A Heavy Weight How an eating disorder consumed my life and college years. by QUINN GAWRONSKI
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wirling disco lights punctuated the darkness of the party and distorted the scene of punch-drunk girls and jostling boys into a blur. Rum made my tongue heavy and my head dizzy. An ex I hadn’t seen in months stood behind the DJ booth. I felt his gaze cut through the crowd before it landed on the back of my neck. I wondered what he saw as those lights briefly illuminated my skin. I wondered if he noticed the new ridge of my spine, the butterfly shape of my rib cage, the carved hollows under my cheeks. He crossed the room and led me out the door into the backyard. The gleam of the moon illuminated his face. “Are you anorexic?” he asked. I said no, but I meant yes. It felt euphoric to hear those words leave his mouth, because to me, skinny was synonymous with beauty. To begin with, I only wanted to lose 10 pounds.
stood for my insecurities, flaws, and weaknesses. If I lost the weight and what it represented, I could love myself. If I lost the weight, I could be loved by someone else. The pounds dripped off my frame slowly, but I wanted to get there faster. As my eating disorder unfurled, everything I did, and everything I was, became wrapped around a weight that was always out of reach. Twelve hundred calories turned to 1000 and then to 700. Cardio became my punishment for bad behavior — a few croutons meant I had to do sprints until I saw dark spots. When I went out, I feared bartenders would pour regular Coke instead of diet and bump me over the allotted amount of alcohol calories I tabulated for that evening. During winter break, my sister wanted to make Christmas cookies, which sent me into a rage.
Even as I typed that story, a red light blinked in the back of my brain. My fingernails were purple, my hands were shaking, and I was freezing despite being bundled up in three sweatshirts. But I believed that, unlike my sister Taryn, I possessed control over my illness. A part of me felt that, in comparison, my eating disorder was mild, like I didn’t need help unless I was emaciated. If I wanted to get better, I could. I just wasn’t thin enough yet. Friends and followers on social media praised me for my new body, for my dedication to the gym, for my restraint around food. Someone told me that when I turned sideways, I disappeared. I think he intended to hurt me, but instead, his comment satiated the hunger food failed to fill. Maybe someone else saw the version of myself I kept searching for, even when I couldn’t find it. When I controlled my eating, I could also control how other people saw me.
“As my eating disorder unfurled, everything I did, and everything I was, became wrapped around a weight that was always out of reach.”
The summer after my freshman year of college, I plummeted headfirst into a rabbit hole of weight loss advice. My heels struck the endless black loop of the treadmill as I clicked on, each word sinking into my permeable mind. Click. Track your calories. Click. Cut out sugars and fat. Click. Drink water instead of eating. Click. Don’t eat anything packaged. Click. Click. Click. Back then, my eating disorder wore a clever, acceptable disguise labeled “health.” It sunk its teeth into me to fill my head with facts and figures on the fastest way to become this better me, a version locked inside the shell of my body and waiting to come out. I listened to the rail-thin women on my screen who spoke about juice cleanses and fasted cardio, believing that I would feel beautiful like them if I just followed their steps. I cut out foods one by one: meat, cheese, dairy, eggs, gluten, anything in a wrapper. I tracked my calories and did cardio. As the weeks went by, weight came to mean much more. Each pound 26 UGirl CollegeLife
illustration by EMILY GUNN
Every morning I stripped down to weigh myself and made sure to avoid water in case it might throw off the reading. I measured every meal I ate down to the tablespoon, another rationed 200 calories to carry me for the next four hours. I controlled every part of my life just as long as the scale continued its descent.
I was addicted to that feeling, this wave of energy and a never-ending hunger high that flooded my head with serotonin. But that feeling only lasted for a few months before it came crashing down with a force that knocked me to the ground. One spring morning, I woke up with a head full of heavy cotton. It obscured my vision and traveled down my throat so I couldn’t form a coherent sentence, and when I sat down to work that day, my eyes wouldn’t focus. My body was sending me a blaring warning — I deprived myself of food for so long that my brain was malnourished, screaming for the food it needed to function.
Of course, I knew all the signs and symptoms of eating disorders. Anorexia transformed my sister Taryn into someone unrecognizable — sallow bruised skin, protruding hip bones, hands clutching the side of her wheelchair after she was hospitalized. It controlled every bite she put into her mouth, every lie she told to leave the dinner table. A year ago, I wrote an article for this magazine about how this illness eroded her life — and the lives of those who loved her.
So I began bingeing, gorging on as many calories as I used to eat in a week in one sitting. It was my body’s reaction to being underfed for months, but that didn’t stop it from happening. The illusion of control crumbled around me as the pounds crawled back under my skin, accompanied by shame that hung over my shoulders. Everyone could see my failure, the weight that wrapped around my thighs from the calories I ate while locked in my room. The climbing
