Behind My Smile
How I Recovered from Bulimia
By Lori Henry
Smashwords Edition
© Copyright 2011 Lori Henry
Cover photo of Lori Henry by Kevin Clark Photography
This article first published in FLARE magazine in 2008 and expanded for rethinking EVERYTHING magazine in 2010.
Table of Contents
Behind My Smile
Everything looked perfect from the outside: I had accomplished the things that were important to me – achieving honour roll grades, becoming a role model at my dance studio, and being popular in junior high. I excelled at tap dancing and was even allowed to go up on pointe shoes that year in ballet class, quite the feat for someone who never wanted to do pliés and jetés. It was all such a pretty picture for those who believed in my bubbly deception.
Behind my smile, though, was a completely different image. I spent my time in school lying to those around me, skipping classes to binge on fast food, running on the treadmill until I could barely stand, and nodding off in class from the sheer exhaustion of it all. Yet somehow, no one knew I was bulimic.
It started when I was 12 years old. No, I remember being seven years old and comparing my thighs to my best friend Melissa’s and feeling FAT. Looking back at old photos, though, I was never an overweight kid. In fact, I was quite cute and, because of having a very active childhood, my body was fairly fit. Maybe it was the teen magazines I saw on the newsstands, the language adults around me used when talking critically about their own bodies, or maybe I picked it up from TV. I don’t really know. I do remember seeing the thin people on my favourite shows and they always seemed happy or, if they were going through something dramatic, they always did it so glamorously.
During that transitional period from elementary to junior high school, I wanted to be in the thin and glamorous category. Forget feeling awkward or going through teen angst, focusing on a diet soon became a much simpler task for me to deal with. If I had the perfect body, everyone would like me, right? Maybe if I cut out meat, ate less and started working out, I’d lose weight and gain praise for my effort. I sure did like being patted on the head for doing good things and pleasing everyone around me. And having a sculpted body would certainly help me in dance class, where I stared at my thighs in the mirror four days a week, seeing them as flabby extensions of my fleshy stomach, when in reality I had an average-sized body for my 5’2” frame. This distortion I blame almost wholly on teen magazines: by the end of elementary school, I read them like bibles and compared myself devotedly to the glossy models who graced the pages.
So I dieted. I focused all my energy on my body and forgot about the pressures of fitting in, keeping top grades, and feeling awkward at an age when awkward is a right of passage. My new plan was to keep dancing four days a week, maybe five, run on the treadmill everyday for an hour – even if I had already danced – eat only fruit, veggies and grains, and let no one distract me, not even my friends. Especially my friends. They were now second on my priority list, the first being to get skinny at all costs.