Sophie
56 kg and falling

When I was with my boyfriend it felt like he was always looking at other women. He barely looked me in the eyes any more, he was constantly distracted by anything that swished past that had a vague odor of cheap perfume. The magic of our first weeks together had faded into a routine of going out, getting drunk, and waking up with a hangover. Our conversation had changed from cheeky, sometimes naughty, sometimes flat-out disgusting and utterly blushable whispers, into an eternal judgment of the people around us. Snide remarks masquerading as intellectual debate.
He snapped his fingers at the waitress as if to say, why aren't you paying attention.
"Listen, I want an egg white omelet with 4 egg whites, okay?"
"I'm sure that's not on the menu," I said, hiding my face from the waitress behind the cuffs of my sweater.
"It's okay," she said, her grinning braces showering Luke with worship. "I'll ask the chef."
"I'll have..."
"She'll have the same. Salad on the side, no dressing. Got it?"
The waitress nodded and gave him one more ironic smile before leaving us with our glasses of water. Luke had wanted to bring his bottle of electrolytes to the restaurant but only backed down because I told him it would make him look desperate. Across from us a group of people were getting their orders of burgers and fries in wicker baskets padded with paper.
"Look at those weaklings." Luke said, "Disgusting."  He said the same thing every time we went out. "People who eat sugar should be taken away on trains. Fucking resource hogs."
I wondered what he thought of me, I wasn't exactly skinny.
"A little fat is okay," I said, trying to find some middle ground. "I'm not perfect either, as you know."
"We'll work on you. Get you to your target weight. It's important to reach your targets or you become a fucking loser."
I knew relationships had an arc and that no relationship lasted in giddy stupor forever – I was studying psychology, after all, which gave credence to my pre-existing ideas on people.
Luke was my first serious boyfriend, at least the first one that lasted longer than a month, and I admit, I had made mistakes. Like clinging to him at every lull in the conversation because I thought that's what guys wanted, to be showered with love and attention. Because that's what I wanted.
I let him do whatever he wanted with me, and it excited me to follow him into all those new territories, but I did not get the same freedom in return. If I wanted to make love in the bath he would get impatient and we would just take a shower instead. In the shower I tried to drip a wet sponge over him but he grabbed it out of my grasp and started cleaning himself with it. Cleaning every crack with my Body Shop Essensual sponge. He'd leave me there without saying a word and I would use the time to exercise in the rushing water, doing squats and working my arms to burn calories until the water ran cold. If I could just lose some more weight he might be satisfied with the shape of me, be insatiable like he used to be when we first met.
I would give everything to him, I truly would, but some things just affected me emotionally. When he saw me naked for the first time he told me he usually preferred thin, cat-like girls with toned abs. I didn't mind, because it was just weight. I thought it would be easy to fix, a project we could work on together. We would reach our goals as a team, motivate each other. Like curbing his drinking before he went biking with his friends. I tried to get him to stop, I really did, but when I brought it up it just caused us more arguments that looped back over themselves endlessly.
I wanted to tame him, but keep him occasionally wild and join him on his adventures, but he didn't want me to bike with him, he said I slowed him down because I always needed to pee.
He went jogging for hours and came back smelling vulgar and amazing and utterly sexy. When we went jogging together I couldn't keep up with him, he just left me behind to trot along in the park while he powered around the lake, catching up with me later when I was exhausted and about to leave.

I tried every diet, nothing worked for long. I just wasn't good enough to stick to something.
"Just don't eat," Ana told me one day, sitting with her legs neatly crossed on her couch in her little Italian-styled apartment, complete with imported Italian furniture, a gift from her rich Italian dad. She said it as if it was easy.
Ana was my light-house, so to speak. A being of lightness. Whenever my thoughts sank down to food she was there in the back of my mind to bring me back up.
"I've cut down on snacks, but it's hard when there's ads everywhere for pizza and bacon and cheese."
"Those things exist for weak people, Sophia" she said in her mildly Italian accent, "people who make bad life choices. A perfect body is a reflection of a perfect mind, and perfection is a choice. Do you want to be ugly or to be beautiful? To be or not to be?"
"That's funny. And yes, I know, I just wish I had your self-control, though. How do you get rid of the craving?"
"Pavlov," Ana said, applying expensive nail polish to her manicured nails while I tried to untangle the mess of my hair. How on earth did short hair get tangled?
"What? Pan love?" I asked, not quite catching the words she said.
"Pavlovian conditioning, what are you, some kind of idiot? Weren't you paying attention in Psych? Anyway, every time you want to eat something you do something to yourself instead. Something a little painful. In a few weeks your mind builds an association between food and pain."
"Hurt myself?"
"Hey, it works. Look." Ana slid her black skirt up and showed me her thigh. Thirty or forty tiny straight lines played down her leg, an array of welts and lines like the frets of a guitar. Somehow even scars were sexy on Ana.
"You cut yourself?" I couldn't stop my eyes from climbing the ladder of her scars.
"Sure, but not badly." She let her hem fall back down. "Just enough to take the craving away."
"What happens if a guy, you know, sees it?" I kept looking at the hem of her skirt, wondering what other secrets she kept underneath her clothes.
"Are you kidding? Guys love scars, it gives them something they think they can fix."
"I'm not sure I could cut myself, you know? A girl I knew in school had been a cutter and things had not turned out well for her, there were rumors that she got locked away in an institution after cutting up her parents." I was worried I could go off the rails like that, because I usually let things control me. Most of my problems were about me not being in control of my urges.
Ana turned her body to the side, taking a photo of her lean curves in the mirror. She never seemed to change, to pick up or lose weight, she seemed completely in control of her life.
"I do it because I have determination, Sophia. But you don't have to if you lack the mental ability."
I bridled at her cutting remark, but she was right, I lacked the mental strength to control my urges, they always seemed to take over and consume me.
Ana disappeared to her room and I heard her going through the jewelry boxes on her vanity, heard the tinkle of the ballerina that would now be twirling, putting on a little show out of sight. I looked around the apartment, decorated exclusively in black and white, everything stylish and sleek and perfect in its perfect place. Even the photos were crisp black and white images of her family having fun – skiing in Switzerland, Ana posing with pouty lips in a cab in New York, sitting in a Jeep on Safari in Africa dressed in designer Safari clothes made in Italy.
Ana walked back in to the room carrying a rubber bracelet.
"For you." She held out her hand. "It's a friendship bracelet," she said, glowing a rare lipsticked smile at me while handing me the black ring, her name printed on it in thin white letters. How many of these did she have?
"Thanks." I took the bracelet and put it on my chubby wrist. It was a tight fit and pressed into the fat and skin on my arm.
"Do you like food?" Ana asked.
"Of course I do," I said, at that moment imagining crispy bacon and brie on toast drizzled with honey, felt it crunch down on my tongue. Ana grabbed my wrist and pulled the rubber band, letting it go to snap against my skin.
"Ow!"
"You do not like food, you hate food. Understand? Every time you think of food you snap this bracelet. And think of me instead."
I laughed at her pouting lips, her plucked eyebrows crunched up in earnest.
"And this will work?"
"Living proof." Ana smiled a broad toothy smile and twirled like the ballerina on her jewelry box, showing off her tiny middle. Her legs, oh my God, they were the definition of lithe perfection. I noticed she wasn't wearing a bracelet, perhaps she no longer needed something to help her be herself. But then I remembered the scars.

Luke and I had been dating for six months, and things had reached a, you could say, state of transition. We saw each other every Wednesday and hung out at Liberty's and drank. Every Friday I spent the night at his place and we watched TV and had rough sex before going to sleep. It was an ordinary relationship, nothing special or fairy-tale about it, but I did like sleeping in his bulging, tattooed arms. He was incredibly strong, he could easily strangle me in my sleep or cut my throat with his hunting knife that he kept in his bedside table, he said. He liked to joke around that I must behave, or else.
I was excited by his raw and untamed manliness.
It was not the same relationship it had been when he was trying to get me naked and into bed. He stopped trying to seduce me and after a while he just seemed to tolerate me. We told each other 'I Love You' but I knew we were both lying. We were both waiting for something better to come along, and if it didn't we would probably get married and keep waiting until we died, lying next to each other in the sprawling sea of Colma cemetery still waiting for someone better to bring us better flowers or cry better tears.
He scared me, and to be honest, I liked the fear, the roller-coaster of the unknown. The way he looked at me sometimes, as if I was the cause of everything bad in his life. The passion I was attracted to when we met had transformed into a thinly disguised aggression. The way he controlled me. The way he pushed me down onto the bed and came on me, never inside me because he hated even the possibility of having a child. Always pushing me, me always pushing back. Sometimes strangling me when we had sex and me sometimes loving that feeling of being so light-headed and close to the edge. I was entertained by him. I was not in an abusive relationship.