shift

I remember talking about it with my sister. We were looking through Facebook pictures, an album of a girl in her class. “She lost so much weight,” Nat said, shaking her head, “it always happens around this time, girls in their junior year.” I shook my head too as we clicked through the pictures, cringing at the shocking transformation from the girl I remembered from the year before, with a healthy figure and a full face with a glowing smile, to the one I saw on the screen, with long, fragile legs and a smile that seemed weak, embedded between her hollow cheeks.

I was a freshman, and I didn’t understand how girls who looked so healthy could have their image so distorted in their mind that they would be driven to starve themselves. I had always been an active individual and had never faced any weight issues. In fact, dieting or weight had never been a subject discussed very much in my family at all. My mom cooked fairly healthy meals, and that was all the nutritional matter my siblings and I dealt with.

Sophomore year, I quit the cross country team, but still taking dance classes, I remained feeling healthy and active. It wasn’t until the end of sophomore year that I began to feel like taking one dance class a week wasn’t compensating for the other days I was coming home straight after school to watch TV until my parents reminded me that I probably had some homework to be done. I want to say that was the only reason I decided to join the gym; actually, at the time, it was. I wanted to start running again and rejuvenate myself into the active lifestyle I had shied away from. I wanted to feel healthy. Healthy. A term that can be very relative and a root cause, I believe, to the trap so many girls set themselves into when struggling with body image issues.

I started going to the gym a few times a week, and it felt great to be running again. Then, when the summer began, my best friend joined me, and we began to go more and more, making it a fun routine. We would work out, stretch and chat for a while, and finish by going to Jamba Juice, a healthy choice. From our healthy morning, I would be inspired to have a healthy day, trying to avoid junk food and sweets, and focusing on my nutritional pyramid. Sounds innocent enough, right? I thought so too. I guess what I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t just thinking about my health while at the gym or saying no to McDonald’s if my brother wanted to get something. It was the summer going into my junior year, and my schedule was not very busy. While my friends went away on their various trips, I worked at a preschool in the morning, and spent the rest of my day usually with friends, shopping, tanning at Dolores Park, going out to eat, and always making room to work out. My health was always in the back of my head. It wasn’t until the end of the summer when I really kicked things into high gear, working out almost every day, increasing the intensity of my workouts, and going from minding my food groups to reading nutrition labels and checking my caloric intake with the calorie count I was losing on the treadmill…so I could be my healthiest self when I went back to school. I never ignored my hunger, I just worked hard to make the healthiest decisions possible – decisions I didn’t need to be worrying about- so that only the purest nutrients were entering my body.

On the first day of junior year, a few people commented on my figure, not shocked by my weight or anything, but noticing a difference. My consuming health conscience continued to persistently whisper in my ear, until one afternoon a few weeks into the school year. I was at the gym during my daily after-school routine, reading a Teen Vogue while running on the tread mill. I turned the page to the Health and Wellness section and saw the word “Orthorexia” written in big, bold type, surrounded by pictures of fruits and vegetables. “Oh God,” I thought to myself, “another story about bulimia, or anorexia, or whatever.” It seemed as if every week teen magazines had a new article about the constant “suffering” of teen girls under pressure of body image and low self-esteem issues, some new doctor’s analysis. But as I scanned the article, the content seemed uncomfortably familiar. Reading it more closely at home, I learned that orthorexia regarded not starvation dieting to lose weight, but instead the obsession with only healthy foods entering one’s system, and meeting all nutritional requirements with the purest, most natural diet. The article gave accounts of numerous teenage girls who did not consider themselves to have an eating disorder, but just didn’t want bad things going in their system. Doctors reported that, in many instance, this mental illness can be a gateway to serious eating disorders if not turned around. Soaking in the information, I realized that I identified with many of the symptoms, and I did not want to be headed anywhere near the direction some of the girls in the article had ended up.

I continued to work out, but no longer counted my calories or obsessed over avoiding junk food. I also made sure to incorporate working out into my schedule when it could fit, rather than scheduling my entire life around working out. Slowly I loosened up on my health consciousness until I was comfortable eating anywhere again, no longer finicky about ingredients or proportions. I’m not saying I threw out health all together, because we all know that could take a bad turn in the opposite direction, but I stopped acting like a pageant contestant being forced to fit a mold, and started being a teenager again, embracing my appetite, metabolism, and growing self all in one.

Yes, orthorexia sounds like a ridiculous, made-up disorder for lunatic girls, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to acknowledge that your behavior is ridiculous. It is so easy to get caught up in appearance in our culture that constantly flashes unrealistic body images in our face. Since we are so numbed to the disillusionment of appearance in our society, it is easy to rationalize obsessive behavior, and difficult to recognize that, to whatever degree, it is obsessive, and it can lead to self-harm.