Nathalie's Reclaiming Mental Health Story

When I was 15 years old, I told my pediatrician that I ate very specific foods at very specific times of the day, and when my eating didn’t go exactly to plan, I made myself throw up. She nodded and then left the room. When she came back, she handed me some papers, the same way that my teachers handed out worksheets in class. Each paper was titled with a different word that I didn’t recognize.

“You have anorexia and bulimia,” she said.

I remembered how, in middle school, I bought one of those celebrity gossip magazines at the grocery store. The cover featured Demi Lovato, and it talked about how she used to starve herself all day, then eat everything in her cupboard at night, and then make herself throw it all up. I read the words “binging and purging.” I remember feeling so sad for her, but thinking it would never happen to me because things that happen to celebrities didn’t happen to normal people.

So I said to my pediatrician, “No I don’t, because I only do it sometimes.”

I left the doctor’s office with my new handouts and a lollipop for my troubles.

There was a time when what, when, and why I ate never crossed my mind. But when I was 12, I remember coming home from school with a new fact I’d learned.

“Did you know that when you eat bread, it all just breaks down into sugar in your stomach?” I said this to my mom, a gastroenterologist. She giggled, enviously, at my simplified outlook on the world.

These were the years when I begged my babysitter to take me to Cold Stone every day after lacrosse practice. She’d say, “Only if you eat the whole thing.” I would order cotton candy ice cream with fudge, caramel, and gobs of cookie dough. I scraped my cup clean every time, and then I’d make a toasted plain bagel with Nutella at home. When dinner was served shortly thereafter, I’d use my fork to scrape my grilled chicken and broccoli onto my dad’s plate. My stomach had no room left, stuffed with foods that I had learned all break down to sugar in the end.

My father is a facial plastic surgeon, an expert in making people more attractive. And my mother, the gastroenterologist, knows exactly what to eat to be “healthy.” But my parents never tried to fix my 12-year-old diet. When I gave my dinner to my dad each night, I’d call him my garbage disposal, and he’d return a gaze that said, Again? but his judgement ended there. I believe they were concerned about my food waste more than anything.

I sustained my Cold-Stone-and-Nutella-bagels diet until I grew breasts in eighth grade. Puberty is terrifying for adolescents. Adults avoid change like a sickness, scared of a new routine and way of being. But in puberty, adolescents have no choice. My shirts that used to drape off my body began to hug my chest, and training bras simply didn’t do the trick anymore. I bought bras that were a size too small, to hide them. The worst part was that I was navigating the change alone, as most of my friends still had boards for chests.

During puberty, I learned another fact: breasts are made mostly of fat. So, if I was growing breasts, it must have meant that I was getting fat. I told myself this as I entered high school. At 14 years old, I could look 18 with some makeup and a low-cut shirt. Instagram taught me to look and act older than my age, which meant to have breasts, but not too large, and to have a thin waist, but not too thin. After a beach vacation, I posted an edited picture of me in a bikini. Smooth the face, pinch the waist, and enhance the muscles. Fruit and spinach replaced bread and pasta. I convinced myself that I was lactose intolerant so that no one would ask me if I wanted ice cream or “cheese-on-that?”

My body caught the attention of a boy. He and I were in the same math class. We would FaceTime to do our math homework together, which turned into me doing his math homework for him. I liked him for his charm and the validation that he gave me: if I didn’t like my body, at least a boy did. And so, the more attention he gave my body, the more I paid attention to my body, and then he liked my body more, so I liked him more.

At the same time, I was flying all over the country for lacrosse camps and tournaments. I played anywhere between 2-8 hours of lacrosse each day. I complained, but I secretly loved how much I got to exercise. I used it as an excuse to eat pasta and bread again. I fueled and refueled my body based off how many hours I exercised.

But, lacrosse went on pause in August, so I stopped eating. In 14 days, I lost 15 pounds. One day, I woke up and decided to be lactose intolerant again. I allowed myself to eat celery sticks, hummus, salad, and one egg at a time. I took daily pictures of my waist to document my progress. My waist was never quite thin enough, though; it wouldn’t be until I disappeared completely.

During this time, my family visited Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While hiking the Tetons, I bought a sandwich with mayonnaise so that it would spoil in the sun, and I would have nothing to eat. I made my family turn around because I was nearly passing out hiking. Feeling guilty about my lack of exercise, I ran four miles when we got back to the hotel.

Later that night, my mom came into my hotel room. She lowered herself slowly onto my bed, as if the bed was as delicate as the subject matter at hand.

“Dad and I think you look too thin,” she said.

“I’m just sick of eating pasta and carbs all the time,” I lied. “And I’m not playing lacrosse, so I’m just not as hungry and I just don’t look as strong.”

I don’t remember the rest of our conversation because the only thing that mattered was that someone called me “thin.”

There are a few memories from August 2016 that I will never forget. One night, my mom found me with my head in the toilet. We had pizza for dinner, and I was trying to get rid of it. It was the first substantial meal I had eaten in two weeks, and when we locked eyes, our eyes were glossy with understanding.

The next morning, my mom asked her friend, an athletic trainer, to come talk to me. I didn’t know the word at 15 years old, but this was an intervention. I’m sure he told me all about what, when, why I need to eat, but everything went in one ear and out the other. I ate a piece of cold pizza in front of them to show them I understood.

When they made me start eating again, I started running four miles each day. My foot began hurting, but I didn’t stop. I was seeing the boy from my math class in a few weeks, and I couldn’t lose all the progress I had made.

At the end of August, a group of our friends met up at the beach. I was so excited for the boy to see the progress I had made on my body.

That night, he had sex with me when I said I didn’t want to have sex with him.

“Please,” he whined.

“Okay,” I complied.

It hurt and I felt suffocated. I felt like a grown woman and a total whore, and I thought that they may be one in the same.

At 15 years old, I struggled to comprehend what had happened to me. I spoke few words for a week. I wouldn’t let anyone get within an arm’s length. Each night, I’d jolt awake, suffocating, hysterical, throwing pillows, punching air, pulling my hair. I’d been cracked in two.

I first spoke about the beach incident with my therapist, then my mom. It seemed like everyone knew something I didn’t, like I had spinach in my teeth and no one would tell me.

I kept running. He didn’t love me, which made me want to eat everything, which meant I had to keep running. I ran so much that I broke my foot, and when my foot healed, I made new eating rules. I wasn’t allowed to eat carbs after 6PM, unless it was the night before a lacrosse game.

The rest of high school came and went like the ocean’s tide. I was pummeled at times, pulled into a riptide, overthinking every meal. These times often ended in my eating everything else before I ate what I wanted in the first place. But other times, the water was calm. Eating felt simple; I ate what I wanted until I wanted to stop.

During my senior year, I strung along enough calm eating days to convince myself that I had overcome my eating disorders. I had been accepted to Brown where I would play college lacrosse, so food became “fuel” for my sport. I wrote my college essay about conquering anorexia and bulimia, and then I gave a speech about it to my entire school. I was the girl who handled adversity, who lived to tell the tale.

And then, I relapsed. When the pandemic hit during my first year of college, I was pulled right back into that riptide, trying to equalize my calories to my exercise. That year, I made myself throw up after binging at Christmas dinner. I peered at myself in the mirror afterwards. Through a blurry gaze, I asked myself, Who are you?

I am an anorexic and bulimic girl in recovery. I’ve realized that you don’t get over these diseases like the annual flu. They’re dormant at times, and they resurface at inconvenient times. Playing college lacrosse helps because anorexia isn’t an option: I have to eat to have energy. But—sometimes—my body looks bulkier here, and squishier there, and I restrict my eating accordingly.

The looming question lately is What happens once lacrosse is over? 14 years of using my body to serve a sport all comes to an end this May. I’m entering uncharted territory. Perhaps I’ll become the lost 15-year-old again with self-inflicted lactose intolerance. Perhaps I’ll revert even younger, back to my blissfully ignorant Cold-Stone-and-Nutella-bagels diet. Or perhaps, I’ll stay in this space where I look in the mirror and finally say, “Okay.”

About the Author

Nathalie is currently a senior at Brown University. She is majoring in English Nonfiction Writing and plays for the Brown Women’s Lacrosse team. Nathalie has a history with anorexia and bulimia, beginning in high school, and she continues to navigate challenges with disordered eating as a college athlete.