When a Fat Girl Gets Skinny

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This poem was originally written by Blythe Baird

The year of skinny pop and sugar-free jello cups,

we guzzled vitamin water and vodka

toasting to high school and survival complimenting each other's thigh gaps

trying diets we found on the internet: menthol cigarettes, eating in front of a mirror, donating blood

replacing meals with other practical hobbies like making flower crowns

or fainting

wondering why I haven't had my period in months

why breakfast tastes like giving up

or how many more productive ways I could have spent my time today besides googling the calories in the glue of a US envelope

watching America's Next Top Model like the gospel

hunching naked over a bathroom scale shrine crying into an empty bowl of cocoa puffs

Because I only feel pretty when I'm hungry.

 experienced being clinically overweight, underweight, and obese.

As a child, Fat was the first word people used to describe me, which didn't offend me until I found out it was supposed to.

When I lost weight, my mom relieved she could stop worrying about me getting diabetes.

She saw a program on the news about the epidemic with obesity said she is just so glad to finally see me taking care of myself.

If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital.

If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.

So when I evaporated, of course everyone congratulated me on getting healthy.

Girls at school who never spoke to me before stopped me in the hallway to ask how I did it.

They say, you're an inspiration.

How could I not fall in love with my illness? With becoming the kind of silhouette people are supposed to fall in love with?

Why would I ever want to stop being hungry when anorexia and bulimia are the most interesting thing about me?

Not going to the hospital is boring.

The way looking at an apple and seeing only an apple, not sixty or half an hour of sit-ups is boring.

The calculator in my head filled with numbers like the amount of calories in a piece of 5 gum.

I love the feeling of drinking water on an empty stomach

waiting for the coolness to slip all the way down and land in the well,

not obsessed with being empty but afraid of being full.

This was supposed to be the year of eating when I was hungry without punishing myself

and I know it sounds ridiculous, but that shit is hard.

Instead, I spent the year eating less and purging more.

When I was little, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up,

and I said

Thin.

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