The Limitation Game: How Counting My Calories Caused My Disordered Eating
Editorial Note
This piece gives a detailed description of disordered eating and weight. If discussing calories, fear foods, numbers, treatment, etc. is uncomfortable for you or could jeopardize your own health, we suggest skipping this article.
If you feel as though you or someone you know has an unhealthy relationship with food, exercise, or your/their body, reach out. You deserve help regardless of your body, your weight, what you ate today, or what you’re going to eat tomorrow. There is no such thing as “sick enough” when it comes to eating disorders. The National Eating Disorder Hotline is 800-931-2237.
I don’t know the last time I ate without feeling guilty, without rationalizing each bite of food, or picking a juice over a water and not worrying about all the empty, liquid calories I would be consuming. I have never looked in the mirror and found that I am finally skinny enough.
Florence Welch sings in her song Hunger that at 17 she started to starve herself. She and I have that in common. At 17, I downloaded myfitnesspal, and pal it was not. Nor was it my frenemy. Myfitnesspal was the bully that kept me eating less and less, skipping meals, as I logged obsessively what I ate that day, and relished in what I didn’t. Some days I smiled in satisfaction when my total caloric intake was less than 800 calories. At 17 and 5’9 in height, the recommended calories for a girl like me for the day were more than double that amount.
But I persisted, and eventually, I started dropping weight, but I knew if I stepped on the scale I’d taken from my grandma’s house at night after dinner and a shower, I would weigh more than if I weighed myself in the morning right after I had woken up. Shivering and completely naked on the piece of sturdy glass, I didn’t realize the precipice I was actually on was the thin glass of an eating disorder, taunting me from below, daring me to come down to it like the pounds I was shedding.
I don’t know where my obsession with losing weight came from, but I know in third grade I emailed American Girl to ask why my tummy got so big in the winter. My mom, who saw the email, laid down with me that night and looked at me softly, spoke to me softly, asking why I would send an email like that. I didn’t know why then either. I just knew little girls were supposed to be skinny, and I wasn’t skinny enough.
Today, at 22, I listen as my mom speaks defiantly of my great grandmother’s soft chin - the one every woman in my family has - while I self consciously touch my own to feel for new rolls that may have developed over night. I want to be proud of my soft chin. I look for beauty in my “womanly” hips, hips made for child bearing, hips for holding on to, hips helped along by the portions my grandma heaps onto my plate when she cooks dinner. I try to believe my stomach, untoned, is sexy in the way it resembles the statue of Aphrodite. But I am tall, and my friends are petite, and while I may find history in my thighs, we are living in a modern world and my body of inheritance feels like an antique I do not want. I am tired.
This weight I carry with me — the mental one, the body dysmorphia, not the body itself — began in third grade. I look at the young girls in my family, some past my age then, some moving towards it, and I worry. On vacation at the beach when the youngest tells me she’s fat, I worry. I make them listen to Lizzo, I promise all bodies are beautiful, I show them images of powerful women who are not size twos. But I know I am also doing it for myself, that I need these reminders, too. That I hope I can save them from the exhaustion of my every day, making excuses for the food I eat, taking a million selfies every few hours in an attempt to dissociate from my own face, to objectively believe I am beautiful.
On August 13, WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers, rolled out a food tracking app for children as young as 8. I was 18 when I began seeing spots from not eating enough food after using myfitnesspal. While I no longer use it, I still suffer from the effects of using a tool made for health awareness as a tool to further my negative body image to the point of disordered eating.
My story with disordered eating does not end, it’s an ellipsis in a book I have been trying to finish since high school. But I’m trying, by talking about it, by talking to the young women in my family about it, by speaking up about the dangers of conflating being healthy with being skinny, to help other people end theirs. If I am going to make peace with my body, I have to admit there has been a war going on between us in the first place. This body is impermanent, but the legacy of diet culture threatens to last longer.
About the Author
Maura Fallon (she/her) is a recent graduate from the George Washington University with a degree in journalism and film. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn where she works for American Documentary and spends her time reading on roofs and dancing in the streets. Prior to the publication of this piece, Maura got a tattoo of a ghost, which reminds her of the body’s impermanence and the importance of the soul that inhabits it.
