on laxatives cold turkey. Now that I had a roommate and would be sharing a bathroom with many strangers, how would I get any privacy at all if I binged? I decided I would just be extra good at dieting—I’d fine-tune my expert starving skills. It was time for me to get off laxatives anyway, because bingeing was counterproductive to my weight loss. This would be easy…or maybe easier said than done.
I had my tricks to ignore the hunger pangs and make sure nobody noticed I wasn’t eating: (1) Avoid social meals, explaining to people that I’d already eaten or grabbed a snack at the library. (2) When I was hungry during the day, satiate myself with gumballs, tea, and diet soda. Bottles of Diet Coke and several cups of tea with at least five packages of Splenda helped curb my appetite and appease my sweet tooth. The barista at the student center nicknamed me Earl Grey because I ordered so much of it. (3) Night food—one small bag of Rold Gold Honey Wheat Braided Pretzel Twists, total food consumption for the day.
To get as much mileage out of each pretzel as possible, I would suck the tip slowly until it was nice and soggy and then bite the top off and swoosh it in my mouth. Instead of swallowing it, I spat it out onto the other end of the pretzel to conserve it, and then I slowly proceeded to put the whole pretzel into my mouth. Chewing slowly, I’d stop before my reflex to swallow kicked in, and I’d swoosh the crumbs in my mouth for a while, spreading the salty taste before finally allowing it down my throat.
My rule was to wait ten minutes between each pretzel. But often I’d break my own ritual because I was so hungry. That tiny bag of pretzels soon became my one and only pleasure in the day. I’d wait for it, like people wait for a hot date or a glass of wine at the end of a long workweek. All day long, I’d pine for that bag, my reward for working so hard.
When my roommate was asleep, I’d reach under the covers for my bottle of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, rolling away from her to spray it into my mouth, pumping as slowly as I could to mute the spritzing sound. My reward for making it through another day, showing my hunger who was really boss. I was! I could take it.
I could feel my pants getting bigger. Now I had to wear my size-twenty-six jeans with a belt at its smallest hole. I couldn’t help but admire my nice flat tummy and be impressed with my discipline. Unfortunately, I couldn’t starve myself forever; I was bound to slip, and that meant a purge.
It was a Friday night, a month and a half into my laxative sobriety, and I was really stressed out. I was struggling with an extremely difficult school project that was due on Monday. I had been working on it all day, but felt like I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I am going to fail. How am I going to get this done? I am so stupid. So overwhelmed, to the umpteenth degree, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. With the pressure to make progress, combined with that empty feeling taunting me from the pit of my stomach, all I could think about was food to distract me. Fuck it all. I am a failure. I grabbed my keys and drove to a supermarket in the town of Wellesley, five minutes from campus. Charging into the store, I manically grabbed a jar of peanut butter and a big bag of pretzels along with a loaf of whole-wheat bread and a ninety-count box of ex-lax. Why healthy whole-wheat bread would matter at that point is a mystery, but it made me feel better about what I was about to do.
I sat in my car in the parking lot eating all of it—stuffing it down my throat in chunks and pieces. Midway through eating, I took the laxatives as my punishment. Then I ate and ate, feeling my waist expanding. I shoveled the food into my mouth without taking a breath, so quickly that I could hardly taste it, but it wasn’t about the taste. No matter how much I ate, I never seemed to fill that empty pit in my stomach. Tears dripped from my eyes as the nausea from the laxatives and food set in. I looked in the rearview mirror; my dark brown eyes were bright red from my rubbing them, and I had peanut butter smears around my mouth. My palms were stained with the melted blue coating of the handfuls of laxatives I’d popped into my mouth. What was I doing?
Suddenly overcome with the sharp contractions of my intestinal walls, I reversed the car, headed back to campus, and sprinted to the communal bathroom on my floor. I was going to be sick. As I ran past a girl taking off her makeup after a long night of drinking, I avoided eye contact, hoping she wouldn’t get a good look at me. Stomach gurgling, I lurched into a corner stall with the sudden horrifying realization that she was going to hear me. I heard her giggling at my prominent stomach noises—loud hollow noises followed by embarrassingly loud gas. I was mortified, but maybe I deserved to be laughed at. Maybe the laughter would serve as a reminder to make me think twice next time I even contemplated bingeing.
I heard her exit that bathroom fast, probably to gossip to her friends about what she’d just heard and witnessed or to avoid being rude by laughing even louder. I flushed the toilet and wobbled out of the stall. Sometimes, after these binges, my equilibrium felt off, like I was coming back down to earth (after visiting some faraway galaxy, preferably Endor due to the Ewok population, but probably more like Purge-a-tory, the planet of purging) and my body couldn’t adjust properly. I leaned over the sink, washing my hands with soap and water. As the water ran, I looked in the mirror. I still had a peanut butter mustache. My reality was as pathetic as that peanut butter mustache.
Bingeing was often spur of the moment, and there was no time to talk myself out of it before it was happening. It was like I was a remote-controlled car steered by some invisible hand. Then the reality would set in, the horrible reality—the regret, guilt, and self-loathing. I would just have to find a bathroom that was more private and plan my binges in advance. At least, if I thought about bingeing, I’d have to make sure it was a good time, where people weren’t around and have the diuretics and food in stock. I had that much self-control. Hopefully.
The graduate school offered a safe spot for planned binges because it closed around eight in the evening for anyone entering, but if you were already there, you could stay as long as you wanted. As everyone left, I would take the laxatives in my private corner and get sick in what became my private bathroom. Then I would stay, studying, until two or three in the morning. When the diarrhea, accompanied by drooping, baggy, crusty eyes, was over or significantly easing up, I would drag myself across campus to my dorm, body aching and stomach sore. I’d fall helplessly into my bed, the blanket comforting my exhausted body.
Parents’ Weekend was my first unplanned slip since my sticky-blue-peanut-butter-fingers incident. I was so ravenous and out of control after bingeing on Chinese food at my parents’ hotel room, I couldn’t stop: lo mien, chicken fried rice, sesame chicken, and fortune cookies (why do they put so many in takeout orders? Ugh). When I got back to my dorm, I did something I was not proud of. I raided my roommate’s food supply and ate her food. I even dug through her trash to see if she’d left anything behind: a half-eaten Snickers bar—score. I had a bag of Cheez Doodles, peanut butter crackers, and animal crackers—anything I could get my hands on. I felt like a dirty rat, digging through the garbage. Correction, I was a dirty rat, digging through the garbage. Luckily for me, my roommate didn’t walk in.
Shortly afterward, I hit an even lower low, losing control in front of my parents one weekend at home. They didn’t see my purge, but they had noticed the copious amounts of sushi I’d put in my mouth.
“I am starving, and I don’t have time to eat a lot at school because I am always studying.” It was my way of saying, Look, I eat. I am fine! My skinny body is from stress. That’s all…
I binged on every single sushi roll I could get my hands on, tempura-fried and all, a Kamikaze roll, which was perfect because I felt like a Kamikaze, so out of control and borderline suicidal in my eating patterns. Screw chopsticks, I was picking the rolls up with my bare hands and stuffing them into my mouth. I took laxatives immediately after, in the privacy of my bedroom, and was sick to my stomach all night. The next day, on the way to the shuttle back to Boston, I was burping up a rotten-egg sulfur smell in “burp-hiccups” so strong that my dad and I both gagged on the smell as he drove me to the airport. I had never smelled anything so disgusting. It was like I was burping up Newark, New Jersey, and anyone
