Ninety pounds. Five-foot-six. Sixteen years old. Track Season. Four words that should never be placed in the same context. The 400 meter run was a marathon, walking up the stairs was a workout. Every move was exhausting. But I had a thigh gap so what did it matter anyway?
One day my best friend approached me and said, “So i get asked like every day if your anorexic and eat food and stuff and like I know you eat food but I just wanted to make sure.”
This was my wake up call. Was the thigh gap and size zero prom dress really worth constant exhaustion? Truth is, a price tag cannot be placed on energy. Strength. Lifting my backpack off of the ground without debilitation for goodness sake. No Scarlet Johannson figure could make up for dreading conditioning day in PE class.
So I did the unthinkable; I ate carbs. I ate eggs with the yolk. I ate my mom’s cookies without calculating how many miles I’d need to run them off.
However having a mother who taught exercise physiology and weightlifting at the local college, I knew simply eating more would not be the sole remedy to my toothpick syndrome. I began a routine of basic weightlifting to replace my daily runs and starving myself. which let me tell ya, was notttt a bad trade off.
Somehow, my life decomplexioned. In no time I could bench my own body weight, donate blood (without lying about my weight), and run a 15 second 100 meter sprint. Somehow, that 20 pounds I put on gave me 20 times the freedom.
