Anorexia Remembered

I received a message from a homeschool acquaintance yesterday, informing me that her daughter was recently admitted to an inpatient care center for the treatment of anorexia. Though I was never hospitalized (I think mostly because the medical community didn’t do that sort of thing in the late 1970’s), I dealt with this demon in high school, as did several of my classmates. I remember well how it began.

I was in ninth grade. The school year was 1976-1977. Jimmy Carter had just been elected President, a good thing for all us Minnesota Democrats. I was taking a full class load at school and had just joined the orchestra with my newly acquired harp. At the beginning of the year, I weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 pounds. Being 5’4” tall, that meant I was slightly pudgy, but not necessarily fat. This was not an unusual condition in my family, but it was certainly disconcerting to me, a young girl entering puberty whose body was changing in a variety of ways.

Sometime during the fall of 1976, my parents and my dentist decided that I should have some extensive orthodontic work done to correct a fairly severe overbite and some tooth crowding issues. That meant four extractions and a frenectomy, an operation to reduce the size of the “hinge” that connects the upper lip to the gum. My frenum was quite large and thick, creating a huge space between my front teeth. I can’t recall which operation occurred first, but this preliminary dental work was performed over the course of two dental visits: one to extract two lower teeth, the other to extract two upper teeth and perform the frenectomy. A few days after the latter operation, my maternal grandmother died, requiring me to travel to Iowa for funeral services with a mouthful of gauze and stitches. If memory serves correctly, I could barely speak, smile, or eat because of those stitches. Family members joked that they would puree my food because I was in such pain. By January 1977, my braces were installed and my three-year journey to smiling perfection was off and running.

Due to the stress on my body from the dental work, I lost some weight. Then, as usual, during the winter months, I got a rotten cold that morphed into bronchitis. More weight lost. Sometime that winter, German measles also began popping up all over southern Minnesota. In an effort to prevent an epidemic, everyone in my age group was revaccinated (at the time, health officials speculated that our early childhood shots were defective). Because I had an ongoing upper respiratory infection, I missed the inoculations. Well, by the end of May, I had the measles. Not just any old measles, one of the worst cases of German measles my physician had ever seen. My fever hovered around 104° F for more than a week. I had measles in my eyes, in my mouth, and (my physician believed) in the lining between my brain and my skull. I was sick! Because a staph infection had invaded the local hospital, the medical consensus was to care for me at home with constant monitoring by my parents and assigned hospital staff. Of course, I knew nothing of this. Later, I learned that I was on the prayer list at church and that my parents received sympathy cards from friends and neighbors who, apparently, were convinced I might not make it. Finally, after more than two weeks, I was (shakily) back on my feet and weighing in at 95 pounds.

The actual weight number wasn’t the biggest problem, though I was certainly enamored with my thin thighs, my flat tummy, and the fact that I looked great in denim shorts for the first time in my life. No, the biggest problem was the praise I received from other people. Everyone who saw me complimented me on my new, thin physique. These were completely innocent comments by friends and neighbors who loved me, who were previously concerned that I might not even recover. Unfortunately, these same innocent comments were processed in a completely incorrect way by the mind of a teenager with body image/control issues. Definitely a recipe for disaster.

My recovery was slow. By the time I graduated from high school, I was only up to 105 pounds. I stayed there through my entire college career, during a brief foray into law school, and while I was a newlywed. It wasn’t until I was almost twenty-five years old that my weight registered in the normal range for my height and age. When I got pregnant with my daughter at age twenty-eight, I finally weighed 125 pounds.

Having developed anorexia at a time when it wasn’t recognized or treated as a true medical condition, I never had counseling, nor did I participate in any kind of therapy to reorient my body image perceptions. I did that with the help of family and friends who cared and were willing to listen. Experiencing pregnancy was a huge help, teaching me that my body would indeed change as I went through life. Learning the difference between “being fit” and “being thin” was also a godsend. I now believe the former is a lifestyle and a frame of mind; the latter is a condition that, more often than not, is genetically determined.

At forty-five years of age, I am now heavier than at any other time in my life (although I am eight pounds lighter than I was a month ago). I still deal with food issues and accept that I always will. I have learned to keep it all in perspective, though. God created me because He loved me and wanted me to have a great life. He created food for my nourishment, as well as for my enjoyment. Both are gifts from Him, gifts that are meant to be used properly and well --- to the glory of His Holy name.