Amy freeze body full#

That little comment, that small quip, that my figure “left something to be desired”: it continued to echo for many years. I, like many people, was so afraid of being sexually rejected for my fatness that I’d do almost anything to be smaller. And, though my unrelenting hunger might have saved me from a full-blown eating disorder, the toll of trying to shrink myself was nevertheless considerable. I was sometimes willing to starve to enjoy the relief of weight loss. Back then, I would frequently rather be hungry than run the risk of weight gain.

My parents were worried, but I concealed from them the extent of my dieting, often scraping my dinner into the trash, or giving it to the dogs, and pretending I’d eaten.Īs a result, I learned to function - more or less - on very little sustenance. I would return home to my daily meal of a few hundred calories. I regularly went all day at school without eating, trying to avoid the cafeteria and the ignominy of being seen, as a now slightly “overweight” teen, to consume anything. I mentally corrected him: I was eating nothing. “She’s eating light,” John explained to the server. That candid assessment was still salient some months later when I sat, with Kieran and our friend John, at a local pizza hut one night, hanging out before debate practice. I heard them when I twisted to peer at myself in the mirror, trying to see myself as he must. I heard them as I tried to go to sleep that night. I heard them when I stripped down for a shower. “Well,” he said smugly, “you have nice eyes and hair, but your figure leaves something to be desired.” The sting of the words did not abate as they echoed in my mind long after we had hung up. He gave me a 7, which struck me as generous. One night - and again, apropos of nothing - he proposed to rate me on an attractiveness scale from 1 to 10. Rumor had it that he liked (like, like-liked) me. He used to call me in the evening for long, meandering conversations, even though we were together at school most of the day anyway. (The point was so I could study for the International Baccalaureate rather than the local high school graduation certificate in Australia.) I became close friends with a boy named Kieran (who, like everyone else in this essay, I’ve given a pseudonym ).

I had begun to attend a previously all-boys’ school at age sixteen, the year the school integrated, accepting me as one of three girls among a cohort of hundreds of boys.

As I grew older and bigger, that would become a routine occurrence.Īnother incident remains particularly vivid.

Amy freeze body full#

(Note that apparently paradoxical word “little,” and the use of the diminutive - “Kate” is my full first name.) And I felt myself monstrous in size and diminished in social stature. I saw myself through the lens of Jack’s contempt, even disgust, in that moment. And yet with that comment, my gaze - previously trained outward on the ball, or my classmates, or (most likely) the horizon - turned sharply on myself. It is unlikely to surprise you - and in most ways, it hardly matters - that at the time I was a pretty average weight, barely even chubby. Everyone else giggled as I felt frozen in place with shame. “Fat little Kate-lyn,” Jack said, apropos of nothing, during a PE class. The first time I recall a boy commenting on my body was when I was in the fifth grade.