Katy Price remembers how she would starve herself during preschool, then binge eat a whole box of animal crackers. “I would absolutely hate myself when I looked in the mirror and saw a rolly-polly belly staring back at me,” Katy said, “But I just kept telling myself, ‘Just one more giraffe, just one more llama …’”
Katy Price is five-years old; she also has an eating disorder. “I just didn’t understand why I kept tipping the scale,” Katy recalls. “Mom kept telling me that I was a growing girl,’ but that wasn’t what I wanted to hear.”
Katy pauses, staring out the window at fleshy children playing in the street, while she rubs a strawberry-flavored lip balm repeatedly on her mouth. “I just kept telling myself, ‘If you skip snack time today, maybe you can slip into that 4T you looked so svelte in last summer, instead of this 5T caftan!’”
Katy hurls her lip balm across the room and throws herself onto the floor, kicking and screaming. “I just want to look like a supermodel from a third world country. Is that so much to ask for?”
At six, Mignon Farris understands how Katy Price feels. “I used to dread receiving invitations to birthday parties, because of the ice cream and cake,” Mignon said. “Some of those soccer moms would get so offended if you asked for nutritional information or declined to have cupcake.”
But soon she found a way to have her cupcake and eat it, too. “I would eat whatever I want, then, later I’d slip into the bathroom while Mommy and Daddy were asleep, and stick my Barbie’s legs down my throat to make me throw up. It was horrible, but I kept telling myself, ‘Mignon, just keep purging to you see those sprinkles, okay?”
Now Mignon is learning to take it one day at a time. “I just live in the moment. My only goal for today is to swallow one Flintstones chewable vitamin and keep that Green Dino down.”
Mignon admits that she still faces challenges. “Sometimes Mommy and I will be walking through the Toy Department and I’ll see a new Barbie outfit and think, Gee, I’d look fabulous in that, if only I could drop a few pounds. And then the whole cycle starts over again.” Mignon keeps her Barbie, that now resembles a bi-amputee from the waist down, as a reminder of how devastating her illness is. “If I had known that the constant exposure to gastric acid would burn her legs off, I would have used something else.”
Like Mignon, Chassity Wilson received a wake up call before her eating disorder killed her. “I’d walk into kindergarten, and if I didn’t turn heads, I’d refuse cookies and milk before naptime, because I knew I wouldn’t burn off the calories by just lying there.” Instead, Chassity would go home and ride her Big Wheel bike around her driveway for hours.
“I knew it wasn’t healthy, because I wasn’t doing it for myself–I was doing it for the boys,” Chassity said. “I know I should learn to love myself as is, but the attention from boys is so addictive. I would do anything to have the six year old boys in my class check me out when I came in from recess. I just wanted them to look at me and say, ‘Mm-mmm, I’d like to hit that!’” Fortunately, her fear of cooties has preventing that from happening.
I don’t experience sickness often, however, when the weather becomes unseasonably warm in January, I do sometimes develop a sinus headache. Today was one of those days. I woke up with my head throbbing and took some pain reliever. When that didn’t help, I foraged around in the medicine cabinet and found some sinus medication. I took it, but the constant, throbbing pain remained. I lay in my darkened bedroom with the blinds shut, alas there was still no relief.
People with Obsessive-compulsive Disorder (
