Back in my hardcore bulimia/anorexia days, I weighed a full 10 lbs less than I do now.
My main food items were apples, lettuce+mustard (both nearly calorie-less), and biscuits.
Why apples are especially repulsive now requires an explanation.
I’d eat usually one or two things a day. I’d cut up an apple into slices and eat one in the morning, one when I got home, one for dinner, and one before bed.
Even though I’d be empty, I still tried to purge. I’d go and throw up the yellow bitter bile that boiled in me because my stomach over produced it. Ironically, throwing it up just made it worse.
Then after I’d go and eat an apple slice.
So there I was: exhausted, crying, head pounding like the skin of a bodhran, and then the acid from my stomach eating the rash to the left of my chin deeper and the acid in my stomach still churning, but now churning the apple so hot that, like the way a collapsing gas cloud in interstellar space forms elements lighter than iron, the bubbles break from the top in a mild burst of brown grease, which then congealed into fat at the bottom of my stomach to accumulate until I gain the strength to lose weight the right way.
Or so that’s what it felt like.
I would get so caught up in the image of what I was doing, the fact that there was warm vomit just sitting in my stomach waiting to be freed, that I wouldn’t realize what I was doing.
This phase of my eating disorder went on for about a month, during which I lost 10 pounds.
I felt like one of the kids in those drug commercials: deflated and smooth. I loved the feeling.
I remember staying up all night playing computer games and feeling like 100 lbs but also like a cancer patient.
All the pictures of me from that time were on my boyfriend’s phone, but sadly in a fit of broken desperation with a hint of rage, he deleted all the pictures of me he had (among other things). About two and a half years worth.
Aside from that, I also can’t eat apples for another reason.
Band camp, sophomore year. I was in the bandroom (this was during my low point above) when Nick got there and came up beside me eating an apple. He tried to talk to me but because I was on the verge of a complete meltdown and was choking back tears to the point that it physically hurt, I just shrugged him off and looked at the floor. He got mad and snapped at me and left me alone, not before throwing his hardly eaten apple away and making a big deal about it (I was adamantly trying to get him to eat more).
Another related memory is from this year. During band camp, when we had fruit breaks, Nick’s mom would be there holding an apple she saved for me.
Every day.
My flute case by the end of my freshman year had about 170-80 apple stickers on it. Everyone thought I loved them, so they gave me them, so I took it as they were encouraging my eating disorder.
Apples turned into constant reminders that I wasn’t good enough or thin enough, and that I needed to only eat one a day, but nothing else but diet cokes, lettuce, black tea, and water.
But conversely, they turned into reminders of how far I’ve come.
I’m no longer purging so much my throat bleeds, that I have acne to the left of my chin from acid, I don’t eat bags of lettuce with mustard in there, and probably the lowest of my life: I don’t purge into plastic bags and hide them in my room until I can dump them down the toilet, usually by then they were decomposed and bloated with gas from said deterioration. I did that so much, there, to this day, is a mold spot where the backpack was that I hid them in.
The reason I said all of this is because I tried to eat one this morning and gagged.
