Katie's Story

I'm sure that many of you out there feel that you struggle alone. That no one else knows how you feel, and they would never understand if you told them. You feel ashamed of what you do and yet you can't stop.
I'm here to tell you that you are not alone because everyone is affected by the images that the media portrays.
Take me, a 120 pound, five foot four, seventeen year old girl. At the age of 14 I had to undergo surgery in order to remove my appendix and after the surgery I weighed 110 pounds. This was due to a couple things: the stress from the surgery, the fact that I had vomited most of what was in my stomach beforehand and the fact that afterwards I'd been living on a steady diet of chicken broth and apple juice for about a week. After being checked out of the hospital I was sent home to relax and gain those pounds back. I grew more and more nervous as the pounds came back, even though I knew that meant I was healthy again. But I had somehow convinced myself that 120 pounds was too fat. I needed to be 110 again. That was my healthy weight. I was thinner then, closer to the idea of perfect, and as a perfectionist, I couldn't imagine why losing those ten pounds was unhealthy.
So what did I do? I obsessed over what I ate. I could only eat so large of a portion and only one helping. If I was still hungry afterwards, too bad, I had already finished eating. I constantly worried over gaining even the slightest amount of weight because all I saw was my 7th grade self. She was 125 pounds, the highest weight I've ever been, and in my eyes, she was exactly what I couldn't be. I'd think of how fat I felt then and worry that I would reach that weight again. I'd lost most of it through playing field hockey and it hadn't come back after two years. What would happen if I was 125 pounds? I thought that if I gained a little, it wouldn't stop. Two would turn into five, which would turn in ten, which would turn into twenty and I would never be able to lose it. I would be overweight, ugly, hopeless and a failure.
Even now at 17 I still limit what I eat and I can't handle any thought of gaining weight. I'm terrified of the famous "Freshman Fifteen" and what it will do to my mental image as I go off to college this summer. At 110 pounds I thought I was the picture of media perfection and at 120 pounds I'm always fighting myself to eat until I'm full rather than only eating tiny portions and stopping. And if I do eat until I'm full all I can think of are pounds on my body and how much weight I could gain from eating that much. I constantly wonder how I can exercise, not to stay fit but to lose weight that probably isn't even there. If I see myself as fat and needing to lose weight now, what will happen to me if I'm 135 pounds?

To everyone out there who believes they are alone, I'm here to tell you that you aren't. I am just now recovering from years of seeing what isn't there. I still wake up some mornings and think that I'm fat and need to lose weight. We can't allow people who are beautiful think that they are less because they are not a weight or size that is the supposed ideal of beauty. This ideal doesn't exist, the companies and the media are just playing on people's insecurities to sell a product. Take a stand with me and help tell the media companies that we refuse to be psychologically tortured into believing that we are nothing because we are not their ideal of perfect.