Romans 12: 1-2: (NIV) Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
If you missed the first two parts of my story, please go here and here to read them before you read this post.
Back to my ‘story’. I am 5 foot 5 inches tall. By the time I was 15 years old I was a bit pudgy, weighing around 130 pounds. I recognized that my mother thought I needed to lose weight and I had given lip service to attempts to do so for a few years. At this point I had no anorexic tendencies. Just before Thanksgiving 1979, I decided that I would lose the weight. I cut down my portion sizes and began doing sit ups. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas that year I lost 15 pounds. The next year I dropped five more pounds and then five additional pounds the year following that. By the time I graduated from high school in June of 1982 I was down to approximately 110 pounds.
I left home to attend Young Harris College and maintained my weight at around 105 pounds, although something in me recognized that I was unnaturally concerned (perhaps obessed would be a better word) with my weight. I did very well academically at Young Harris, maintaining an A average and gained induction into Phi Theta Kappa honor society.
In the summer of 1983, I left Young Harris and moved to Atlanta to take the final core classes that I needed for acceptance into pharmacy school. I enrolled into a summer program at, what was then called, Dekalb Junior College where I was to take two quarters of organic chemistry in eight weeks. Yes, you read that correctly. Two QUARTERS of organic chemistry in eight weeks. I moved into the nursing dorm at Georgia Baptist Hospital and began my summer course work.
This was a grueling schedule and I was not doing well in class. For the first time in my life, I was struggling with academic work. In fact, I was failing and the stress of failing was causing me to seek to control any area of my life that I could. While taking these classes and the associated labs, I began to eat less and less until I was ‘allowing’ myself a grand total of 600 calories per day. Eating was the only area that I could control as my grades dropped lower and lower. It was many years before I realized that my grades were dropping because I was starving myself to death and was so physically ill.
My weight had dropped dramatically and after only three weeks of class, I weighed less than 100 pounds. I weighed myself many times a day to make sure I had not gained a single pound. I constantly glanced in the mirror, turning this way and that, almost daring the mirror to reveal any fat. Still, I felt fat. How does ‘fat’ feel? I’m not sure I can describe it, but suffice it to say, I felt it.
On what would become my final day of class, I passed out at least twice sitting in my seat in Mrs. Carpenter’s Organic Chemistry class. No one recognized that I had passed out, but I knew that I had. At the break between classes, I went out to the pay phone (circa. BCP – before cell phones) and called my parents. I told my mother what had happened and that I needed to come home. I was failing in my classes and this was the ultimate shame for my poor heart and mind. I apologized profusely to my parents when I finally got back home, but felt that I was a terrible disappointment to them. Neither of them ever sought to shame me for my grades. They showed only love and concern.
For three weeks after I got home that summer of 1983, I would get up in the morning, shower, get dressed and then go back to bed. I was mentally and physically exhausted. I weighed 95 pounds and was starving myself to death. Yet, the demon that sat on my shoulder whispering ‘you are fat’ to me would not go away. In retrospect, I should have been hospitalized, but I wasn’t because my parents just did not realize the depth of my emotional disturbance.
Years later my mother would say to me, “I remember coming down to eat with you at the cafeteria (at Georgia Baptist Hospital where I lived for that summer and the first two years of my time in pharmacy school). You would show me those girls who looked like skeletons and tell me that they were in the psych unit being treated for anorexia.” I now realize that I was crying out for help by focusing attention on others with the same problem that I was experiencing. Deep down I knew that I needed that same kind of help, but I never verbalized that to anyone. Why would I? My eating (or lack thereof) was the one thing I could control and control was of utmost importance. This was one thing I felt I could ‘do right’.
I spent the fall of 1983 working and taking classes back at Young Harris College in preparation for entering Mercer University School of Pharmacy in January 1984. My physical health improved somewhat, but my mental health did not. I maintained my weight at around 98 pounds. When look at pictures from that time, I see a skeletal young woman whose body was begging for relief from starvation. The pictures that you see of me on my blog sidebar are of me at a weight of about 117 pounds, which is close to my current weight. Imagine me with 20 pounds less weight. It was not a pretty picture.
Tomorrow, I will finish my story. See you then.
