Growing Up Alex: Childhood and Middle School

I had shown signs of disordered eating since I was a child. My parents were divorced and I lived with my mom most of the time. Whenever we’d have dessert after dinner, I had to wait until she had finished eating hers before I would even begin mine. She did not make me do this. At four years old I had somehow deemed this act necessary.

I am also an only child. Any time I ate with a friend, I would make sure that I ate slow enough so that I could eat just the slightest bit less for lunch or dinner, even if it meant that my friend left 2 noodles of macaroni and I left 4. I stopped eating donuts at age 7 when my father casually mentioned that they were fattening. Kids would bring munchkins in to class and I would claim that I just didn’t like them. I was terrified of ‘getting fat’.

My dad lived on the beach and I would stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror, in my bathing suit, sideways while sticking out my stomach and then pulling it back in in an attempt to figure out if I was fat. I was only 5.

I compared the size of my legs to the size of my neighbor’s legs and was ashamed that hers were thinner than mine when we’d walk to school in the first grade. By age 7, I was reading the nutrition information on packages as I ate.

One day, after getting a haircut, I looked in the mirror and saw a fat face staring back at me and I began to sob. I was in 3^rd grade and I was underweight for my age.  My face was certainly not fat. I admit that, to this day, I still struggle with seeing my face as it actually is.

None of my behaviors seemed odd to me because they were just a part of how I lived my life. I liked food like cookies and chocolate and pizza and when I would eat them, I would eat decent sized portions. I was a small girl both in height and weight. My classmates would call me cute and pick me up and treat me like a little kid. I grew used to that. I grew used to being called, ‘Little Alex’. I essentially accepted it as part of my identity or, as some therapists may say, it became a part of my self schema.

In 6^th grade I went through a growth spurt and the natural course of puberty brought upon by early adolescence. I shot up 3 inches in 1 year. In 7^th grade I was still on the shorter end of average, but I had caught up in height to many of my classmates who had once loomed over me. I was very uncomfortable because it didn’t fit in to this schematic idea of who Alex was. Alex was supposed to be short. She was supposed to be smaller than everyone else.

My entire life I had struggled to find clothes that fit me because of my size. The women working retail would always remark to my mother about how tiny I was for my age in a way that almost made it sound like a positive thing. As a young child I dreamed of being tall. When I actually did grow and became ‘average’ in height I had a wee bit of an identity crisis.

A common component of puberty in girls is weight gain. It’s natural. It happens to all of us at one point or another. Pants that used to be too big, even with belts, suddenly fit just fine. Sometimes when I sat down, I could even feel the cloth touch my stomach. In my mind this wasn’t okay. I’ve had many therapists over the years and it seems that while I showed many signs of disordered eating as a child, it was around 12 or 13 when I really began to slip in to more eating disordered behaviors.

Growing Up Alex: Factors and the Existence of Depression and Anxiety in Eating Disorders will be posted on Thursday 3/27/2014. Make sure to follow the blog to receive an e-mail for when it’s posted or follow it on Bloglovin‘!