Content warning: disordered eating
In high school, when I wanted to try to become pretty in my own eyes, I looked up all the weight loss tips and exercise routines. On Pinterest, I saved diagrams of thin women in yoga poses and cut back to a thousand to fifteen-hundred calories a day. Years later I’d learn that doctors recommend that eight-year-old girls eat sixteen-hundred calories a day.
I began walking miles upon miles in old tennis shoes, squinting into the August sun. Sometimes, midday on busy roads, trucks full of men would slow down to yell profanities at me, and somehow it made me feel worse about my body, as if the excess of my body was drawing attention to itself.
As I became obsessed with calorie counts, I began to memorize them. It’s been years since I quit Googling most calorie counts (though admittedly not all), but I could still give you a fairly accurate approximation for most meals. I also started some strange food habits. That school year, instead of using bread in my sandwiches, I used hollowed out cucumbers. I still remember the slip of lukewarm cheese and ham on slimy cucumber shells. Eventually, calorie control went from self-assurance to a necessary habit.
Then I went to college, where I could only eat dining hall food. On Thursday nights, the only food worth eating was the orange chicken, which was probably between four and seven hundred calories, which could easily eat up half a day’s calories in fifteen minutes, which maybe I could offset by not eating breakfast, which I knew was a bad idea.
In a particularly low moment, I tried to purge as if a disorder could be worn or shed as easily as a jacket. Thankfully I was unsuccessful, but I made myself nauseous for half an hour with the effort.
Soon after, I decided that I had had enough. It wasn’t worth the effort of chastising myself for fueling my body and wanting to enjoy the process. My mental health was under constant strain with the effort, and compromising my mind for my thinness wasn’t worth the sacrifice to me. If I gained weight, so be it.
I’ve been better since then, but I’m still yo-yoing. I know it’s getting bad when I notice people’s thinness above anything else. I tell myself that I’m working out to be strong, but there’s always a tense lining to the thought, the kind when you know you’re blinding yourself to your self destruction.
But I’ve been staying with family this week, and my grandparents are staying in the same house as me. During dinner tonight, I heard my grandpa say “Tiffany” and “weight” amidst a string of other Korean words.
I asked my grandma and my mom what they were talking about, but neither of them would tell me. Later I pushed my mom when we were alone, and she admitted that my grandpa asked if I’d gained weight, and she told him it’s not polite to ask women that. It didn’t slip my notice that my painfully honest mom didn’t just say no.
Once I had my answer, I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t know why it was so important for me to know. It also wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been; not a critique or a judgment, but a question. Yet I still called my boyfriend and asked him to tell me I’m beautiful as if the two statements could cancel each other out.
Even after you’re determined to start loving yourself, the world will still echo the same questions and judgements you’ve been using to crush yourself. YouTube will push diet pill ads, TikTok will send you workout routines, and your grandpa will comment on your weight at the dinner table. Old habits lie in repose, waiting for any excuse to be unleashed. Sometimes I forget that healing isn’t a destination but a lifetime battle.
I’ve been convincing myself to keep eating when I’m hungry, and I tell myself that one cookie a day is perfectly reasonable. The most important thing I can do for myself is keep fighting—if not for my current self, then for my past self who fought for us. I think of her steely determination, and I know that I can’t let her—or myself—down. She’s worth fighting for, so I’m worth fighting for.
Tiffany Kajiwara graduated from Calvin in 2022 with majors in literature and writing. Now, she continues to live in Grand Rapids and works at Baker Academic Publishing as a marketing assistant. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, thrifting, and psychoanalyzing cartoon characters.
