cup strawberries-50 calories, medium apple-80 calories. One of the women’s magazines had a chart in one of their diet sections which I stole looks at until I memorized it.

So it was about calories now. I didn’t realize it, didn’t see any reason to question this seemingly natural evolution of my supposedly healthy eating habits. I was getting results. My track times were dropping in every event I ran, after a month my season was on a perfect trajectory. It was my first full season on the distance running side of things, which I am naturally more suited for, and consequently it was the first time I’d been properly trained for races like the 800 and 1600. Of course my times were going down. My coaches lauded my work ethic in practice as well which, in my mind, included the quiet junk food prohibition I’d enacted. I felt like a real track runner for the first time in my life and, in my mind, I was quickly beginning to look like one.

Every afternoon the locker room would be filled with girls walking around in sports bras while they fixed their hair or decided whether they should wear a tank top or a tee. They slapped each others’ tiny bottoms and roared with laughter as jeans were traded for short shorts and spandex. The runners and jumpers were all skinny with prominent vertebrae, and such narrow hips that their torsos were almost rectangular. The throwers were different; they had sturdier, more classically feminine bodies but they were somewhat removed from us. They had different uniforms, different traditions, a different coach. I’ve always had an athletic build and been relatively thin and during indoor track with the smaller team I had never thought about how everyone else looked. That 11^th grade track locker room was the first time in my life when I’d been one of the biggest girls in the room. As the season went on I was beginning to look more and more like them. You could see my muscles and tendons more when I ran, because my legs were thinner, but I thought they were stronger. I had a waist and arms like the best girls on the team; I was doing something right.

In April one of the most valuable members of our team got her period for the first time in the locker room. She was eighteen years old and unbelievably excited. In the last year she’d grown an inch or two and had finally cracked 100 pounds.

Last year, I found a pamphlet in my college fitness center on athletics and eating disorders. I snuck it into my bag and read it in my car where no one could see. Girls and young women involved in individual sports like running or gymnastics are three times more likely to have disordered eating. Some studies say as much as ten times.

“When was the last time you got your period?”

My mom asked me this point blank while we were in the car in early May. She’d asked me if I needed feminine products at Walmart and hit me with the question after I said no.

“I don’t know,” I answered. I’d always been lazy about keeping track of it; I’m not one of those girls who could set a calendar by her menstrual cycle. I shrugged and kept shrugging, quickly realizing that it had been a while. My mom had known that going in, I think.

“Well, I think we should get it checked out, just to make sure nothing’s wrong.” She tried to say it casually, but she was moving her hands more than she normally does while talking and was nodding as if trying to assure herself that this wasn’t a big deal.

I was irritable and silent when she drove me to the gynecologist. I thought that this was all unnecessary and going to a clinic in a sterile white office park was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday. I didn’t want to see a gynecologist. That was the doctor you went to for sex things and what would my friends think if they heard I’d been to a gyno?

I don’t remember the doctor well, but I thought that she was nice and I liked that I didn’t have to sit on a cold table in a hospital gown while I answered all of her questions about my family history, the age at which I first got my period, my non-existent sexual activity, my non-existent drug use and my high activity level. All that was done before I changed into the gown. My mom stared at me the entire time; then I thought she was just being overprotective and irritating, but now I suppose she was panicking. The first thing the doctor did when she came back was weigh me: 112 pounds. At the beginning of track season I was 131 pounds.

“Allie that’s so low,” my mom said. I didn’t answer her.

The gynecologist did an exam and as I sat up, laid down, breathed in and reached up as she requested, I was silently convincing myself that 112 pounds wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t so skinny. I knew girls my height who weighed less. Besides, I was running well and I was sixteen; I was supposed to be skinny.

After all the lights and metal instruments had come and gone I was diagnosed with Amenorrhea, the cessation of menstruation for an extended period of time, clinically it’s required to go on for 3 months or more. It can be caused by various illnesses, but in most cases of young women it comes from low body weight or unbalanced nutrition. It’s entirely reversible, but it can decrease bone density and cause problems with the reproductive organs. Mine was short enough that I hopefully avoided any long term effects.

Just to make sure there wasn’t an underlying condition, the gynecologist had me get blood taken at the lab down the street. “You need to gain weight,” my mother told me simply as we walked across the rainy parking lot. It was almost deserted. I didn’t agree but I didn’t tell her no. I didn’t say anything; I just squeezed her hand tightly as they put the needle in my arm.

Last summer, I bought a bikini for the first time because I finally had a good enough body to wear one, but I kept my more conservative tankini just in case.

It ended, innocently enough, with a dress. During February break my best friend and I had gone to Portsmouth with our moms to shop for prom dresses. We spent the whole day in bridal shops and boutiques trying on dresses of color and shape, except for poufy princess ones. Neither of us was into that. In a tiny shop that shared space with a shoe store I found the perfect dress. It was almost mermaid shaped, but subtly enough that it didn’t look like a costume. It was white strapless with a gauzy over-layer that had simple curls of black flowers trailing down from the top to my waist, tapering away. On the bottom and top hem was a rim of black ribbon and the skirt was dotted with subtle rhinestones that caught the light. My mother said it reminded her of something Audrey Hepburn had worn in the movie Sabrina. It even fit me perfectly. It was a little snug around my hips but I wasn’t worried; I always gain a pound or two during the winter holidays and it somehow goes away by spring. It wasn’t just a beautiful dress. It made me feel like a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress and when you’re sixteen you can ask for nothing more.

In May, about a week before my prom, I put on the dress for the first time since February to make sure my shoes were tall enough to keep it from dragging. The structured bodice was hanging around me. No matter how much my mother tightened the beautiful corset style black lacing in the back, it slipped down my flat, bony chest while the excess fabric around my waist crinkled and bowed. That was when I realized that something was terribly wrong. My dress stayed hung on my door to air out from the back of my closet and keep it from wrinkling. That night I could see its perfect white silhouette against the darkness and the light that leaked under the door from the hall caught the rhinestones. I stared at it, curled up in a ball in my bed, and cried. What had I done?

I went to my prom the next weekend and had a wonderful time. I danced, I laughed, I posed for a tremendous amount of photos and afterwards we all went back to my best friend’s house where we devoured brownies and chips as we compared how many bobby pins we had in our elaborate hairstyles. I spent the entire night pulling my dress up every five minutes, but that was more out of self consciousness than need, I think. I knew that I wasn’t well and I needed to fix it; I just didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

If I had had any doubts that I had an eating problem, they were erased when my prom pictures came in a month later. The dress is hanging unnaturally low, barley clinging to my almost nonexistent breasts. The delicate shine of my necklace is overshadowed by the jutting of my collarbone. My face is smiling, my hair immaculate, my body obviously overwhelmed by the beautiful fabric covering it. When I look at that picture, I don’t smile fondly or think of the good times. Instead I cringe and think of how bad it got. For three months I was a statistic one of the 10 to 15 percent of the US who had disordered eating. Whenever I show my prom photos or any from before I started getting weight back, to people who didn’t know me then, I tell them that I was so thin because I had a bad stomach infection and lost a lot of weight. I say this before they even ask, because I know that’s what they think when they see it. It screams at you. I just couldn’t hear it.

Today, I measured out a 300 calorie portion of cereal for breakfast, sat down to write this and realized that it never goes away. 


Allie Lane is a soon-to-be graduate of the University of New Hampshire with degrees in English and German. Her main academic interests are creative writing and literary translation. She grew up in Derry, New Hampshire, enjoys books, movies and the outdoors. She has, on occasion, been referred to as a Good Egg.