Tag: tw: anorexia

My advisor, a 70-year-old man, saw me at our department colloquium yesterday for the first time in a while (I’ve mostly been at home working, he’s been traveling, etc.) and asked me how I was. I said fine, mostly, just stressed out and busy. He asked me if I had lost weight, gesturing to his face to indicate that that was how he had noticed. (I was wearing a sweater over a button-up shirt, so it would have been hard to tell any other way.) I said yes, and asked if I looked unhealthy. He said no, he thought I looked good, and then said “You can never be too rich or too thin.”

This made me really uncomfortable, not so much because he’s an old man and I’m a young woman (though that makes it weird, too) as because I was anorexic in college, and I weigh about as little now as when the eating disorder was at its worst. (I’m not losing weight on purpose this time; I’ve been losing my appetite due to dissertation and job market stress.) He made a joke about something that’s really sensitive for me, and basically told me that I look good (better? unclear) when I’m at an abnormally low weight.

I probably shouldn’t say anything to him, because that would just make things weirder. Just gotta bitch about it on Tumblr, I guess.

claricechiarasorcha:

philosopherking1887 replied to your post:
…I should probably try to write some more thorki….

“I’ve never had a fic hit 1k kudos I’m a bad writer”? That’s not exactly encouraging to those of us who never had a fic hit 150 (until a tiny post-Ragnarok one-shot became Kudos Georg, but still < 500).

It’s more being self-denigrating to myself because I’m like that, but I will apologise for that comment. I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. :/

As an ex-anorexic, I am well-acquainted with the paradox of self-deprecation that ends up insulting other people.

Me: I’m so fat, it’s disgusting.
Friend: I’m objectively fatter than you are.
Me: Well, maybe you weigh more, but you don’t *look* fat.
Friend: Uh huh.

I weighed myself for the first time in a while and was alarmed to see that my weight had dipped below 90 (I’m 5′1″). I knew I’d been losing weight due to job market and dissertation stress, and my appetite has been really bad recently, but I didn’t realize it was that bad… My home scale might not be entirely accurate, but if it is, my weight is as low now as it got when I was actually deliberately anorexic. Taking birth control masks some of the symptoms (amenorrhea, nonexistent libido), but this is still probably not good.

I’m really not doing it on purpose this time. I either don’t feel hungry before I start feeling lightheaded from lack of food, or I feel hungry but everything sounds disgusting, or I’m too tired/lazy to make myself food, or I can’t finish what I’ve started eating, or hunger quickly turns into nausea. I do still have some bad habits leftover from the anorexic days, including checking calorie counts and recoiling from ones that look high, and just ignoring inconvenient hunger until it goes away on its own. I really gotta stop doing that. So I’m eating an entire 550-calorie tray of Trader Joe’s mac & cheese that’s supposedly 2 servings. Fuck it, it’s one.