ED Reflections, no. 2

Holy pot pie this little pseudo-blogger is tired! I'm trying very hard to post once per day but moving, bizness at the new house, and a lack of home internet are making it somewhat challenging. But, I persist. I will not let my reader(s) down! Surely your time is better spent reading my diary than picking your cuticles. (Is it just me that does that while waiting for web pages to load?)

So, the "soup" of the day today is the first part of my post on my eating disorder history. BAM!

Rather than writing a v.v. long post about my past with disordered eating and exercise, I decided that it might be easier (and less of a huge boo-hoo downer) if I broke it up into parts with lots of sarcastic jokes (let's call these "little fatty tidbits"). I’ll start with the “beginning” for clarity’s sake, though when I think about my eating and exercise, I always remember disparate snippets that feel very dreamlike, including little fragments in which I alternately remember being a little girl who hated herself and her body or a twenty-something anorexic who needed exercise to soothe my anxious thoughts.

When I left off, I had just asked you to imagine a chubby adolescent eating candy and simultaneously wondering why she was overweight. That’s me. My parents fed me many, many more things than just candy and Blackjack Pizza, and there were always carrots, celery, and grapes around for us to snack on. But I’m a sensitive freakin’ girl, and being freckly, fairly awkward, and highly insecure made me use food to feel better about things that had nothing to do with food. While I had been a skinny child, puberty hit me hard and left me slightly overweight and very uncomfortable in my skin. It also left me feeling uncomfortable in my ears, which have always been rather “perky”:

1. I do not wax and shine these babies.
2. This picture only makes it look like I'm a werewolf.
3.  If you saw me in person you'd be able to tell that my ear perks out like the handle on a coffee mug. 

But that’s for a different post on a more self-indulgent, narcissistic day. Today's post is about real challenges, not first-world ego problems.

So, the result of all of this is that I began dieting young. At eleven, to be precise. And I can still remember how it made me feel. More importantly, I can remember how it made the people around me feel about me. Friends at school, most of whom I suspected of not really liking me, suddenly seemed to actually like me. A friend’s mom even told me how wonderful I looked and asked me how I had lost weight (F-you Mrs. S!) I know it probably didn’t happen this way, but I truly remember a group of my friends crowding around me on the first day of school when I returned from summer break in my new thinner body. I don’t recall how I arrived at that body, whether it was through extreme dieting or being more active, but I do remember feeling like something important had happened. Like a fundamental part of who I am or would be was in the works with this simple little act of burning off a few of the cinnamon bears I liked to eat.

Stay tuned for more. I tend to be more funny when I talk or write about my intimate feelings and neuroses:-) (Still can't figure out these f-ing emoticons...)