The only good thing—and at the time, I considered it a very good thing—to result from my illness and the subsequent tests and surgery was that I lost 20 pounds and developed the habit of eating next to nothing. Being denied all solid food for two weeks because your gastrointestinal tract needs for one reason or another to be empty as possible is excellent training in how to be an anorexic for a freaked-out 14-year-old girl already obsessed with rigor and high standards. If I couldn’t control how my body looked, at least I could control what it consumed. It was a relief to get by on less than 1,000 calories a day.
The culture at large wasn’t yet aware of eating disorders; I certainly didn’t know there was a name for my fear of food. But clearly something was up. People I barely knew would approach me and suggest I gain weight. My mother, who only months before had encouraged me to diet, was frantic to get me to put on a few pounds. I still cringed when I saw my body in a mirror, but refusing food felt good in a way indulging never could. Having people ask me why I was so bony and thin wasn’t as good as having them tell me I was beautiful, but it beat having them mock me for being misshapen.
I eventually got over the anorexia, but not because I got therapy or help or wanted to be healthy. I just realized, as I watched the proportion of my body remain the same even as its silhouette shrank, that starving myself A) wouldn’t actually get rid of my ass and B) was super boring. I still obsessed about calories and exercised though I hated it, but I gave up virtual starvation—not because it could harm me, but because it was futile and dull. If it had done anything at all to make my butt less grotesque, I might never have quit.
Lucky for me, styles change. In the late 1970s, Levi’s button-fly shrink-to-fit original 501 jeans became popular, though they were too practical, comfortable and humble of origin to be high fashion. I was thrilled. They sat a good three inches below the waist, rather than rising to cover your belly button, like Calvins, so there was already less that could go wrong, and though I never understood how they managed this, they really did shrink to fit.
But what made the biggest difference was escaping my tiny rural high school and going to college on a campus with 30,000 other students who wore what they wanted and generally ignored me. Having grown up in a small town where everyone knew everyone else, I had no idea how delicious anonymity could be. More comfortable in my life, I became a bit more comfortable in my body; I abandoned calorie-counting and gained enough weight to be almost chubby, and it didn’t even make me want to die. Then the jeans now considered “mom jeans”—ample through the ass and thigh—came into style and those I could wear, though I still needed a belt to make them fit my waist properly. In 1983, my butt was still too big, but it was no longer an impediment to dressing like everyone else.
And then, at age 21, I went on a mission for the Mormon church and got sent to Taiwan, where I had to wear a skirt and ride a bike every single day, which, as you might know, is excellent lower body exercise.
The wearing-skirts-every-day thing meant I never had to worry about jeans and was one of the best aspects of my 18-month mission, which isn’t saying much, since it was the worst experience of my life. I was so miserable that I forgot to eat or cut my hair, and one day I accidently woke up thin and lovely.