Never Enough

You are dragged from your sleep when you hear your alarm blasting Eye of the Tiger at you. Yanking your covers off, you stumble to the bathroom, where you keep your alarm to make sure you don’t fall back asleep. You understand you are weak and would hit snooze for another hour if you kept your phone right next to you. 

After you turn your alarm off, you start your day. You strip off your pajamas and step on the scale you keep in your bathroom. 

130 lbs

You feel a wave of despair. You were 129.5 lbs yesterday morning. Weak. Lazy. You chide yourself as you step off the scale and pull on a pair of black leggings and a light pink tee-shirt. Scolding thoughts follow you all the way from your bedroom to the kitchen. “You knew you shouldn’t have had that second helping of potatoes for dinner. You weren’t even hungry. Weak idiot.” 

You walk straight past the kitchen, and as you pass the fridge your stomach growls at you. No, you think sharply. You were already a little piggy last night with a whole chicken leg, broccoli and TWO servings of potatoes. That .5 pounds gained is nothing a little run before breakfast can’t fix. 

Pushing your hunger down, you lace up the bright pink laces on your gym shoes, grab your headphones, close the door behind you and start running. 

Music blasting, heart pounding, legs burning, you run and run and run. Your thoughts and your legs take strides in unison. Pound. Work. Pound. Harder. Pound. Be. Pound. Better. You think about what your neighbors are seeing as they look out their windows. A 5 ft 7 woman running sloppily trying to lose that extra weight. You run faster.

4 miles later your lungs feel like they're trying to tear a hole in your chest and you feel that if you don’t sit down this instant your legs are going to collapse out from under you. So you oblige, stumbling into your kitchen and plopping down in the chair. Good, you think to yourself. Now you’ve earned breakfast.

You realize that you have one matter more pressing than breakfast to attend to first. Coffee. You decide to go through the nearest McDonald’s drive-thru for a quick pick-me-up before breakfast. As you pull up to the drive-thru window you hear the customary “-BZZZ- welcome to McDonalds what can I get for you?” You respond, the answer so deeply ingrained in your mind and soul you don’t even need to think. “Large hot black coffee please.” “Any cream or sugar?” “No, thank you” No. Never cream and sugar. Straight black coffee doesn’t have any added calories. The nutrition gurus on Youtube that you watch always say to avoid drinking your calories. With a scalding black coffee in your hand, you head home. 

Throwing your keys on the counter, you look at the clock. You realize that it is 9:50 am and you have an online meeting at 10. Oh well, you know breakfast can wait until after. You throw on a nice shirt and fix your hair and do your make-up. You sit down for the meeting, which is an informational meeting about helping new students adapt to life in college, which you will do as a guidance counselor for one of the state universities. The meeting is boring and you don’t really pay attention for half of it, and the speakers drone on for so long you feel yourself falling asleep half-way through. 

At long last the meeting is over. You close your laptop and take your empty coffee cup 

which was drained after only 15 minutes of that meeting and did nothing to keep you awake, but at least it suppressed your appetite, and threw it in the recycling bin. One of the instagram models you follow had said that coffee was her great trick into keeping the hunger away. 

The clock now reads noon and you know that you missed breakfast time. You are proud of yourself for making it this far. Your friend told you about how he was doing fasting and it was helping his metabolism. You understand that this means you will just burn more calories during the day! 

You hum a happy tune as you set about making yourself some lunch, marveling at your amazing self-restraint for the day. You open your cabinet and take out the sleek little food scale that you keep tucked away. You open your Skinny Smoothie Goddess cookbook and start measuring. You flip through the pages for a few minutes, trying to find one that sounds delicious. 

Warming Apple Cider Smoothie? Apples have a lot of sugar. Next. Almond Butter Superchanger? Oh god, the amount of calories in nut butters makes you shudder and pity all the poor souls who eat these foods without knowing better. Green Plant Goddess smoothie? A lot of dense green veggies, a little milk and banana, sounds perfect! You place the cup of spinach in the blender (7 calories), followed by a cup of kale (33 calories), then a cup of milk (150 calories). Hmmmm, you think. There are quite a lot of calories in a whole cup of milk. you think half a cup would be better, plus it will make it a thicker texture. Now for the banana (102 calories). Well, a whole banana seems unnecessary, so you cut it into ⅔ of a banana. Then a lot of ice cubes because a quick fitness hack you saw said that ice cubes add a ton of volume to any smoothie with no calories. You blend it all up and pour it into a glass and it fills ⅔ of the way. 

You sit down on your comfortable plush kitchen bench cushion and tuck in. All the professionals say that you should eat slowly and mindfully, savoring each bite because it will make you feel more full. You do what they say, savoring the cool meal on your tongue and feeling your stomach thank you for feeding it such nourishing foods. 

After lunch you put your gym clothes back on and do your second workout. A weight training session to get your muscles burning. More muscle means more calories burned. 45 minutes later with shaking limbs you rest, satisfied with a day’s work. Now with your workouts over with, you take a steaming shower, washing all the sweat away, but you avoid looking down as you wash your body. No need to see the unsatisfying progress of your stomach area or how fat your thighs look today. After the shower you get ready for a night out with your friends. 

By the time you and your friends arrive at the restaurant for dinner, you are so happy and joyful in their company that for a minute you almost, almost forget the thoughts of food and fitness that are year-round residents in your mind.

 But then the server hands you a menu. 

All around you, your friends laugh as they debate which appetizers you should all get. “Would you guys be ok with mozzarella sticks?” 

“Oooo yeah and how about some of that calamari.” 

“Maria, how about you?” they ask you. “If we got some calamari would you have some.”

“Haha no I’m not really that hungry,” you lie. Calamari is fried in oil which means carbs and unhealthy fats and that is absolutely unacceptable. 

When the server comes around with the appetizers you sit there and make conversation with your friends, laughing and trying to draw their attention away from the fact that you haven’t touched a thing. The server comes around and takes your orders. “I’ll take the house salad, dressing on the side,” you say. Dressing. Useless calories. 

Your friend Cal laughs at that. “Guys,” he says to the table, “Maria must be saving room for the birthday dessert, am I right?” 

You force a laugh in return, “you’ve caught me red-handed Cal, just saving room for my birthday cake.”

But when the cake comes, you only pick at it. You can’t stop calculating the amount of calories in the icing in your head and in the cake and not to mention in the ice cream on the side. You start to feel sick. 

Down at the other end of the table, you see your friend Adalaide staring at your full plate,  but she refrains from confronting you until later that night. When your birthday fanfare is over and everyone disperses to their cars, you walk across the parking lot to your own car. As you stop in front of the door, fiddling with your key ring, Adalaide comes up next to you. She tells you she has noticed the sadly lacking amount of food you’ve eaten tonight, and that you have been losing weight lately, and not in a healthy way. She notices how you laugh off anyone’s concerns about it. She says you should think about getting help. She says her sister had similar habits a few years ago, and went to a place called the Cook County Wellness Center. She says they can help you there.

As you open your car door, you courteously thank Adalaide for her concern but ease into the driver’s seat, insisting you are just fine and she shouldn’t worry. The car ride home is silent and lonely, your only companion is the knot of anxiety in your stomach over all the calories you just ate. How it would affect your weight in the morning? How could you be so weak as to eat cake? How should you eat tomorrow as penance for this sin? The advice from Adalaide got lost in the storm of tumultuous thoughts. 

After you pull into your drive-way, you immediately get ready for bed. But not before you strip off your clothes once more and get on the scale.

 130.5 lbs. 

You look at your reflection in the mirror. No matter what you do, it’s never enough.

…

The next morning you wake up. You step on the scale. 129 lbs. You breathe a sigh of relief. Yesterday’s self-restraint was rewarded with results, so you do the same routine again. You finally feel as if you’ve found the strength to lose weight you’ve been looking for. So when the clock ticks past the morning hours without food, you congratulate yourself on holding out. And when you cut ingredients on your lunchtime smoothie, you commend yourself for not adding useless calories. You relish the shaking in your legs after each run. Every day you feel more tired than the last. You know that must mean you are working harder. That means more calories are being burned. You eat a light dinner because you read a health article about how light dinners promote weight loss. Every night, the last thing you do before sleep is get back on that shiny steel scale. 

You can never hide from the scale. It would weigh your good deeds and your sins and it would give you its verdict. It’s judgement was as cold and unyielding as the metal it is made of. A lower number than yesterday, a good judgement is passed. A fraction higher and you’ve been condemned. 

Every day.

128.3 lbs

Not low enough

124.7 lbs

Not enough

120.4 lbs

Never enough.

...

One day a few months later, Adalaide calls you and invites you to go on a run with her through her local park. You accept her offer, but 1.5 miles in, you start to feel light headed, so you stop. Adalaide slows down and circles back to where you are standing, panting heavily trying to catch your breath. Her voice is muffled from the blood pounding in your ears. She is asking if you are ok? In her eyes you can see that this is a rhetorical question. She can see you are not okay. She tells you firmly that you’re done for the day. She grabs you by the upper arms and guides you back to her car. You collapse in the passenger seat and close your eyes. Your face burns with shame that you were so weak on your run, and that Adalaide had to see it. 

Adalaide closes her own door and takes a steadying breath, hands gripping the steering wheel in front of her. You notice that she is barely breathing hard from the run. 

That is not fair, you think to yourself. She is at least 20 lbs heavier than me, she should be more out of shape than me. 

“Maria,” Adalaide begins. “Have you thought anymore about going to the wellness center I told you about?” You fiddle with your seatbelt, avoiding her gaze. “I have watched my sister go through this too.” Her gaze softens. “I know you must be tired of the constant calorie counting. The ever-present worry that any weight loss will never be enough.” Never enough. At that you lift your eyes to meet hers. It feels like a dam has cracked in your chest. You realize you are tired. You want so badly for the calorie calculator to go away. You want to enjoy a bag of chips and a netflix show without feeling lazy and fat. You want it so bad you weep. 

“Take me there,” you ask Adalaide. “Please.” 

A weight drops from Adalaide’s shoulders and she gives your hand a squeeze. “Yes” she says. 

…

A week later, you and Adalaide pull up to the wellness center for your scheduled appointment. You and Adalaide made the appointment in the car after that run. She gives your hand one final squeeze before you both exit the car. The facility is larger than you imagined. A large building that takes up an entire lot, with a front covered from floor to ceiling with windows. You walk through the automatic sliding door and face a lady standing at the front desk. She smiles warmly as you approach her desk. She introduces herself as Elaine, your primary care giver while you are a part of this program. She beckons you and Adalaide back to her office to get started.

When you step into the office, you immediately feel at ease. The smell of lavender permeated the pale blue room. Elaine’s office is very neat and organized and it brings a sense of calm to you as you take a seat in one of the plush velvet chairs on one side of the large desk. You explain to Elaine how you’ve been feeling as she sits in a large leather chair on the other side. She nods and jots down some information on her computer as you speak. After you finish, she has you fill out forms of your own as well. By the end of it all, she gives you a rundown of how treatment will work. 

So begins months of meal plans, support groups and therapy. In the beginning, you cried when you saw the amount of food they wanted you to eat. The calorie calculator was racking up the numbers in your head until you felt so full you wanted to throw up. You did throw up a couple times. They did not even allow you to step on a scale. How were you supposed to know if you had been good or if you had sinned? 

Throughout it all, Adalaide was always checking in on you. At first, she knew from her sister that it was best that you not be alone, so she moved in with you for a while. She called it an extended slumber party, just like when you were kids, but better. You hated her for it. When she was there, she made sure you ate every bit of food. She was Big Brother: always watching. She always caught you throwing a little bit of food away or down-sizing recipes. But she never gave up on you, no matter how much you wanted her to. She always made sure you were doing well. 

…

Your Birthday: One Year Later

You lean in close to your reflection in the mirror as you apply a final layer of mascara. You are just finishing getting ready to go out for your birthday dinner. Your friend Cal would be here any minute to pick you up. 

At that moment, as if he heard your thoughts, the doorbell rang. Turning from your reflection to leave, you pause right before exiting the bathroom, “Just say it” you silently remind yourself. You knew you’d regret it if you didn’t. You turn on your heel, look directly into your reflection, and declare:

“I am enough.”