Voices
I remember trying to learn how
to be a kid again and failing, trying to make duck beaks out of
Pringles, trying to do flips on the
trampoline, trying to eat at my
old favorite restaurant, an allyou-can-eat sushi buffet. But I
couldn’t. All I could think about
was that 14 Sour Cream and Onion Pringles had 140 calories,
that jumping on the trampoline
burned fat, that I hadn’t eaten all
I could eat in a long time.
From ages 11-20, my relationship with food vacillated between
high points, when I was healthy
enough to get my period but still
obsessed with my weight, and low
points, when I stopped getting my
period all together. During these
nine years, I resented my period
when I got it and was indifferent about it when I didn’t. This
changed last March. It may sound
overly simplistic, but it finally
dawned on me that I was suffocating — and that it was my own
hands around my neck. I finally
admitted to myself that I wasn’t
healthy and that I hadn’t been
healthy in a long time.
But realizing you want to be
healthy and becoming healthy are
two very different things. I had
grown up with anorexia. I didn’t
ISABELLA
HUFFINGTON
HUFFINGTON
03.17.13
quite know who I was without
it. But I recognized that anorexia
and I were two different things.
And that was a start.
I started gaining weight. It
wasn’t easy. In fact, I think it
was the hardest thing I ever did.
People talk about looking in the
mirror and not recognizing their
own face. I knew my face; what
I didn’t recognize was my own
mind. I learned that just because
On my 12th birthday,
I refused to eat my birthday
cake, and that is when my
mother panicked.”
I think something doesn’t mean
it’s true. I went from regarding
the voice in my head that told me
I was fat and worthless and undisciplined if I finished the salad
on my plate as the voice of truth
to seeing it the way I see Fox
News: sometimes funny, often
dangerous, but rarely true.
I finally got my period again
in July. And this time,
I was ecstatic.
Isabella Huffington is a junior
at Yale majoring in art history.