**I wrote this piece about nine months ago in an intro to non-fiction writing class. It was the first piece I ever wrote that made me think I might want to be a writer. It is one of my many stories.
You are eleven and you are writing down everything you ate in the last week in the small notebook you got from the LA Weight Loss lady. She is blonde with too-big hair and blue eyeshadow, but she’s not fat and that’s all you aspire to be. You write what you’ve eaten, knowing that afterwards you and your mom will go to Boston Market and get a quarter of a chicken with green beans and new potatoes, and peel the skin off because that’s what LA Weight Loss tells you you should do. You write what you’ve eaten, knowing that after the lady weighs you and your mom in, if you haven’t lost enough weight or if, god forbid, you gained weight she’ll ask you if you had a bowel movement that day or if maybe you’re near that time of the month. You learn not to be too embarrassed or ashamed by these questions because if your bowel hasn’t moved in a few days or you are supposed to start your period soon then the weight gain is not your fault. It doesn’t even cross your mind that the weight gain might be an indicator that the diet outlined by LA Weight Loss doesn’t work. After all you are eleven, and this is only your first diet.
You are eleven and a boy likes you. Or so your friend says. She’s not exactly your friend. She’s actually a friend of a friend who rides to school with you even though you go to Merriam and she goes to McCarthy. But you do get to spend recess together, and that’s when you find out about the boy. It’s not the boy you’re really in love with with the dreamy hair and the nonchalant attitude. It’s his goofy best friend, the clown of the class. He’s literally chinless. He’s kind of like a cartoon. He’s got big teeth and a small bump where there should be a clear separation between his face and his neck. He’s not just skinny, but lanky, like gravity is really doing a number on his limbs. His hair sticks out in all directions mainly because, unlike the other upper-echelon boys in the class, he doesn’t wear a hat. When your friend who is not exactly your friend tells you this boy likes you, you blush and smile privately because you know how you make each other laugh. But that moment barely lasts a single second before it dawns on you that there is no way any boy, let alone a boy in the upper echelon of your class, could like a girl like you, a chubby girl.
You are eleven, and that day you go home and tell your mom that you need to go on a diet. Years later your mom will tell you that her stomach sank when you said those words, that she never wanted you to go down this path. But going on a diet doesn’t only seem essential for the sake of any real possible relationship with this boy, it also seems like a rite of passage into womanhood to eleven year old you. You go to your pediatrician to get her to sign off on your diet, because no respectable diet program would allow an eleven year old to go on a diet…without a doctor’s approval. Your doctor approves as she’s been hounding you to lose weight since she met you six months ago, I mean you are a little high on the BMI scale. You don’t know what that means, but you know that it’s bad, and you know that it’s related to the fact that you’re fat. Your doctor is hopeful that maybe you’ll hit a growth spurt, and everything will even out, but a diet is a good idea anyway.
You are eleven, and you don’t yet know that in fifteen years you will still know the BMI cutoff for “normal” weight even though you’ll try your best to forget it.
You are eleven, and you don’t yet know that the only time you will be “normal” according to BMI will be the summer between your freshman and sophomore year of college. When you’ll religiously eat between 600 and 800 calories a day, workout for thirty minutes every morning, and spend most afternoons reading in bed because you’re just too tired to do anything else.
You are eleven, and this is your very first diet, and you are excited and hopeful because “diet” means “thin” and “thin” means “everything will be ok.”
You are eleven and you don’t yet know that you will continue to try different diets with different rates of success for the next fifteen years. You don’t yet know that 95% of dieters gain the weight back and more. And even if you did, you don’t yet know that it is not the fault of those dieters. That their inability to keep the weight off is not a reflection of their weak character or lack of self-control, but of bodies working overtime to keep them alive. You don’t yet know that dieting is one of the most powerful triggers of eating disorders that we know of today. And that in the fifteen years after your first diet you will present with symptoms of anorexia nervosa, anorexia athletica, binge eating disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and orthorexia. You don’t yet know how often eating disorders are not diagnosed in fat women, and that, worse yet, eating disorder behaviors are often prescribed to fat women. You don’t yet know that in fifteen years you will consider yourself lucky for having gotten out in your twenties and not in your forties or sixties or never.
tmd 