This is the first of three stories that will dive into body image among college-aged people today. Due to the sensitivity of this topic, the main interviewee’s name has been changed to ensure her privacy.
Amy wakes up every morning, and three words begin to play over and over in her head: not good enough. These words twist and turn throughout the day, transforming. Not smart enough. Not pretty enough. Not skinny enough.
Amy is one of over 30 million people suffering from eating disorders in the United States.
According to an article from LiveStrong.com, a healthy weight for women varies quite a bit. With today’s technology, doctors now have the ability to identify the best weight for a person based on their personal weight goals, height and body type. For example, a healthy college-aged woman who is 5 feet 8 inches should be anywhere from 129 pounds to 170 pounds based on her body mass index (BMI). Not every woman is meant to be a size 2.
However, for some girls the number on the scale is still terrifying. This causes many women to idolize others’ looks in the pursuit of the “perfect” body.
For Amy, these comparisons started during her 17 years of dance, when she was in constant envy of the people she shared the stage with.
“I have a longer torso than my legs, so I always needed bigger sizes (in costumes).” Amy said. “If I have a bigger size, that means I must be big. I must be fat, right?”
During her junior year in high school, her insecurities began to expand past the dance studio. She started to see herself in a negative light, even around people she loved.
“It was the first season I wasn’t in a sport, and I felt like I had gained some weight,” Amy said. “I felt I looked bigger than my boyfriend at the time. That’s kinda what started it. I noticed from pictures from the past year I had changed and I didn’t like it at all.”
Her body anxiety hit a new low during the middle of her senior year. During this time, Amy and her boyfriend split and she became obsessed with her body. Over the next year and a half, she began to work out two or three times a day while maintaining a diet of little to no eating. Amy was fully anorexic but could not admit this to herself until years later.
The transition into college life only heightened Amy’s negativity toward her body as she continued her dance career on the Grand View Dance Team. Surrounding herself with other skinny, athletic girls just made her doubt her own body even more.
Amy’s coach, Stacie Horton, experienced similar feelings when she danced at the University of Iowa. While on the team, Horton had to make weight every week based on her BMI at the start of the season.
“I know that when I was in college, I had roommates, I had friends, who didn’t eat,” Horton said. “They were bulimic and anorexic … because if you didn’t make weight on that Friday, you didn’t perform.”
Although the weigh-ins were harsh sometimes, Horton’s love for dance never wavered. After college, Horton went on to be one of the coaches for the Iowa Barnstormers Dance Team before accepting a job at Grand View 17 years ago. After seeing the negative side of dance during her college years, Horton entered her new job with a more positive dance environment in mind.
“If a dancer has been exposed to a negative experience in a studio or on another dance team … my hope is I can have them leave (my program) with a great experience,” Horton said.
Although Amy had a supportive and body-positive environment with the dance team, her body struggles only seemed to increase over the next three years.
At the start of her junior year, her struggle with anorexia took a turn for the worse.
“I struggled with bulimia — bad,” Amy said. “I was sick one time, and my friend helped me throw up. After I was like Well that’s easy, you know, I can do that all the time.”
During the next few months, she began to question her daily actions more and more. Getting ready for a night out with friends led to an internal struggle as she analyzed every choice she made. She would question her hair, makeup and clothing choices over and over again until she got to a point of wanting to just stay in instead.
This self-doubt continued throughout most of her junior year, and her friends began to worry.
“My friends are really concerned about me,” Amy said. “I feel bad for making them worry because I know I have a problem.”
Her friends weren’t the only ones who saw a difference in her. Amy’s mom has always known that her daughter was not confident in herself but never understood how deep her self-hatred was.
“She doesn’t understand why I feel this way, and I hate that,” Amy said as she began to tear up. “She made me. She raised me. She probably thinks I’m like the prettiest girl in the world because I’m her daughter, and I think I’m the ugliest.”
These compliments from her mom can’t change Amy’s low self-image. Many people struggle with taking compliments from others, but for Amy, it’s a little more extreme.
“You know when people tell you that you look good today?” Amy asked. Or your parents are like ‘You’re so pretty,’ or ‘Amy you look so good today for church or something?’ I know they mean it, but I physically, and probably mentally, I don’t believe it. I feel like I can’t.” Amy pauses here and looks at her hands. “Like do we even see the same person?” She continues. I always feel like I am not as skinny as I used to be or I’m not as pretty as I used to be like when I was thinner. But even then, it wasn’t healthy. I just constantly have you’re not good enough going through my head. Which is really shitty.”
This struggle to take compliments and twisting them to have a negative connotation is very common for people who struggle with eating disorders. Annie Zomaya, a contributor for the National Eating Disorder Association and a recovering sufferer of eating disorders, urges people not to compliment people with eating disorders on their looks.
“Our brains are wired differently,” she said. Our thought patterns can be extremely abstract.” “Though you may mean well, there is no guarantee that your words will not be translated into something insulting or triggering. It’s not your fault; it’s not the subject’s fault; it’s just the way things are.”
Although Amy admits she has a problem, she says she is not ready to talk to a professional yet.
“I feel like my problem is stupid,” Amy said. “I feel like I shouldn’t be feeling this way in the first place. Other people have more important problems than me just hating myself. Everyone has an issue. Everyone has a problem. In my head I’m like You need to figure this out by yourself, because you are doing this to yourself.”
According to Grand View Assistant Director of Leadership and Counseling Kenlyn Gordon, refusal to search for help is related to the stigma surrounding eating disorders.
Gordon only sees two to three students a year who are diagnosed with eating disorders but said many of the other women she meets with have anxiety that stems from body image concerns.
“I think the biggest thing is that weight and how you feel about your body is highly tied with shame,” Gordon said. “We know when we feel shame about something, we feel like we can’t talk about it. We feel alone in that.”
The shame that surrounds these conditions caused Amy to feel like a hypocrite in her everyday life.
During her sophomore year of college, Amy began teaching girls ranging from 3 to 13 years old at her old dance studio. While in her classes, she told her dancers they were beautiful no matter what they weighed or the size of costume they wore.
“Making sure that they felt empowered, I felt was like my No. 1 priority,” Amy said. “I don’t want them to end up feeling how I feel,”
The idea of helping others, whether it is with their own self image or just on a daily basis, is one of the few things that distracts Amy from her own worries.
Currently, while working at her nursing clinicals and Certified Nursing Assistant job, Amy finds herself turning her attention from her own insecurities to the problems of her clients.
For Amy, these interactions are helping her healing progress. According to blogs of several women recovering from eating disorders, distractions are the best way to pull a person suffering from an eating disorder from thinking about his or her triggers. Many of them suggest things that take up a person’s full attention. Caregiving is that for Amy.
As Amy transitions into the recovery stage herself, she acknowledges that she has a long road ahead.
“I feel like my body has changed so much with the past four years that I don’t know what my normal is,” Amy said. “I went from really, really skinny my senior year of high school to now, which is probably the heaviest I have been, and I just don’t have a normal.”
Whereas Amy once searched in vain for the perfect version of herself, she now searches for something more attainable but still difficult to pin down. She is looking for her normal, and it might take years to find, but she is making progress.
“(A) healthy lifestyle would be the best,” she said. “But pizza is always a good option and beer’s good too.”