The First Time I Was Told to Shrink

Content warning: eating disorder, intrusive and suicidal thoughts

“You’re doing so well on the bars, but we think you’d do even better if you lost some weight.”

That’s what my gymnastics coaches told me when I had just turned twelve. I remember the dingy little office we were in and the playback of a competition VHS tape (a real rarity back in the dinosaur ages). I’d finally started to improve and had started earning some podium spots in competitions.

I had spent an embarrassingly long time being kind of the chubby unremarkable kid in Level 5 (I did 4 years in it?!), and finally something had clicked. I was also a tween, and finding my own sense of being a human being on planet Earth.

And then that sentence. “We think you’d do better if you lost some weight.”

I was probably 5’ 1” and 120ish pounds. I was soft and pubescent.

I didn’t spiral immediately because of the comment and I don’t remember being particularly offended or shocked, although I guess I was shocked enough to have had the memory seared into my brain. In a fucked up way I think I sort of appreciated this spark of interest from them after years of feeling mediocre and under the radar.

Rhinestones and Poodles

So, I started eating more salads. Grilled chicken instead of breaded. I took conditioning time more seriously, and started running or walking the neighborhood more, and tried to eat a little less food. I probably lost a few pounds but didn’t pay super close attention, and I leaned out more naturally as puberty settled in. That summer I moved up to Level 6, and it was the first time I remember feeling like I belonged in the sport.

By that fall I was a compact little meat stick of a human. Pure muscle, and started hitting higher scores and eventually grabbed an all-around title (bad newspaper quality clipping below, will find a better one when I get back to AZ). In a vacuum, it could’ve looked like a healthy change and trajectory. But of course, it wasn’t in a vacuum. It was in the very particular world of competitive gymnastics, where my coach ate bagged salad for dinner STRAIGHT FROM THE BAG and had rhinestone-covered toy poodles (no joke, and sorry, not sorry for calling you out here!).

This was just the innocent-ish beginning of my weird food stuff though.

In the middle of this season, right after winning a all-around title, and right before I turned 13, I broke my ankle during practice. I was on crutches for a month which gave me time to reflect. The coaches were annoyed with me for not being able to participate fully at practice (yep, I still went!), some of my other friends had quit and moved on to a dance studio, and used the injury as an exit point to do the same.

There were not other meets, lol.

The culture of weight obsession in the dance world was pretty much the same. It was ambient. It wasn’t explicitly talked about, aside from the costume lady measuring me and telling me not to get any bigger before the competitions since they were tailor made, and the way we all casually made fun of one perfectly healthy teacher for being “fat.”

That summer, something switched and I still don’t totally know why. My first boyfriend and I had broken up for reasons that were not made very clear to me, even when I called him a thousand times from my landline while laying on my trampoline (which was upsetting to say the least).

I was starting high school. I had left gymnastics and moved into a dance studio and was still settling in there. I was stressed out and wondering what my place was.

So for whatever weird combination of reasons, I started counting calories with the intention of losing weight. I am inherently sort of obsessive and perfectionist-y so I was VERY good at this even though it was in an era long before apps. I memorized how many calories were in the foods I regularly ate and would track in my head or scraps of paper.

98 pounds

By the end of that school year, now aged 14, I was 5’ 2”ish and 98 pounds. I was dancing nearly every day, multiple hours a day. And I was eating around 800 calories. An apple for breakfast. A granola bar for lunch. Maybe a Lean Cuisine from the gas station for dinner between dance classes. I remember being so hungry, and jogging to Circle K one night in the rain between rehearsals and then heating up my sad little tray of low fat lasagna.

I also remember telling myself that if I ever weighed more than 100 pounds again, I’d kill myself. (Which, obviously, I didn’t. But the fact that I felt this strongly is the point.) I don’t think I really meant it. It was a part of me that was trying to scare all the other parts of me into compliance. An empty threat, but a sign of the serious dysfunction happening interally.

At some point in this window of time I had fantasies of cutting my nonexistent “rolls” off my body with scissors. Like they were detachable.

Then one morning, I was showering before school and felt like I was going to black out. I was dizzy and scared and got out to sit down on the bathroom floor. When I eventually stood up, I remember looking at my reflection in the foggy mirror and realizing this was really not okay anymore. I knew I had an issue. I didn’t tell anyone, but I knew.

My mom had already warned me that if I lost any more weight, she was going to take me to the doctor. I remember quietly nudging the little spinny wheel on the scale to make it look like I weighed more than I did just in case she ever checked.

But this episode must have scared me enough that then, slowly and messily, it started to lift. And by sophomore year, things started to settle. I started to feel more like myself. Or at least less at war with myself.

This is part one. If you're a paid subscriber, the rest is just below. Therapy, parenting, and the hard-to-say stuff about weight, love, and living in this body.