By Anna Davis Abel
Featured Art: “Self-Portrait” by Rachel Hall
“You’ve got to be feeling better!”
Kim, the nurse practitioner I see every month, beams at me from across her desk, framed by a fortress of file folders and half-drained pens. A congealed yellow mass perches in the corner of the tabletop, leering at me like an inside joke I no longer find funny. This is what ten pounds of fat looks like! she’d said once, jiggling it between her hands. You’ve lost four of these!
“I do feel better,” I lie, curling my lips into the smile I know she loves.
I am her only eating disorder patient—a peculiar case in a weight loss clinic that masquerades as a wellness program. They market health here, but the waiting room tells a different story: anxious bodies perch on plastic chairs, flipping through pamphlets promising transformation. The air smells faintly of antiseptic and desperation.
“You’re a real success story, Anna,” Kim says, slipping the reading glasses from atop her head. Her fingers dance over the laptop keys, scrolling, scrolling—pausing. A satisfied hum. “Looks like we’re only twelve pounds away from your BMI goal! And how long has it been since a binge?”
I aim for optimism. “Three months.”
“Amazing,” she gushes, the same way she always does.
I recite my lines as she cues them: How much are you exercising? What does a typical dinner look like? Just how often are you drinking water? I give her the answers she wants, the ones she can copy and paste into my chart without question. We are two actors, rehearsing our script.
At the end, I hand over fifty dollars, accept my prescription, and step back into the waiting room where hopeful eyes flicker toward me. As if I know something they don’t.
All I know is that I’m full of shit.
But it’s not Kim’s fault I’m like this. I actually like her, which is saying something, considering how many versions of her I’ve had over the years—doctors with tight smiles and sharper judgments. Kim is different. Thorough. She checks my bloodwork, talks about balance, never gives me the glazed-over fat people eyes—the ones that dim slightly when she speaks, as if my fat person brain won’t comprehend her wisdom.
Maybe that’s why I’ve lasted this long at the clinic, why I’ve spent a whole year, playing the part.
But I feel the urge creeping in, like hunger after a skipped meal. There’s the craving to vanish. To block the clinic’s number, delete every appointment reminder, and pretend this place never existed. It’s a familiar itch begging to be scratched.
And I know, soon, I will give in.
*
One of my earliest memories is about food.
I was maybe five or six, all straight-across bangs and round cheeks that burned red in the Alabama heat. My mother was working a Saturday shift, leaving me in the care of her boyfriend, a doctor with hair in his nostrils. He had gone grocery shopping. I perched on a kitchen stool, swinging my legs, watching as he unloaded boxes of saltines, cans of green beans, a sweating gallon of skim milk. I talked—about nothing, about everything— until something caught my eye.
A flash of blue.
The box sat among the other groceries. Plastic crinkled at the corners like it had been waiting just for me. Oreos. Double Stuf. The forbidden fruit.
Before I could think, I tore the packaging open, fingers sinking into the ridges of the cookies. One, two, three in my palm—before his voice cut through the moment.
“Hey! Don’t eat all that. Just take one.”
I froze, staring at him like he’d spoken in tongues. Only one Oreo?
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” He scoffed, then said the words that landed like a stone in my stomach, like a scripture I didn’t yet understand.
“Because you’re already wearing women’s sizes.”
I don’t remember what I said, but I know I put the cookies back in the package. Then I climbed the stairs to my small bedroom and shut the door.
For what felt like hours, I thought about the Oreos. It was an itch that started as something small. A tickle in my ribs. An ache in my jaw. But slowly, it grew, spread, until my eyes burned and my little fingers clenched. I couldn’t stop imagining the crunch of the outer shell, the way the icing squished between my molars. My tongue pressed against the back of my teeth like a dog begging at a door. The words looped in my mind, over and over. You’re already wearing women’s sizes. The more I tried to push them away, the more they burrowed in.
When I heard his snoring from the floor below, something in me snapped.
I moved without thinking, creeping along the floorboards I knew wouldn’t squeak. In the pantry, I stretched onto my toes, fingers grazing plastic. The blue box felt cool in my hands.
Like a thief, I scurried into the formal dining room we never used and slid beneath the heavy wooden table. My feet sunk into the plush rug. My back pressed against the table legs. In the hush of the house, I ripped the package open and shoved two whole Oreos into my mouth.
The itch disappeared instantly.
I ate the whole box.
*
I enrolled in my first weight loss program when I was ten years old. It was a local chapter of Weight Watchers that met in the basement of a Presbyterian church. Mama and I were Baptists, but that didn’t stop her from taking us to the meetings every Tuesday evening.
We started each session the same way: stepping onto the scale at the front of the room, one by one. The numbers flashed on a red digital screen, visible to all. I prayed we’d get there early—fewer people meant fewer witnesses. Fewer claps. Fewer pairs of eyes darting from the scale to my face, measuring my progress.
But Mama was a single mother who worked late, so we were usually among the last to arrive. By then, the other women—middle-aged, soft-spoken, devoted—were already seated in a circle. Their voices hushed when someone stepped onto the scale, but their attention never wavered. They watched without watching. Pretended not to listen. And when it was me who lost a pound or two, they clapped the loudest. I was all of their daughters, all of them.
Mama and I never participated in the discussions that followed the weigh-ins. When I asked her why we stayed when some weighed and left, she told me the meetings were for accountability. Weighing around everyone else ensures we stick to the plan.
I understood this to mean the diet was a communal act. Gaining—even maintaining—my weight was failure for all of us. Failing to become smaller would make me the wayward member of our flock, the faltering disciple. So, I thought of those women every time I ate. Every bite was a choice between salvation and damnation. I couldn’t let them down.
Then Mama’s work schedule changed. We stopped going to the meetings, but the battle wasn’t over. “We can do it ourselves,” Mama said. “We know what to do now.”
But what I heard was: Now, you know better.
And worse—Don’t let us down.
*
There’s an assumption about overeating, that it’s a practice in indulgence, gluttony, and excess. It would make sense to think I must be chasing flavor, licking my fingers, reveling in sweetness or salt. But the truth is, for me, taste is incidental. It’s the texture that matters. The way something dissolves on my tongue, the way it presses against my teeth. The food could be bland as paste, and still, if it was the right consistency, it would scratch the itch.
There’s also a myth of chaos. The idea that to eat without conscious thought is an unhinged act, as if I become a shark in a blood frenzy, tearing into bags, spilling crumbs across the floor. But my compulsive eating has never been disorderly. It is measured. It is deliberate. If anything, it’s a ritual I have refined over time.
As a child, I soaked saltine crackers in sweet tea, holding them in a sugary baptism until the squares sagged at the edges. My brother hated it, would call out to my mother in disgust as I fished the starch from my glass. I’d ignore him, smiling, and place the bloated cracker on my tongue, pressing it to the roof of my mouth like plaster. Then I’d wait. Lips puckered, tongue sealing tight, holding it there for as long as it took to dissolve. Then another. And another.
Later, it was grapes—entire bags of them, peeled one by one. I’d strip the skins with my teeth, piling the translucent husks in a neat little mound. I’d hoard the naked fruit, cool and glistening, in my cheek until I had four or five, then crush them all at once, swallowing the juice in slow, deliberate gulps before chewing what remained.
In high school, I became a disciple of dissection. KitKats, Oreos, Nutty Bars—all carefully pried apart, their layers separated like scripture. I’d use my bottom teeth to lift the chocolate coatings, scrape the fillings across my tongue, chew the wafer shells dry so that, when I reached the soft center, the contrast would be even more satisfying. One cookie, one bar, one strip. And then another.
Donut holes. Bakery bread. Marshmallow spirals. Soft pretzels. Reese’s cups. They are my unmentionables. The sins my husband knows I can’t resist, the things he stashes away in his basement hideout like relics. It’s not foolproof—I’ve been known to slink into the shadows, to pry a few free from his hoard—but it helps not to see them, not to know they are there, waiting in the pantry.
Maybe my weakness should embarrass me, but it doesn’t. My husband is a recovering alcoholic. He understands that temptation is half the battle.
*
I didn’t consider that I might have a problem until I was twenty-five.
It was my second year of graduate school, 850 miles from home, and I was the heaviest I’d ever been in my life. My grad school stipend wasn’t enough for the weight loss programs I grew up with, but the stress of my thesis made the itch to eat nearly impossible to resist.
Then I saw an old acquaintance from undergrad, smiling from my Facebook feed. Her cheeks were hollow, her belly button peeking from ultra-short shorts. I gaped. She’d lost what I scientifically classified as a shit ton of weight.
Like an addict chasing a fix, I messaged her: You look amazing! How’d you do it?
Her response was instant. Thanks, girl! I got treatment for binge eating, and the weight’s just fallen off. Vyvanse has been a game-changer!
I googled the unfamiliar stimulant. I was no stranger to medical interventions. Adipex. Orlistat. B12 injections. I’d done them all. But Vyvanse was a drug I hadn’t tried. My heart pounded. How’d you get on it? I asked.
She told me about asking her doctor and that six months in, she was still keeping the weight off. My hands shook as I made an appointment at my university clinic.
But it wouldn’t be that easy.
The doctor listened, nodding, then smiled as if bestowing me wisdom. “Have you tried looking for low-fat recipes on Pinterest?”
I blinked. “It’s not that I don’t know how to eat. I just . . . can’t stop.”
Her brows furrowed. She put a pitying hand on my knee. Fat person eyes looked back at me. “Let’s set you up with a dietitian.”
I nodded, swallowing back tears. The dietitian sat me down in her closet-sized office. She arranged plastic fruits and vegetables between us to demonstrate portion sizes, as if I didn’t know them on my own. The plastic fruits were the same kind my husband’s three-year-old nephew kept in his toy kitchen. She invited me to a support group of middle-aged women who met on Mondays. My body went hot, then cold. I saw digital red numbers behind my eyelids.
Outside, my throat clenched. My eyes burned. I shoved the folder into the nearest trash can and never went back.
*
Seven months after what I now call the Plastic-Peas Debacle, I sat in my grad school’s mental health clinic, stomach twisted in knots. Things had reached a crisis. I only ate in the dead of night, stuffing my mouth until I cried. Then I’d shove the evidence wrappers deep into the trash before my husband could find them. It became hard to pretend I didn’t need some kind of medical exorcism.
The psychiatrist I was assigned was a young Indian woman, gentle but direct. As I picked at a loose thread on my pants, I told her about the night spirals. She stopped me.
“What brings on the crying?”
“Guilt,” I admitted, forcing the tight-lipped smile Southern women wear when we think we’re saying something shameful. “I know I shouldn’t eat that much, but I can’t stop. I was on Klonopin in high school—if you could just write me something like that, I’m sure the eating will stop.”
She tilted her head. “I think you should talk to one of my colleagues, Gillian. Once we get that settled, we can look into something like Vyvanse for those spells.”
Vyvanse. My heart kicked in remembrance. My undergrad friend had gotten so thin on it. Where the psychiatrist saw treatment, I saw salvation. It was a golden apple, nearly in reach.
*
Gillian was thin. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was the paperwork, which specified she was an eating disorder specialist. I glanced around the room—even though it was just me and her there—wondering if I’d somehow wandered into the wrong place. When she took the papers from me, I blurted, “I don’t have an eating disorder.”
“Oh? That’s okay. Why do you think you’re here?”
“Vyvanse is a controlled substance,” I said, reciting the research I’d obsessed over since my psychiatry appointment. “I can’t get it until I show I’m in therapy.”
“And why do you want it?
“To lose weight.”
“And why do you want to lose weight?”
I narrowed my eyes. Was she mocking me? “Because I’m fat,” I said, clipped and cold. She jotted something in her binder, and heat rose up my neck. My voice sharpened. “But I can lose weight. I’ve done it before.”
“Really?”
Exasperated, I rattled off the diets, the programs, the rules I’d followed to the letter. The 500-calorie days when I was 14. The heart patient diet that dictated dinner be a single tomato. The pills, the diuretics, the cleanses. I thought I was proving my discipline, my devotion to the cause. But Gillian heard something else entirely.
“Are you happy when you’re doing these restrictive meal plans?”
I blanked. Happiness? That had never been part of the equation. I’d been told that nothing tasted as good as skinny felt, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant.
At the end of the hour, she didn’t agree to tell the psychiatrist I needed Vyvanse. Instead, she told me to come back in a week. I wasn’t deterred. If I knew anything about myself, it was that I could commit to a plan. I was a good disciple. I could bide my time, the passing days my penance.
*
Months later, I sat on the faded couch in Gillian’s office, clutching the stuffed dog she’d given me so I wouldn’t pick at my skin. I told her about the time I tried to make myself throw up.
“But it didn’t really do it for me,” I admitted.
Gillian, a recovered bulimic, laughed softly. “Why’d you try?”
“I was too full. It seemed like a quick way to relieve the pressure,” I confided. “But it didn’t feel good.”
“And eating until you’re sick and then feeling guilty—does that feel good?”
I frowned. “That’s different.”
“Is it?”
I sighed. “You know what I mean. Bulimia is a real disorder. You can’t just make it happen. It’s about your brain’s wiring. I made myself throw up once, but because I’m not actually sick, I didn’t have to keep doing it.”
Gillian tilted her head. “But you do have to keep eating until you want to vomit?”
I hesitated. “That’s just because I don’t have the willpower to eat right.”
Her lips pressed together. She wrote something in her binder.
Despite meeting for months, we always ended up here, stuck at the same impasse. I didn’t know why I kept coming back each week. I’d long given up on her telling the psychiatrist I needed Vyvanse. Yet, I never missed an appointment. It was its own compulsion, answering her questions with what I thought was obvious but somehow wasn’t.
It wasn’t until I was alone in my car, staring at my hands on the wheel, that I’d wonder: Could I really have a problem?
And even more quietly—Is this really not my fault?
*
That summer, when I went home for a visit, all anyone could talk about was how thin I’d gotten. Aunts I hadn’t seen since Christmas begged for my secret. My mother asked if I’d found a new diet pill. And all the while, I hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about. Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw the same fat girl I always did.
I didn’t own a scale, but my mother kept several. One night, I crept into her bathroom and pulled a digital one from the linen closet. I stepped on and watched its red blocky numbers flickering as it calculated. I held my breath, my heart a drum in my throat, and gasped when the numbers settled. Eighteen pounds—gone.
Disbelieving, I darted to the laundry room where an older scale was tucked between the dryer and a stack of detergent bottles. Instead of the digital reader, this one had the old school ticker display: a disk that spun with applied pressure. I stepped on. The same number stared back.
I sank to the tile, my back pressed against the washing machine. I wasn’t dieting. I wasn’t on any pills. The only thing that had changed was my weekly meetings with Gillian.
Back in her office, I told her the whole story, expecting her to be as baffled as I was. “I don’t get it. I didn’t even do anything.”
“Well, that’s not true,” Gillian offered. When I made a face, she tucked her ankles under herself and answered, “You’ve put in a lot of work, Anna. It’s hard for you to see because you’re in the thick of it, but I do.”
“It just doesn’t make sense. I’ve never lost weight without trying.”
She smiled. “You haven’t binged in months. Why do you think the urges are getting easier?”
I chewed my lip, thinking. The urges that had once swallowed me whole still whispered, but now I could resist them before they took over. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I still get them, but I can stop before I lose control, I guess.”
She nodded. “That’s because you’re not depriving yourself. If you want a cookie, eat the cookie. When you tell yourself you can’t have something, you’re just making it more powerful.”
A memory stirred in me. Sunday school, the tale of original sin. That all suffering began with one woman’s lack of willpower. Eve took one bite of something forbidden, and the world fell apart.
But what if it wasn’t that simple? What if Eve only wanted the apple because she was told she couldn’t have it?
That night, staring at the ceiling, I wondered: What if I wasn’t actually living in a sea of forbidden fruit?
*
“Tell me how it’s going with the Vyvanse,” Gillian asked near the end of our session. It had been two weeks since I started the medication.
“It’s not what I expected,” I admitted. “It’s like someone turned down the volume on a staticky television. The compulsions are still there, but they’re easier to ignore. It’s . . . odd, not thinking about food all the time.”
“And how does that feel?”
I rubbed my eyes and leaned back against the couch. “Confusing. Everything feels less dire. I was so sure that fast food and candy—things you can’t eat if you want to lose weight—were catastrophically bad. But now? I don’t know. What the hell have I been doing my whole life if they’re not?”
Gillian’s gaze softened. “What have we said? There’s no good foods or bad foods. There’s only fuel for your body and prioritizing what it needs.”
“A protein, fat, and carb with every meal,” I muttered, repeating the mantra she’d taught me. “But can it really be that easy?”
“It really is. Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re not. That’s it. Everything else is noise.”
It was devastatingly simple. And earth-shatteringly profound. My throat tightened. I wiped my eyes before the tears could fall. “No one’s ever said it to me like that before. No one’s ever given me permission.”
“Permission to just eat?”
I nodded.
Being fat had always meant that I owed the world a diet, that restriction wasn’t just normal—it was expected. My fatness was a sin to overcome, my cross to bear.
My voice was small when I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever considered what it might be like to live without dieting.”
Gillian’s eyes shimmered, but she didn’t look away. “You just do it,” she said softly. “You live.”
*
In less than a month, I’ll turn thirty. I both am and am not looking forward to it.
There is a quiet comfort in leaving my twenties behind. I know myself better now. I’ve been with my husband a decade, and we are happy. We own our home. I have a job I love, teaching undergrads who remind me of the girl I once was. I have enough money to fill my fridge and wear clothes that bare as much skin as I like. In so many ways, I am living the life the child curled under the dining room table dreamed of.
And yet, there are shadows. I never imagined that five years after first sitting in Gillian’s office, I’d still be battling the demons in my pantry. That twice a month, I’d confess to a new therapist in a different state how little I like the mirror’s reflection. That we’d still talk about the scale, the feel of food in my mouth, the old compulsions with new names.
Once a month, I step onto a scale at Kim’s “wellness” clinic, surrounded by posters of thin women and infographics about Wegovy. It’s the only way to get the Vyvanse I started refilling a year ago. I’d gone two beautiful years without it before the static returned, the itch clawing its way back. My original sin, again.
Turning thirty means I am also thinking of children now. The thought is both tender and terrifying. I know my body will have to grow. The scale will inch higher, and while that is daunting, it’s the after that frightens me most—when there is no life inside me to justify the weight. If I do not “bounce back” like an unspoken prayer, what will they whisper? Who will I have let down?
Yet for the first time in a long time, I want something for me. I ache for the weight of a baby in my arms, for round cheeks and my husband’s kind eyes. I imagine a daughter beside me in the kitchen, fingers sticky with batter. I dress her in ruffles and old-fashioned bathing suits that reveal the perfect swell of her belly.
In every daydream that I see her, she is a happy baby. She has hazel eyes and brown curls, her father’s hands and my nose. Her legs have rolls, her arms too. She is fat. She is loved.
And yet, she is perfect.
Anna Davis Abel is a graduate of West Virginia University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She currently teaches at the University of Alabama and in the Alabama Department of Corrections. She writes primarily women’s narratives but has a special place in her heart for Southern fiction.
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