When I Eat, I Eat For All of Us

I like food. A lot. I like horribly unhealthy foods like greasy fries and burgers and ice cream and I like fruits and vegetables and whole grain bagels (with cream cheese)!

I don't count calories on purpose. This is my rebellion against years of being told to be anorexic. This is my rebellion against the magazines, the billboards, the TV shows where people are told to get skinnier! Get skinnier before your wedding! Get skinnier for your kids!

But I don't eat enough. I don't eat regularly. Sometimes I eat breakfast, and then nothing else for the rest of the day. Sometimes I don't eat anything until lunch at two. Sometimes I get home from work and my stomach growls and I realize I haven't eaten once in the entire day. I'm trying to change this, but it's hard. I can't explain these feelings, the complacency with forgetting to eat. It seems that I've been forgetting about food for so long that I can no longer hear my body asking for food.

But I like food, I do. And I am fighting the system that tells me to starve myself. It's like this societal parasite is under my skin anyway, telling my body to silently starve. And because my weight stays roughly the same, whether I eat four meals in one day or one the next, no one notices and I just think in my head, "Oh, it's no big deal." My weight doesn't change more than a pound or two. I'm a size six -- not cocaine-skinny, not baby-fat chubby. But somewhere in my body is a voice that whispers for me to eat less. Calories don't matter, if eating less sometimes means just ordering a side instead of a full meal. I can't count calories because I have an obsessive personality and I will do nothing but memorize numbers and do math all day until I've made myself nauseous by turning food into a calculation.

Is it control? I know I'm a perfectionist, a recovering masochist. Is it the combination of the world saying it hates me, hates me for being a woman, for being imperfect, for not being ideal, for my mind not mattering but my body up on the pedestal where they throw the flowers and if you're not good enough, rotted fruit? Is it poverty? Guilt for eating when I know I could go on just a few more hours without it and be fine?

I don't think anyone would put me in the hospital for an eating disorder. No doctor would criticize me or my weight, except to suggest I cut out the crap and eat only healthy food, and start working out. (I won't, I can't, I need to keep fighting this! I need to be allowed to eat what I want to eat and sleep when I want to sleep and not work out if I don't want to I need to be allowed to love my body please don't make me hate myself please)

There are millions of girls and women in the world who don't have full out eating disorders but have disordered eating. Some of us are fighting and know we're fighting, and some of us just think it's a skipped meal here, a skipped meal there.

When are we going to stop letting everyone tell us to hate ourselves? Where will the love come from?