I’m 5’10” tall. I have been since around the time I turned 14. And for most of my life I was 9 stone or under (that’s 126lbs or 57.5kg for those who didn’t grow up with stones as a weight measurement, and yes, it does make me feel old).
I’ve had eating disorders most of my life. When I was in high school from 2nd Year onwards I never ate breakfast or lunch, I avoided dinner when I could. I did this while training for a minimum of 2 hours per day, 5 days a week on the school climbing wall. At weekends I would either cycle, or go hill walking, or fell-running. All that didn’t include a part-time job as a cleaner in a local supermarket, being in scouts, later being a scout leader, and volunteering at a scout center.
Later I would discover something that had previously escaped my attention. Food tastes good. So I took to eating and purging. My teeth show the history of that, with a lot of fillings and tooth enamel that has never been the same.
Now bear something in mind. I’ve suffered from chronic diarrhea since I was about 5 years old. That means I was already coping with random, and massive, weight loss to begin with.
So you have to be wondering why I was doing this to myself. I could give you a load of waffle about my being sexually abused as a child. It would be the truth, but that’s not why I started to starve myself. I could say that it was because of all the skinny people on television giving me a warped self-image. But that would be total bollocks, the people I thought looked best on television, were like Wonder Woman’s, Linda Carter. And while she was/is gorgeous, you could never have called her skinny. Busty as hell, curvaceous yup, well proportioned…like a frikkin’ goddess. But not skinny.
No the reason I starved myself was that I simply didn’t want to grow anymore.
I was very much aware that I was really a girl trapped in what was rapidly becoming an ever more hideous, male body. While the other girls became ever more busty, curvy, beautiful, I instead was becoming more muscular, hairy, lantern-jawed. The latter isn’t a joke by the way, at one point I had a jaw line you could have used to break up granite boulders.
But being a very smart kid I reasoned out the following. Growth needs fuel, food is human fuel, if I starve my body of the fuel it needs it’ll stop growing, and my horrible male development will stop. It worked. I did stop developing. I never became hulking like the male side of my family. But it came at a huge cost, and I’ll spend the rest of my life paying the cost of that particular piece of reasoning.
The physical cost isn’t a serious issue for me personally. It isn’t really much of a cost to begin with. I have weak teeth, lots of careful dental hygiene and that’s less of a problem. I have a couple of minor fractures that didn’t heal up quite right, but everyone gets aches and pains as they grow older.
No the costs that hurt me are the psychological ones. After so much time ignoring my hunger pangs, I rarely notice when I’m hungry. So I easily forget to eat, which means I have to be conscious of it the whole time. I never get to relax about eating, because when I relax I forget to eat for a day, or two, or seven.
And when I do eat, I feel bad for doing so. Now don’t take me up the wrong way. I love how food tastes. I reckon I’ve eaten the deep-fried wings off of about a thousand chickens in the past 5 years alone. But, and it’s a big but, I always feel guilty, like I failed because I ate, no matter how much I enjoyed the meal.
A good example is my bedtime ritual. When I go to bed I 90% of the time take a cup of hot milk and two Viscount biscuits with me. A Viscount in case you’ve never met one is a chocolate covered, mint-cream filled piece of heaven. I take that snack because if I don’t my hiatus hernia starts playing up during the night, and I wake up clutching my left arm and wondering if I’m finally having a heart attack. But that milk and those biscuits fill me with guilt.
Which is, of course, the other reason I eat them. They’re an act of defiance at my own subconscious psyche. A personal “Fuck You deep-seated personal neurosis!”
Now we get to the meat of this article. I am now physically pretty much the type of woman I tend to fancy. I mean sure there are one or two thin girls who make me hyper ventilate (I’ll let you guess for yourself who you are). But usually I seem to prefer girls with a little padding. Put in a better way I prefer a healthy body shape.
Well right now I have that myself. I’m very busty, I have an ass that can hypnotize at 20 paces, and kill at 5 though for a different reason than shape or size. I have a healthy amount of body fat. Add in the piercing’s, tattoo, height, gothy wardrobe and a mind so kinky it could be used as a cork screw (for a 6 dimensional bottle cork) and you have me. You also have one of my ideal women.
I should mention here that I do have a small Buddha belly. But that’s far more due to intestinal swelling rather than body weight.
But while I may be a walking embodiment of one of my ideal types of women. I still don’t want to be her. I love my facial features, I love my boobs. But I loathe the weight I now carry. Hate it beyond all reason. I make myself eat to maintain it, but it kills a little piece of me to do that, even if it is the right thing to do.
I want to be a size 12 again. No fuck that, honesty here, I want to be a size 10 again. I want to fit into the tiny skirts, the tight tops I used to wear only a few years ago.
I can’t do that though. My health problems are now too profound. If I starve myself again I won’t have the reserves I need to survive my own body. So I’ve compromised with myself. I’ll lose a little weight. Just enough to fit back into my black leather evening gown. 1 stone 6lbs of weight. Just enough to bring me back to 12 stone even.
But it’s a compromise that hurts.
Because while my body image wasn’t screwed up when I began becoming an adult. back then I was just a girl who was desperate not to end up trapped inside another hideous, hairy man. But becoming a woman who had starved herself into a 20 year puberty has finally caught up with me, finally screwed me up. I sit here inside a body that is in one way at least healthier than it’s ever been (not saying a lot when you consider all my health problems, but at least I don’t pass out when I stand up anymore, or well, not every time anyway). And all I want is to be back in my skinny body, the one that made people scared to hug me, in case they cracked one of my ribs. But that’s a body I can never afford to have again.
My Random Ruminations. 