Weight Wars

Dear public, online diary,

today I thew up all over myself. It all started when I got the bright idea to enroll in a training camp for kickboxing. I overestimated my level of fitness and was quickly forced to call it quits early after I vomited outside in the dirt. Oddly, my first day went fine. I was tired and exhausted, but I was not having problems breathing. My second day was much harder, maybe my body hadn't had time to heal itself from last week. Or else it was the five cups of tea I had just before I went. I read somewhere that being over hydrated can be nearly as bad as being dehydrated. But maybe it was just some odd, anxiety fluke that made me burn out on the second day. Either way, I am going back but I am waiting until Wednesday or Thursday to return, and not just because I want  my body to heal; I also want to avoid the camp until I have overcome my humiliation.

Why would I do something like crash-binge exercise? Because I weigh 174 pounds at 5 feet, 2 inches and that puts me back into the obese category. Last year I was around 155 pounds. Now, one ex-boyfriend later, and a summer of sweet chocolate indulgence later, I weigh 20 pounds more. I did weigh 25 pounds more but I lost about 4 pounds since Friday, which might not be the healthiest thing in reality. I heard that 2 pounds per week is the high end of acceptable weight loss, not 4 pounds in 3 days.

Either way, I am tired of carrying all this extra weight. I am taking a lighter load in classes so this means that I have plenty of time to do push-ups, leg lifts, jump rope, and to play with my punching bag. I have waged a war on my own weight since the age of 22 or 23, when I started to gain weight due to a prescription drug named Zyprexa that I was put on during a bipolar episode.

I have watched my weight go up and down by as much as 60 pounds. At age 25 I was 135 pounds. At 28 I was 194 pounds. At 29 I was a 155 pounds. My life has become whittled down to nothing more than cryptic numbers jotted in my notepad--Monday, September 10th, 174 pounds, down 4 pounds, aged 30, 40 minutes of extreme exercise, 600 calories going into the work out, ate 1000 afterwords just to make the world stop spinning. Yes, I literally ate a 1000 calories. It is not as hard as it sounds. A simple combo meal from Wendys or Carl's Jr can set a person back by over 1000 calories! I am trying to remain on a 1200 calorie a day diet, but that should not happen on exercise days, as I learned the hard way. Little food in the belly after an extreme work out left me feeling woozy, dizzy, light-headed, weak, and on the verge of blacking out. I ran to the fast food joint and stuffed my mouth with salt, grease, and meat. No, not good, but it was just a quick fix to get me home without having to pull the car over to the side of the road in order to vomit.

I have decided that I cannot be happy unless I have a Master's degree, psychotropic medicine, pot brownies to soothe my migraines and anxiety, and a better body. Ideally, I would just always be happy without having to strive for anything, but that is not the way my mind operates.

Classes are going fine. I went on academic probation this semester because my graduate GPA dropped to a 2.8, which is well below the 3.0 minimum for Master's degree students. Luckily, I can raise my GPA this semester and take all the remaining courses for my program next semester.

By spring, 2014, I should be applying for my Master's graduation ceremony (and I will be more fit and skinnier).
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Finals Over, Diet Begins

Every finals week I start to binge eat. I cannot stop. I will literally sleepwalk out of bed and rummage through the kitchen in the dark and stuff whatever there is into my mouth and crawl back into bed. I woke up once with little graham crackers packages littered all over and crumbs in my bed. Then, the guilt, the all-consuming remorse, the weight gain, the looming diet in my near future.

Well, finals week is over. I failed pre-calculus. The professor posted a message online saying that it was very common to have to take his class twice. That did little to quell my feelings of failure. I had just gained about 3 pounds during finals week. To fail AND to gain weight. No. Bad. The rest of my classes were A's and B's, but that class dropped my cumulative GPA significantly. Now, it is summer, I am not working, I have a lot of free time, and my primary goal is to lose weight.

In 2011 I weighed 194 pounds and I was at my heaviest. In 2012 I weighed 155 pounds, having dropped around 40 pounds in a year. Then, I dated some guy who liked to fry all his dinners and he was always making me dinner---I gained 15 pounds. Then, we broke up and I felt completely dumb for letting him stuff me full of deep fried salmon just to be polite about his cooking. Never again, I vowed. I enrolled  in martial arts classes, but alas, I still gained weight over midterms and the dreaded week of finals. Now, at 167, I am back to being at the borderline between obese and very overweight on the BMI chart. 

At 167 pounds my pants fit, which is not good. I was starting to get used to the loose waistband and the need for a new wardrobe. I am determined to lose at least 20 pounds before the end of August. I did it before, I can do it now. 

My diet since I got out of class about a week ago has been dramatically altered from my high caloric finals-week-diet. Now, I drink a lot of tea and I wait until after 6 pm to have a normal sized meal. By "a lot of tea" I mean somewhere around 6 cups during the day and another 3 cups of green tea at night. I always put a bit of fat free half and half or almond milk in each cup, which does add calories, but that 10 calories per cup (or 100 calories per day) is equivalent to a small, single snack. I run on chai (tea). 

For example, today I had 3 cups of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 2 plain flour tortillas for breakfast, and a large diet Coke from McDonalds. It is 1:30 pm and I kind of feel full. I have no desire to eat more flour tortillas, even though my relative just finished making delicious home-made tortillas from scratch. 

Dieting is an old friend for me. I think to some extent it is healthy, but then again, maybe having 2 tortillas for breakfast isn't healthy and also those are pure carbohydrates. For lunch I will have a nice tomato and cheese sandwich on flat bread, followed by 5 cups of tea with fat free half and half. Maybe some shots of espresso after that...who knows? If you're trying to lose weight, see a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am just a desperate, unemployed graduate student with little money and little control over my life. I am only relaying this information because I want this blog to be as honest with the reader as I can be. I know that obsessing about weight is never good. I applaud those women who are free from the self-disgust I feel. I also know that I have body issues, food issues, and overall issues. This blog was started to show the real human behind mental illness (I am schizo-affective who gained a lot of weight taking the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa). Now that it has been a year, I still want this blog to be honest, even if that means showing my ugly bits. 

To some people, summer is a time to relax. For me, it is the time when I exercise daily and limit my calories. Sometimes, summer also involves getting involved with some guy and maybe even smoking marijuana now and then. I would prefer not to smoke marijuana or get involved with some random guy for three months, but that has been my pattern for the past 3 years. Maybe I will sign up for classes at the dojo near my house. :) Cheers to summer, kickboxing, espresso, tea, and you!!

I Lost 1 More Pound and My History as Big Hips Woman

I lost one more pound for a total of 5 pounds. I am pleased. My big hips still have love handles, though.

I was reading this viral blog post about this girl who posted her picture on a blog. She was very pretty and heavy. Her blog post went on a tirade against people who have been mean to her because of her weight and how she is sick of hiding her body because other people don't like to see fat. In the photo she was in her bra and underwear.

My facebook friend posted it on her wall and I read the story. It resonated with me. I still remember strange men making comments about me being "too fat" to my face as I walked by.


*************Bio of Big Hips Woman**************
Unlike the blogger, I was never overweight as a child or young adult. I gained weight at the age of 23, but when I gained weight I gained a lot of it due to the effects of Zyprexa medication and a bad diet that I have had since my childhood.

Since then, I have been on a mini-crusade trying to get rid of the fat. At some points, I succeeded. About 4 to 5 years ago, I went on a crash diet and lost so much weight I went from a size 14 to about 130 pounds, or maybe a size 8. I never bought new clothes so I never found out exactly what size I turned into. Instead, I'd wear size 10 and size 12 pants with a big belt to keep them up. I lost a lot of weight but I did so by not taking the Zyprexa medicine and through a starvation diet. Naturally, being a schizo-affective with a propensity towards mania when unmedicated, I became floridly psychotic and was plucked from my daily routine of food obsession and food denial and locked in a psychiatric facility. I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks and when I got out I just kept gaining it back, plus some extra.

I paid for weight training classes at the community college. I seriously worked out 3 times a week but the amount of weight I gained after dieting was too much and the exercise barely made a dent. I was in a class with only 2 other women. One had a tiny waist, bone-like arms, and huge breast implants. The other was a very thin, waif-like girl. Sometimes they would come into the mat room where I liked to hide doing my sit-ups and sit down along the wall, stare at me periodically, whisper and laugh. I don't care if they weren't talking about me, the looks on their faces and their obvious stares was enough to make me want to cry. Ironic that they were taking a weight lifting class but all they did was sit around, watch me and talk. Meanwhile, I was doing endless crunches and pedaling like a maniac on a stationary bike. Then came the horrible day when I ran into my old friend who had last seen me a few years ago when I was still about 115 pounds. She congratulated me on my baby. I felt ridiculous. "I'm not pregnant, just fat," I said. She apologized profusely but the damage had been done.

I continued with intermittent periods of intense exercise. I walked for hours every day for years but that never paid off. I would periodically run for hours but the weight wouldn't budge and my knees would ache for days afterwards. I would do yoga, lift a 10 pound weight, and I also took a semester of modern dance from the community college. This entire time I was doing manual labor and staying on my feet for 3-5 hours a day at my part-time job. Nothing worked.

Fast forward a few years: I was a returning student to the University. I  had just gotten out of "reintegration rehabilitation" for mental patients. It was an out-patient all-day 6 month bonanza of group therapy, art therapy, and lectures about how to deal with mental illness symptoms without resorting to drugs or relapsing. Through the whole thing there were catty females in the program who would chant obsessively that they didn't want to get fat. Luckily, they had no jobs or anything else to do during the day except to diet and depend on their men to support them. I notice that when people fail at the basic things in life like employment, education, and relationships, they always tend to fall back on the food thing. Anyways, I went to the University, concentrated on succeeding, ignored my food consumption, and gained 15 to 20 pounds. Hitting 194 was a bleak day for me. I dropped meat out of my diet and started monitoring how many calories everything had and I dropped to 181 in about a month and a half.

The next two years I exercised like I was training for a professional MMA match. I took judo twice a week for six months. On top of this, I used my stationary bike for an hour. I also used my mechanical rowing machine for at least 30 minutes. I walked for hours every day. By the end of my first year back at the University I had dropped 40 pounds and was 151 pounds. The next semester I took a modern dance class with many stereotypical dancer-type females. You know what I mean, the ones that took ballet in their youth and never took to a normal people diet. The type who think weight is a matter of self-discipline and not being a sloth. It was painful but I endured and danced and danced and got an A. Next, I dated an Arabian guy who kept feeding me deep-fried salmon, white rice, and potatoes. I gained 20 pounds.

I decided action must be taken, swift, brutal action. I enrolled in 1 hour of karate twice a week followed immediately by 1 hour of kick-boxing twice a week. On the weekends, I use a punching bag I bought for myself and  I still walk for hours every day. The result? The weight didn't budge until just now. 5 measly pounds. 5. Yes, 5 pounds. I'm 168 now, in the obese range. I am obese but I can flip you over my shoulder and throw you to the mat, I can do karate katas, and I can throw a nasty cross, hook, and a violent roundhouse. This isn't air-punching, cardio stuff, this is grab your sparring partner and flip them onto their backs. This is stand there and let your sparring partner lift you into the air so you fall on your back really hard, then get up and do it again. This is full-force roundhouse kicks on your sparring partner's command, your leg hitting pads as hard as it can. This is non-stop jabs, hooks, crosses, front kicks, roundhouse kicks, elbows, knees hitting the pads as fast and as hard as you can.

I've decided to keep up the martial arts routine, not because I am losing weight, but because I love it. I still want to lose weight, just so society will shut up about my body. Primarily, though, I want to lose enough weight to get into the main women's fighting division which is 136-144 pounds. That's where all dem tuff chicks are.I can't wait until I am up there taking real hits and giving real hits in a real competition. If I have to go on a parsley diet, or a 6 pm diet, so be it. I have so much determination that never showed on my figure, only in my eyes. One day, that slender sporty girl will be in the ring with me and she will suddenly realize that all those layers of fat were hiding hours and hours of training. That, just to be the weight I will be, I had to work five times harder than she trained for  and 5 times longer. She will realize that those years of being fat made me hard, made me angry, made me endure things she could not. I will tell her beforehand, "I used to be 194 pounds. I lost weight so I could sock you in the face a whole bunch of times. :)" And it will be true.

That is my bio as big hips woman. Thank you for reading. ~Electra

Return of the Love Handles

I finally jumped on the bathroom scale. My worst fear came true. Despite two hours of martial arts practice twice a week, I have somehow gained 6 more pounds. I think this might be because I am so famished after stumbling out of the two hour ordeal that I rush towards the student union’s food court and stuff myself with junk food.

Currently, I am 15 pounds heavier than I was last semester.  I was 152 in the fall. Now my fat is really making me hate my body. I train hard during class and I keep up a routine of kickboxing over the weekend, but to no avail. I am the heaviest I have been in two years. Every time I get a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a car window or in the mirror, I think, oh no, what happened?

Drastic actions must be taken. I must eliminate fast food from my diet and vow to flee from the sight of chow mein bowls topped with delicious, tangy, juicy, orange chicken. I must yield to the blandness of salad and the repetition of roma tomato sandwiches with pesto sauce smeared on it instead of ranch.

I will lose this weight I’ve gained and then some. My shrink says that I should not feel guilty when I eat food, but I do. The sight of it sends me into delighted conniptions. After that, however, comes the moment when I realize I just lost some of my daily allotted calories.

I am eating two cut up roma tomatoes with a half inch cube of chevre smeared on top of the tomato to add some flavor. I dribbled some olive oil on it (not even half a tablespoon), and ground some black pepper all over in the hopes that I could somehow trick my body into thinking I was eating a double-decker hamburger with extra cheese and layers of chipotle sauce.  

Earlier today I had (surprise) a roma tomato sandwich with pesto sauce and cubes of fresh avocado. I love it, but I was fantasizing about a handsome, charming man or a pretty, charming woman, holding a tray of pizza slices drenched in full-fat ranch. Delicious, greasy, chewy, cheesy pizza—gulp.

Grad school is going well. I have nothing terribly important to say about the experience or the stress. It is stressful, but what is more stressful is that ominous black screen on my bathroom scale, staring at me from the corner of the room, haunting me and really pissing me off.

Yum. I think this might be my fourth tomato of the day. If only water came in fat-free, sugar-free chipotle, burger flavor. :)

My Bathroom Scale Sneaked into my Bedroom

My bathroom scale sneaked into my bedroom this month. It now sits in front of my reading chair, like a bizarre ottoman. Sometimes I even rest my feet on it while I read this spy thriller, "At Risk." In order to get to my reading chair I have to step over the scale. Usually, I wind up sitting on my chair, thinking about my weight. I could take about how  weight is another corset for modern women, or how people discriminate against people who are overweight but I will not (at least not right now).

Right now, I would like to devote a little entry to the topic of why I want to lose weight. I want to look like Marilyn Monroe. End of blog, lol.

I still remember that day in the psychiatric facility, three years ago and 25 pounds ago. My social worker was telling me about my axis. Axis 1 is like one diagnosis, Axis 2 is another diagnosis. In medical jargon, it is essentially "things that are horribly wrong with you in a tidy little list." My axis said I was schizo-affective. Then, horribly, he said my other axis was clinical obesity. I knew I was overweight. I was about 184 pounds and only 5 feet, 2 inches, but obese? I thought obese was for women who could only wear mumus and whose arms were the width of my thighs. I know better know, but back then it was a terrible shock. Not only was I crazy, I was fat as well.

Two to three years later I am still schizo-affective. However, I am only clinically overweight now and not obese. I have lost 25 pounds since that initial diagnosis. My weight yesterday was 159 pounds, down from 184, which was not even the "peak" of my weight (my first semester of University I packed on pounds during finals week). I can never go back to not exercising for a minimum of 20 minutes daily, plus one hour walks, or I will gain everything back. I can also never return to eating 2,000 calories or more a day, ever. My body adjusted to getting 1800, then 1600, now 1300 calories a day. To shove in 2,000 calories would probably lead to significant amounts of weight gain. I will just get used to limiting my caloric intake. Cut fast food consumption. Cut what fast food I do eat into halves and eat only half. My staples are no longer home-cooked chicken and sandwiches. Now, my main staples are sauteed zucchini, cucumber sprayed with olive oil and flavored with Splenda packets, plain yogurt with Splenda packets, boiled and sauteed cauliflower with cumin, cayenne, and coriander spices, cereal, oatmeal, and tomato with roasted bell pepper and cheese sandwiches. When I eat fast food I either make sure I have had less than 2,000 calories for the day, or I feel really guilty and decrease my calories for the following day.

Maybe you can tell, I have not eaten breakfast yet, which is why I am rambling on about food. I am planning on having half a packet of instant oatmeal. Only half a packet because I will be baby-sitting my elderly grandmother for half of today, which means no taking hour long walks and doing morning exercise on my stationary bike. Maybe for a snack, a peach. Then for another snack, red-leaf chard lettuce mixed with mandarin oranges and a low calorie spritzer. Then lunch....dreading having to choose something for lunch. Then, a cucumber with olive oil and splenda. I like splenda on my cucumber because it makes the cucumber taste like fruit.

My goal for this summer is to lose 20 pounds. I will likely only lose 5 pounds, but whatever, at least I set a goal for myself. So if you ever stop by this little blog and see like four entries in a row of random meals, listed like some kind of restaurant menu, that is because I am concentrating my energy on losing more weight. 159 is less than 184, but not by that much. I want to reach 139 pounds. No wait, I will reach 139 pounds.

Body Issues: Breasts, Weight, and Dance Class

The guy on myspace wanted to know what size bra I wear. I have to laugh, that's the first thing guys ask. In fact, I'm so accustomed to that question I stopped thinking it was rude years ago. Now, it's just like they're asking how old I am. I answer this question due to some strange exhibitionist trait I have had since I was a teenager. As you can tell by the fact that I write my diary entries online for anybody to see---I am totally an exhibitionist.

So I responded to the guy via myspace messaging. 36FF. In UK sizes. That translates to 36H in US sizes. I always answer in UK sizes because all my bras are imports from the United Kingdom, where large breasts are everywhere and stores actually make bras for the large-breasted population. It's not like here in California where Target goes up to 36DD only. There are some big bras, but they're for big band sizes, like 40 or 42 band widths. Maybe you don't know this, but the larger the circumference of the torso below the breasts, the smaller the cup size will be listed as. So a 36DDD is only a 38DD. Larger band, smaller cup. Smaller band, larger cup. Bra mathematics can be confusing.

I ran into problems in my dance class last week with my body. I am enrolled in a general education level dance class which I must pass in order to obtain my B.A. this May. I am a senior in college, 28 years old, 163 pounds (at the moment), and about 5 feet 2 inches. So I'm fat. Overweight, chunky, thick, whatever. The students are mostly underweight and still in their teenage years. I have never felt so out of place in my life---not even when I accidentally attended a faculty-only potluck last semester (only to be rudely told to get out! I was invited via email from another faculty member, but I left regardless! I almost cried, I was so humiliated!)

They are so tiny, so flat-chested, so, well dancer-like, that I wanted to run out of the dance studio in tears. We stretched, then danced. The professor, a waif-like blonde trained in modern dance, told us to do a little prance across the studio, then crouch, lunge, and twirl around. All the girls did this and they looked like professional dancers. I wound up being last in line and I was super conscious of my large breasts jiggling all over the place with every prancing step I took. I did not make this look graceful at all! It looked vulgar. I sighed, kept my eyes down, pranced, crouched, lunged, twirled, and ran to the end of the line to hide.

In certain situations my body type (heavy on top, thick thighs, big butt) gets me noticed by men. In other situations, it makes me feel like the circus freak fat woman. Dance class is making me consider a more rigorous diet.

The only good thing that came out of the class (besides the fact that I can graduate when it's over) is that there is a cute, adorable freshman who smiles at me. He's one of only 2 or 3 guys in the class. We partnered up at one point, standing back to back, and melted in a heap together on the floor. It was strictly the class work assigned by the professor, this partner work, but I felt on top of the world as we slid into each other's arms! I can't possibly imagine him picking me over the slender, model-like dance students, but it was still nice to be curled up with him on the floor. :)

Joining the Cult of Thinness

The Cult of Thinness is a book by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Her credentials are top notch; she is both a professor of sociology at Boston College and a woman who was asked to investigate why so many college-aged females were brought in to the college health center for eating disorders. Through intense research, personal interviews, and her own brilliant insights, Professor Hesse-Biber wound up writing a series of books on women's weight issues, books which delve into deeper topics such as women's rights and roles in American society.

As a Chicana (Chicana=Mexican female born in the US), one might think I would have some insulation to the peer pressures to be thin that plagues so many Caucasian females. However, I was raised in California with copies of Cosmo, Vogue, and 17 magazine just like everyone else and the effects were on par as my Caucasian counter-parts. No, I couldn't ever be pale-skinned and blonde, but being thin was the one thing I could be. Wanting to fit in with my classmates, who were predominately Caucasian, I picked at my food, dieted whenever I didn't fit into size 5 anymore in order to get back to size 5, and I never went over 115 until my mid-20's

 I was thoughtlessly thin until around age 23 or 24 when Zyprexa, the anti-psychotic drug (I became schizo-affective in my 20's), cause me to gain upwards of 60-70 pounds. This isn't unheard of as one of my psychiatrists commented that he'd had a patient who'd rapidly gained 100 pounds as soon as he was put on Zyprexa. As soon as I was 25, when most people are graduating from college, getting real jobs, and maybe even getting married,  my life dissolved into one of regimented pill-taking, intense psychological scrutiny, the inability to complete college due to psychiatric disability, and the part I dreaded most: living as a fat person. If society had treated me differently I wouldn't have minded the fat as much as I did, but I was publicly ridiculed for being 180 pounds on a 5' 1" -5'2" build.

At age 26 (or 25, I forget) I fasted myself back to 135 pounds. Nowhere near my skinniest weight, I was miserably. Shortly thereafter, the effects of an untreated metal illness kicked in and I was soon being poked, prodded, and scrutinized inside a psychiatric hospital where the familiar faces of the mental health staff were shocked to see how much weight I'd lost. I couldn't understand why they were so adamant that I eat 3 meals a day: couldn't they see that the weight gain was worse than the mental illness? No, they did not see that the weight gain was worse and instead they dutifully forced me to drink milk and eat at least half of all my meals. Combined with my new medications and the accompanying side effects, I gained all the weight back, plus about 10 pounds.

Then, I yo-yo'd from a size 14 to a size 16, back to a size 14, and back to a size 16 before I got my life together and was admitted to the University.

Happy ending, right? Ex-EDNOS female now a size 14 (162-164 pounds), getting exercise, going to University, taking proper medication for mental illness, all goes well, right?

If that were true I probably wouldn't gravitate towards books on self-image. For that matter, I wouldn't be writing graphic tales of my mental illness and personal life experiences on the internet for anybody to read!

Reading The Cult of Thinness made me realize how zany it was to believe that being fat was worse than being insane. The sad thing is, according to the book, this belief is perfectly normal in our society. Dieting is like a rite of passage. Mexicans have quinceneras, where 15 year olds dress up like brides and take Catholic vows, Americans have weigh-ins, not to see if you're healthy or not, but to determine just how much weight you must lose to be acceptable to society.

I say all this like I'm going to jump off the band-wagon, but shirking this sort of social media brainwashing isn't that easy. If anything, I have to re-take my vow of dieting. I feel like I got married to this idea of thinness at age 13, cheated on Thin by getting fat in my mid-twenties, and am only now making amends by eating a zucchini for lunch. Just like in the Catholic faith, there is no divorce once you join the Cult of Thinness.

To those of you who are ready to get a divorce, read this book! It has amazing insights into how women focus on their appearance to avoid focusing on glass ceilings, wage discrimination, war, and other horrors of modern life.

The Cult of Thinness Book for sale on amazon dot com

Obesity As Genetic Mutation

Hello,
I am watching an excellent episode of NOVA concerning the problem of obesity.
Yes, if you eat only fast food and sit down all day, you'll get fat. That's like obese person, type 1.
But there's another version of obesity: set-point obesity, or obese person, type 2.
This NOVA episode investigates the brain receptors and the genetic make-up of obese patients. MC-4 is a receptor that triggers the "I'm full" response in humans. For some people, this receptor is absent, which makes over-eating inevitable.
Finally, a scientific approach to studying obesity! I was getting really tired of people saying "just don't eat! It's your fault you eat so much!" Truly, these people are ignorant, but unfortunately, they're the majority of people in American society (and the most vocal ones as well).

Here's the link to NOVA
http://video.pbs.org/video/1506746269
Enjoy!

Wasted, Read it!

I read "Wasted" by Marya Hornbacher a while back but I only recently purchased it.

She is at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to food. I tend to cycle between binge eating and excessive dieting while she has struggled with anorexia and bulimia. "Wasted" chronicles her experiences with the two disorders. The book is poignant, interesting, and her style of writing flows freely and easily from her finger tips. She also wrote one on being bipolar that's titled, "Madness: a Memoir." My favorite part is when she is released from a treatment center for a few hours to attend college and she always has to run off quickly before anybody discovers that she's part of an in-patient program.

I empathize with her because I spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals for bouts of mania. I never told my teachers that I wasn't just ditching their class for two weeks...I was sick. Instead, I'd just sort of waltz in and take my old seat without so much as a hello. Of course, my grades suffered each time the paramedics would cart me off on a stretcher with leather wrist cuffs, but I guess that's the price you pay for denial of illness.

The writer does mention an incident where an overweight woman called her chunky, ("just like me," she said to Marya.) and I have to address that. Of course you're not chunky, Marya, and if you were you'd still be a great writer. That woman probably felt really lonely in her castle of flesh and wanted, perhaps irrationally, to be close to you. I doubt she was being cruel. She probably wanted to feel less alone in her pudgy life. Trust me, I should know (I've never called anybody chunky, but still).

The truth is, eating disorders have things in common. This might shock and offend and piss off anorectics everywhere, but it's true: binge eating, anorexia, bulimia, bulimirexia all have a common thread of food obsession, control issues, and emotional issues. All 3 disorders can be precipitated by traumatic life events and are aggravated by stress. Of course, one is more socially acceptable than the others.

Here some people would disagree. They would look around and see this "plus size movement" as proof that there has been a backlash against skinny. Well, tell the fashion editor, the majority of the population, women's clothing manufacturers, and the guy down the street THAT and you'll see how little truth there is to this "pro-fat" movement. Take a classroom of females, one extremely skinny and one extremely fat, and ask them to describe negative comments, looks, and experiences their weight has caused them. Yes, both will have some. But it's likely that the fat woman is more likely to get comments from strangers, doctors, and family more often than not.

Having starved myself to a size 2 and binge eaten to a size 16, I vividly recall many more cruel weight comments when I'm fat. Plus I  have to deal with knocking all kinds of things over with my huge butt. Once, I scrambled out of my classroom desk for a break and almost tipped the thing over with my butt! Desks were obviously not intended for the thick women in the world.

But back to the book, it was totally engrossing and I highly recommend it.

Wasted by Marya Hornbacher---read it!