‘All I needed was three minutes’: Living with bulimia in a world that tells women how to look

I don’t know where the idea first came to me. It’s difficult to say – one night I might have been throwing up from drinking too much. The night that my German friend told me that mixing beer and vodka was normal, that people did it all the time. (I was so green that I believed her and mixed beer and vodka in my red Solo cup.) Perhaps, I noticed that I was also throwing up my dinner. Perhaps, I noticed that it was an easy way to get rid of the food.

I took to bulimia in a way I had never taken to anorexia. Pro-mia. It was made for me, I thought, because I was someone who enjoyed excess instead of restraint.

I didn’t want to skip meals, I wanted to eat three at once. I already knew what it felt like to overeat; this would merely be an extension of that. Bulimia meant that I could embrace America’s excesses! I didn’t need to count calories, I could order anything I wanted to off the menu at cheap chain restaurants. All I needed to do was make sure I followed the meal with ice cream. Yogurt. Soft serve. In a pinch, a creamy, dreamy milkshake. Anything to make sure the food came up easily.

I formed the habit – one I have to this day – of noting where the bathroom was anywhere I went. How crowded was it? Were the stalls private? Might someone come in at any time or would I be guaranteed privacy for at least three minutes? All I needed was three minutes. One to lock the door and bend over the stall, one to stick my finger down my throat until the food came up (great heaving gobs of food, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting) and one to clean up.

I made sure to always have breath mints in my purse. I wore too much perfume, praying that nobody would catch the dank smell of vomit lingering on my jacket. Other than that, it was remarkably easy to hide the evidence. My eyes were only bloodshot for a minute. I would wait in front of the mirror, take my hair out of its elastic, apply another prim coat of lipstick, and it was done. I would stroll out of the loo, nonchalant.

If I were in a restaurant, I would be too ashamed to meet the eyes of the waiters as I walked past them. Waiters have a way of knowing which of their patrons have eating disorders (the food left in the napkin, the telltale vomit flecks on the side of the toilet). I imagined how they thought of me: wasteful, irresponsible, throwing away a $24 entrée because I didn’t have the self-control to not eat it in the first place.

It wasn’t always so simple. Sometimes, there would be people in the next stall and I’d have to wait for them to leave. I couldn’t risk them hearing me. (Only a bulimic knows how loud the sound of vomiting is.)

Sometimes, there were too many people waiting in line and I couldn’t throw up at all. In that event, I would panic. I would calculate how many calories I had put into my body. Idiotic, stupid, reckless. Calories that I couldn’t get out. Now they would be absorbed into my bloodstream, slowly. One by one. Making more fat cells. More fat deposits on my fat body.

I found and reread the book A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam. I’d first read it when I was a child, and I remembered it was about eating disorders. A young, slightly plump nanny falls for the dad of the house, a well-worn trope, thus setting up a rivalry between the wife and the nanny. But in a clever working of the narrative, McWilliam makes the wife an overeater and the nanny bulimic.

My glowing feasts were celebrations of being a child. I lifted from myself the weight of thought as I donned that precious fat [...] It was so beautiful; how could it do harm? At the same time, Margaret was carrying out her inverted worship of the same god.

I was struck by the perfection of this metaphor. If the narrator found food holy, if she likened overeating to a holy act, so too was throwing up a holy act.

After all, we had to get on our knees for it.

I was careful not to overdo it. I knew how stomach acids could corrode enamel and I didn’t want to be fitted with a set of false teeth at thirty. In A Little Stranger, the narrator describes how Margaret grows hirsute, how her spittle becomes thick. I was terrified of growing hair all over my previously unhairy (for a brown girl) arms and legs. Becoming a budget Sasquatch.

If the fat wish to be a shadow of their former selves, the sickly thin wish to be the flesh of their future selves, not a flesh fed by nourishment, but the plump, taut, muscled and yet tender flesh of romance, ready to be carved. While they reject and vomit food, for what are these girls paying, these girls wanting to be hollow? What fantastic connection has been made between daydreams of beauty and romance and that life of bitter spitting?

I closed the book. It was too real; it made me feel sick. McWilliam could not understand that “connection between romance and spitting” – all she could do was remark on its oddity. But I could.

My bathroom-worship did pay off. My body did change. To some extent. Bulimia combined with judicious dieting and cutting out carbs meant that I was losing weight. I could see the numbers on the scale going down – 154, 150, 149, 147, 140, 138...133...

Not enough – never enough – but I slimmed down to a size where I was now acceptable, even desirable. I pushed the XXL dresses to the back of my closet and replaced them with mediums. I no longer dreaded flights back to India. The aunties who had casually made such cruel remarks in the past were now obsessed with asking me how I “did it”.

One of them cornered me in a hallway and patted my midriff as though she was airport security. “What are you doing? What’s your secret? Is it keto? Tell me!” she commanded. “My daughter needs to lose weight too.”

I smiled. “Oh, just eating healthy and exercising, you know.” Restricting, fasting, counting, occasionally abusing Adderall because it killed my appetite, cleansing, binging, purging, lying, lying, lying.

I thought of all the brown daughters nagged about their weight by their mothers. Always being put on fad diets, always being told, “You know, that samosa has 350 calories. Would you like some sprouts instead?” while their brothers reached for a second and a third. I felt tears spring to my eyes. I wanted to cry – I was crying – for her daughter.

~~~

I want to be optimistic. I want to say that at least some things have gotten better. We no longer live in an era where extreme thinness is the only beauty ideal. We now have Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and the rest of their clan. And yet, have they freed us from the burden of thinness or have they added another layer to it? For now, we are expected to be body-positive. We are told (hollow injunction!) to “love” our flawed bodies even though they do not resemble the aerodynamic, perfectly engineered ‘thickness’ that the new celebrities represent. White girls with the (surgeon-bought) bodies of black girls and Latinas.

And more than ever before, these beauty ideals are thrust on us. A fourteen-year-old brown girl growing up in Gujarat with a smartphone can download Instagram and stare longingly at pictures of other fourteen-year-old girls who do not look like fourteen-year-old girls at all. All day long, she can immerse herself in the world of crop tops and contour and IG “baddies’” that do not look like any Indian girl she knows.

How is it enough to preach self-love and body positivity in the face of this onslaught? Brown girls are intelligent. They know what they – what we – are being told.

I wish I could close this with a happy ending or at least a cathartic one. What can I tell you now about my body or my eating disorder? I want to write that I lost weight and stopped thinking about it for good. I wish I could tell you that I no longer have body issues, that I no longer skip meals or go on ridiculous diets. I am at an “ordinary weight”. I exercise when I can and I eat healthy. Should that not be enough? Must I spend the rest of my life standing in front of the mirror, moving my weight from foot to foot? Will tyrannical dressing room mirrors always leave me in tears? I want so badly to be able to focus on my work. I hunger to not obsess over my body. No more, in this life, in this duniya. I have endured so much already.

If I could draw a line under my weight and move on to the next page, I would. But that would not be the truth, and I want to tell you that eating disorders don’t disappear, they merely recede into the background of your life.

If you’re lucky, they stay in the background. Some days – if you’re really, truly, lucky – they let you enjoy food without thinking about them. As if you don’t have a body at all but are as weightless and free as a small silver puddle in the gloom.

Excerpted with permission from Besharam, Priya Alika Elias, Penguin Random House.