Mia
56 kg

A bird's mother throws up food to feed it.
My mother spooned out a half-portion of mashed potato into my plate and cut the fat off my steak, despite my health-nut father grumbling that we all needed some fat, that some fat was good fat in moderation… that lecture I'd heard over and over every time we had a meal together. I desperately wanted to move out and not have them hovering over me, going to the bathroom after me just to check.
We had to eat a balanced diet, which meant gorging myself on disgusting animal parts and their favorite throat-cloyingly bland quinoa that tasted like a pile of termites. They loved saying quinoa, gloating every moment they knew how to pronounce it.
Pass the quinoa, darling. Have you had enough quinoa, darling? Give you sister some more quinoa.
My poor Addy, her face a carnival of emotion every time they put a bowl in front of her, starting with a look of disbelief, then exasperation that faded slowly to sullen acceptance. Other kids had cocoa pops and chocolate milk, she had to deal with food, to get through it. Then she'd glare at me and her eyes would say, this is all your doing.
They had changed their classic 'there are kids starving in Africa' speech after Addy asked them 'Just how do starving kids in Africa benefit from us eating all of this quinoa?' Now my dad had graduated to a psychological manipulation closer to home. How we couldn't afford to waste food because money was tight. How every meal was a blessing. Blah blah blah. Who cared? If we spent our entire lives eating perfectly balanced little meals our only reward would be to get old and die.
I wanted to die young and beautiful, to be an eternal memory of the best I would ever be.
I pretended to voraciously eat my dinner, listening to my parents argue about the cost of food, how we must not waste it on silly snacks and other weaknesses like that, my dad looking in my direction every time he said weakness. We all knew he wanted a boy. What a disappointment it must have been when I emerged from the womb with the wrong equipment, equipment not suitable for throwing balls or riding quad-bikes, but equipment that would break every so often, send me into tears, get me into 'serious trouble, young lady' if I was ever anything but virtuous.
I never wanted to cycle with him, despite getting a very expensive mountain bike for my birthday - (we don't have money for snacks, dear!) - more of an obligation than a gift. I never rode it once just to prove to them I couldn't be bought and that they didn't get me.
My signs of weakness, he would remind me. Every candy bar a humiliating defeat, every salty potato chip a tool designed to ensnare the weak-minded into some corporate-sponsored addiction of calorie-afflicted waste-products. My dad would die if he met Ana, but my crazy mom had met her after school a few times with a twinkle in her eye... my secret friend.
"Why aren't you eating?" My dad broke my thoughts.
"I am eating," I said, pushing the food around, trying to compact the sprouts and hide and change the oh-so nutritious plate just so that it would disappear from my life. Right now someone in the world was eating a big steamy plate of lasagna and not having any guilt about it.
"What's wrong? You've only had half your lentils."
Uh, because I don't like lentils?
Ana had come into my life and now food had changed for me. She eliminated the pretense, the denial we were all in that we were going to live forever if only we ate lentils and beans and sprouts. Ana had won me over with her allure, her flirty eyelashes that promised seduction, wild men, and an oh-so sophisticated social life. She gave me hope, a goal I could reach. Just do ABC and everything will work out.
I wanted the life of a princess, to sip cocktails on yachts with movie stars, not the dull working-class life my parents wanted for me. To hell with equality and all that stuff! I wanted to find a rich prince and nest, damn it, live a life of pampering, eternal adoration, feasting! I wanted to work on my things in my own time, not have some overbearing goof with a sweaty attitude force me to be creative to his deadline.
Under the table I pulled at the rubber bracelet Ana had given me, let it snap against my skin, doing this over and over until the skin around my wrist itched red. Choose… eat or starve? Maybe my dad was right, maybe eating was for the weak.
I switched off from my parent's banter and watched Addie instead, our little munchkin lost in her own world, talking incessantly about her dolls in-between each mouthful of quinoa, despite no one listening. She was explaining in her quiet little voice to no one in particular how her dolls were all going to get married and live in her red wagon. Stupid little runt, she would no doubt have lots to tell her therapist one day. I tousled Addie's hair as I walked past to the kitchen and she moaned at me in annoyance, shaking her anatomically correct Lizzy doll at me. My mom had insisted on buying her kids at least one anatomically correct doll with real lady parts and realistic curves. My sister called her Lizzy doll 'Fatrina'. Addie would spend hours with her dolls, acting out scenes where they tried on each other's clothes or cross-dressed with the male dolls. She would make them wear things that weren't even clothes at all, like an orange peel rescued from the recycling pot or a page torn from a coloring book, or a slipper. She had created a dysfunctional and sometimes nudist family who lived in a perfect pink house and went on perfectly rational diving adventures in the bathtub. But there would always be that one anatomically correct doll among the perfect models, tormented by the others for being different. Addie often had the other dolls tie up poor Lizzy, acting out tragic scenes where they tortured her for being fat and ugly. Over and over again, the same scene played out until some new spark of inspiration let her change mental tracks. But the thing that worried me was that she always let Fatrina enjoy the bondage, let her say things and even sound out things that a little girl shouldn't know about. I wanted to tell my mom that there was something wrong with Addie, but Addie knew a lot of my secrets, like when I purged after dinner, or when I stole food from the fridge after my parents were in bed. Little kids notice everything. She had taken the blame for a lot of what I'd done without caring what people said of her, so I just let her be. If she wanted to be a creepy little girl and torture Fatrina, well, that was her right.
One afternoon after a group play date the parents of some of Addy's friends found out that she was playing with anatomically correct dolls and arranged a conference with my mom. I had listened to them from my room, in that calm but raised voice that showed civilized outrage, discussing why certain dolls were not Christian, not right. Being anatomically correct apparently creeped the hell out of them, they preferred the tiny, big busted and androgynous Barbies and the eunuched Ken dolls dressed in Hawaiian shirts and loafers with no socks.
Poor Ken, I always felt sorry for him. I imagined that like an old, neutered dog he would just lie around Barbie's pink house with big sad old dog eyes while Barbie filled her life with treasure and talked and talked and talked, only calling on Ken when she needed something done, when she needed the machine of him. No wonder he was just an empty shell of plastic muscle. A dildo. I imagined he secretly longed to run free with the GI Joes, to wear rough clothes and kill something, but there would be no killing of anything in this house. Nothing physical anyway.
I had just lost my appetite.
I dumped half of my food in the trash with the inevitable shouting barely registering in my brain. Addy was right, all those starving kids in Africa would still be starving whether I ate this shit or not.

Nothing feels as sexy as thin. I looked at myself in the mirror and took a body-check photo in my underwear, uploaded it to my body-check gallery. Almost five hundred people had subscribed to my photos, mostly other girls, some well manicured guys who cared about thighs and wrists. In a few minutes the trickle of comments and messages of encouragement would come, feeding me in some deep unfathomable way that a bag of Funions never could. I wondered if they thought I cared what they thought, after all they never cared when I was fat. They never encouraged me then, only hated me. The internet was like this giant, seedy casino strip-club of the world, always open, where anyone could wear a mask or pretend to be perfect, give or take something in exchange for something fleeting.
I hated internet porn, not because it objectified women, I loved that it empowered people to explore their sexuality, but because every movie was exactly the same. All the people looked the same, had the same expression, the same bodies, the same hair. They fucked the same way with the same, carbon copy facial expressions. I just wanted something different, something that could truly entertain me. All the porn actors were so perfect, where was the fun in that?
It would be so great if we could swap our internet lives with our real lives, if we could change our name or our shape whenever we wanted.
I had been in denial about who I was for so long that when I was fat I used to upload only photos of me looking good. Not photos of me eating, oh no that was a terrible idea. Never a family photo or a birthday party, because people would see a cake on a table and my fat face and make comments like 'How long did it take you to eat that', and 'What's for dessert?' There was always some guy who was extra mean and called me a pig, jokingly at first, but then it always ended up straight out calling me obese. One told me that if sugar was what made me happy then I deserved to die of cancer.
But those days were gone. Those photos and those comments were deleted forever, now all I had was a real, perfect life. As far as anyone knew I had always been perfect.
Compared to the monster I had been I now looked amazing, a fairy, perhaps not at my ultimate weight yet but everything was where it should be. I had finally achieved Ana's level of perfection. I was so grateful to her for sticking with me and holding my hair when I needed her, for being tough and putting up with my stubborn tantrums. She was a hard friend, no doubt about that, but there was a reason for everything she did. She always knew what to do, no matter the situation. Ana had mastered her life and now it was easy. The rest of us had to work for it.

After my parents finished their nightly argument my mom stumbled in to the room and sat on the bed, holding back her tears and her wine.
"I'm going to divorce him, I swear it," she said, repeating the mantra every few days.
"Mom, check out my stomach." I stood up and showed the triumph of my flat belly.
"You're so beautiful, honey. So pretty. I'm so proud of you."
We talked about her favorite subject, how to look good in a sleek dress. She mimed how to sit in sophisticated grace, swishing her hair as she looked around at all the rich businessmen in their tuxedos, turning down drinks from all but the richest one.
"Are you seeing anyone, dear?" She asked out of the blue, her mind gone from thoughts of my dad.
"Sort of. It's complicated."
"Oh, don't worry about complicated. Grab the loveliest one and hold on. And never let him take you for granted. Never let him think he can just have you any time he wants, he has to work for you, always."
That didn't sound like the guy I was seeing. He was a rough guy, took charge in a way that was exciting to follow. Whenever we made love he kept trying to strangle me, but it was okay because he was the kind of hot that made the consequences worth the resistance. His tight skin had beautiful tattoos, his fists hurt, and I know I was just a girl with a girl crush on a bad boy, I know that, but I thought he could become something, you know, like if he was ruthless with me then he must be good at making money, that he would be able to provide for me and our kids and our home.
My mom told me to twirl around and I did. She promised to buy me a little black dress if I lost a little more weight.