SCALES ARE FOR FISH!! | Fighting Weight Obsession

I used to get up in the morning to get on the scale, and wouldn’t go to bed at night until I did the same. That’s not including the 40 or 50 times a day in between I used to step “on” and “off” of it.

Sometimes I would be so paranoid that the number wasn’t right that I would take a “five pound bag of flour” or “dumbbells” and sit them on the scale to double check that it was telling me the truth. Some days it was my best friend, some days—or should I say most days—it was my enemy. If that number wasn’t exactly the number I wanted, which most of the time it wasn’t, I would curse that scale to hell and back, and go in to such a sense of panic you would have thought the sky was falling, not the fact that my weight wasn’t. I would drink a glass of water and weigh myself, I would pee and weigh myself, I would shed tears for five minutes, floss my teeth, and shave my legs just to see if that would make it go down.

The worst would be when it just wouldn’t budge, even if I hadn’t eaten a thing. This would piss me off so bad to the point that I would purge bile from my stomach to see if it would go down. When this wouldn’t work I would jump in my car, sometimes in the middle of a snow storm, or the middle of the night to go buy laxatives from the convenient store around the corner. I would then ingest the whole box and agonizingly wait until they began to kick in.

Time never moved slower then when I was waiting for the first stomach cramp. I cannot tell you the sweet agony those cramps brought me, and although after digesting 60 little pink dots brings on the most horrifying, “god help me” worse then the worse stomach flu you have ever had in your life pain, it means that you are about to flush everything shy of your brains out.

If I was lucky sometimes I would only have to go through about one hour of sheer hell, but sometimes it would go on longer. Weak and barely able to breathe, I would crawl my way over to the scale and in a dizzy haze step on to it. My heart would race as soon as I would see those numbers, and those 2-3 extra pounds down would send a wave of relief over my whole entire body. “SUCCESS!!”, I would scream, “god dang, full blown, SUCCESS”.  However, because my body had purged itself of every ounce of fluid, the instant I would drink an ounce of anything my cells would hold onto it, making the number go immediately up.

This is an agonizing process to go through. You never ever win, and all the starving in the world, all the laxatives, all the running in the sun with 6 layers of clothes on will never make that number the same. You turn into a heavy weight contender trying to make his weight, only in this case the weight is death. I remember even when that number was so low that I should not have been alive, it wasn’t good enough. I knew in some small part of my brain that I weighed as much as a small dog, but the other sick part of my brain somehow managed to tell me that it was too high.

It’s been years since those days, and thank God I was able to survive, but surviving meant I had to make that number go north, and unless I could somehow manage to come to terms with that, I was gonna lose more then weight, I was going to lose my battle with this damn Eating Disorder. Stay tuned and I will tell you how I managed to finally tell that “bathroom scale” where it could go, and what it could do with its powerful little numbers.

To be continued!