Almost every single person I meet comments on how small I am, whether it be that I am only 5 feet tall or that I am skinny. I rarely get through a day without someone pointing out that I am small. I have always been skinny and I never had a huge appetite, but I was at a relatively healthy weight throughout most of my childhood. However, that all changed after my jaw locked.
For many years I weighed around 95 pounds. After my jaw locked, I dropped to 88 pounds. Seven pounds might not seem like a lot, but for me that is mass that I could not afford to lose. Over the summer, I took it upon myself to start tracking what I was eating and I even saw a dietician to see what my options were in order to get my weight back up to a healthy level. I was able to get back up to 92 pounds by eating 4 meals a day which was a total of around 1,800 calories a day. The majority of my calories came from liquids. I drank Ensure and made protein smoothies everyday with everything I could possibly put in them to make them 750 calories.
Unfortunately, I lost all of the weight I had gained back once I got to school. Not only did I begin walking an average of 5 miles each day, but eating and making my smoothies became a lot harder. The convenience of the dining halls turned into a struggle to find something I could eat. I kept making smoothies in my dorm, but it became very difficult to keep all of the ingredients in my room and I gave up after a few days.
I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people in America have an unhealthy relationship with food. However, the dominant discourse is people loving food, but feeling guilty for eating it because of how it will affect their weight. While this is a valid struggle that I don’t want to demean in any way, it is by no means the only problem people have with food. For me, I used to love food. I was the world’s pickiest eater, but I would eat burgers and boneless wings for days. Not only am I not able to eat half of the foods I would eat on a regular basis, but eating anything has become a physically and mentally taxing activity. My jaw gets very tired after nibbling on even a small piece of food. Frequently, I have to stop eating or take breaks. Not because I’m full, but because I don’t have any more energy to get the food into my mouth. Because of the mental difficulty of eating, my appetite has almost disappeared. I am very rarely hungry anymore. The worst part about this is that I have to force myself to eat food even when I don’t feel hungry.
If you gain one thing from reading this post, let it be this: don’t ever tell someone you wish you had their problems. I understand that there are thousands if not millions of people currently trying to lose weight. Trust me, they’ve all told me they would kill to be in my situation. I don’t like people doing this for a multitude of reasons. The first is that telling anyone, not just me, that you would be glad to have their problems makes it seem like their problems aren’t real. If someone trusts you enough to tell you something they’re struggling with, the worst thing you can do is make them seem invalid. Second, it’s not the truth. I lost count of how many people have told me they would love to be in my situation. I can guarantee you after one day they would be begging for their old life back. In their situation, they would love for it to be nearly impossible to gain weight so that’s all that they hear when I talk. They fail to recognize the context. I can’t eat most solid foods unless they’re soft and flat, I’m barely hungry, and eating has become a chore. The hardest part is that whether I meet my calorie goal or not, I have to wake up the next day and do it all over again. I can never take a break from being worried about my weight. If people really heard this part of the story, they wouldn’t be so envious. While there are some problems that are worse than others, it should never become a competition or comparison. It is natural for us to want to be the opposite of what we are, but it’s important to recognize that everyone has problems and we need to be sensitive before saying someone’s problems are more desirable than our own. We don’t all gain the freshman 15, some of us lose it.
Medulla Ossium 