The Slice

Seeing a challenge inspired by chocolate cake was amazing for me because chocolate cake has played a major role in my life. Trigger warning, eating disorders, anorexia.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t obsess over my weight. I always had to be the skinniest girl in the room or my body dysmorphia would consume my world for months at a time. When I was eleven my friend asked me in the cafeteria at lunch time why I wasn’t eating and I told her it was because I felt fat. She told her mom what I said, and instead of telling my grandparents like she should have, she told her daughter that I was trying to fat shame her and told her she couldn’t be my friend anymore. This girl came back to school and told all of our friends that I called her fat and that they weren’t allowed to sit with me. If I tried to sit with them they would all get up and move to a new table. My grandmother was the school nurse, so the entire faculty was very nice to me and eventually I started having lunch with one of the guidance counselors. She also noticed that I didn’t really eat, and she did tell my grandmother, but it was dismissed. They both figured that I was upset because I was being bullied and that had led to my lack of an appetite.

The older I got the more the disorder consumed my life. I never ate during the summer using being overheated as an excuse to starve myself and keep “the perfect summer body”. The only time I would truly eat was during soccer season and track season because I could convince myself that I was burning off all of the calories I was consuming. During soccer and track season I would get slightly muscular with healthy fat on my body, but during the off seasons I never ate and would lose it all. No one ever seemed to notice that every winter and every summer my clothes would hang off of me. The feeling that no one cared how skinny I was convinced me that I was a “normal” weight and that what I was doing was okay.

My senior year of high school I went to the Homecoming Dance with a group of girl friends and we took a group picture together. It was during soccer season so I had a little bit of weight on me, and not one but two of the girls looked skinnier than I was in the picture. I was devastated. I still posted it on my social media platforms, because I didn’t want anyone to know how insecure I was, but every time I looked at that picture my chest tightened. I recognized that I was being a little over the top feeling so sensitive about the picture, but I didn’t know how to make myself stop feeling that way. Not too long after I turned 18, I started getting severe panic attacks. I never liked vomit, but around this time in my life I developed a phobia to it. I was always the kid to run out of the room if someone got sick, but I got to the point when I was eighteen that if someone threw up in class I would walk out of school and drive home. When you take someone who has a phobia of vomiting, mix in an eating disorder, and throw panic attacks on top of that; it turns into a big mess.

A couple months after I graduated high school I got pregnant with my son. That was the first time I cared about someone enough to eat. I ate extremely healthy to try and not gain too much weight during my pregnancy, but I ate all the time. I listened to what my midwife told me to eat and not to eat. She was the first person I ever admitted that I had trouble with eating to. She comforted me and tried to help me work through it, always telling me how amazing I was nourishing myself and my unborn baby. She recommended me to groups for people struggling with eating disorders, I was always too self conscious to go, but looking back I really wish I hadn’t been.

After what felt like the world’s longest pregnancy, with a lot of heartburn and an unplanned all natural delivery, yes I am still mad at my son’s father for not getting there in enough time for me to get an epidural, I finally had my beautiful baby boy. I thought everything was going to be better, in the first week after I gave birth I had no anxiety, no bad thoughts about eating, no irrational fears of getting sick. Then the father of my child made a comment about how I would need to lose a few pounds to get my body back. Between that and the comment he had made about my stretch marks, I was in the deep end. My panic attacks, my phobia, my eating disorder; they all returned tenfold. We were engaged and he had known me for over five years and he couldn’t see that I was deteriorating before his eyes.

I am 5’2” and after a year and a half of living with my son’s father and being engaged to him, I was 75lbs when I moved out. But that's when I really started realizing I had a problem. When I realized that it wasn’t okay that my coworker used to bend me over to show everyone how much my spine stuck out. That it wasn’t okay that I couldn’t enjoy food like everyone else around me. The fact that eating in public made me so anxious that I couldn’t go on dates. Realizing I was not a vegetarian for the right reasons. For the second time in my life I wanted to eat for someone else, only this time it was for myself.

Now for how chocolate cake fits into this story. Unlearning years of self depreciation and bad eating habits is not easily accomplished, and I needed help. One of my good friends who had been in recovery from anorexia for many years agreed to help me with my journey. She sat me down and asked me what my favorite dessert was when I was a kid. I told her chocolate cake, we almost never got it growing up in my house because my grandmother hated it. So it was always an extra special treat when I got it at a birthday party or another event not hosted by my family. My ex-mother-in-law used to buy me chocolate cake for my birthday every year but I could never make myself eat it. So my friend went out and bought me a chocolate cake.

Eating chocolate cake for the first time in years was nerve racking. Now in my second full year of recovery, being that nervous over a slice of cake seems so ridiculous. But at that time, it was downright frightening. That first bite was magical, the rich chocolate, the sweet buttercream frosting, it all melted together and made me nostalgic of my childhood. That cake was the door to a whole new world of eating food because I enjoy it not just because I have to eat to survive. After that I started eating more and more and working on my anxiety too. I stopped being a vegetarian, I stopped calorie counting and obsessing over my body. With a therapist’s help I unlearned my old ways of thinking and reacting to comments about my weight, and I really started loving myself and my body.

It’s been a little over two years since I’ve had any setbacks or self deprecating thoughts. I’ve been over a hundred pounds for about a year now fluctuating between 110 and 115. And even if I go over that, I have learned how to be comfortable in my own skin and love myself. I hope that anyone who reads this who is struggling can use this as motivation or inspiration to reach out and get help. It’s a long road, but recovery is worth it, you are worth it.