An entry written with lemony teeth and cold feet
Saturday, Nov. 13, 2004 - 16:55

I'm toxicleansing my body. Not because I don't think my body's natural cleansing is insufficient or anything, and not because I felt like I needed to or anything, but just because my mom and two of my sisters are doing it. Regardless of what I proclaimed in my last entry, I am a sheep.

I'm on day two of three days of ingesting nothing but lemon juice mixed with water and honey. Also I have to take this horrible fiber stuff that smells like celery and onion and is very bitter. It's horrible.

After ingesting only this lemon stuff for three days, you can drink either tomato juice or carrot juice and nothing else for two days, and then you add fish and chicken for a couple days and stuff like that, all the while taking the horrible bitter celery-onion powder. The whole thing lasts ten days, I think, and afterwards I'll be cleansed and toxin free.

Last night I was lying in bed and my stomach was making weird gurgles and my teeth were all citrusy and I was thinking about food and I decided that I would cleanse myself no further. But then I weighed myself this morning and, after only one day of drinking basically lemonade, I weighed only a couple pounds more than I did at the height of my anorexishness of last summer, which is at least five pounds less than what I've been weighing recently, if not more. So then I decided to keep doing this to see what happens.

If nothing else I've learned that my body responds to fasting fairly well.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while but have always lacked the gumption. I don't think I've written about my little eating issue since last summer when it was happening, so here's a little summary/update:

I sort of started eating very little, right, like one or two small meals a day, and I didn't mean to do it, there were just other things going on in my life. Then after a couple weeks of this I got on the scale and saw that I weighed less than I thought I did, and then I realized that I hadn't been eating much. And so my brilliant head came up with this: not eating + me = skinnier. And so then I kept on not eating much, and I was doing it on purpose, and I liked being able to control that, I felt like I finally had found some self control and I really liked that. I was also going jogging four or five days a week, and then I also got a job as a maid, which isn't physical labor per se, but it's a physical job, you run around and sweat a lot. Then after a couple weeks of not eating on purpose I talked to someone about it and stopped doing it. I'd known what I was doing and I knew it wasn't good, but I didn't care and I liked it.

So then I was eating three meals a day again but still jogging and working and swimming a lot, and the meals I was eating were still on the small side, and I kept on losing weight. Then I went to Australia for two and a half months and I didn't have a lot of money and I'd secretly planned to not eat much while I was there in order to lose weight and save money.

However, fortuitously, there was an obviously anorexic girl at the first backpackers hostel I stayed at in Sydney. When I first saw her I felt disdainful and I scoffed, "Look at her, she's let it get out of control. She's obviously anorexic, she's let our secret out." And I felt superior because you couldn't tell with me. I wasn't skinny, I was just normal, finally, and it wasn't out of control with me. But then after a while I looked at her more, and she was skeletal and her hair was disgusting, and I thought, is that what I want? Is that attractive?

I thought, how skinny do I want to be? What will be good enough? Because I'll lose three pounds and get to my "ideal" weight, but that won't be good enough so I'll lower that number five more pounds, and I'll get to that and it won't be good enough, and I knew it wouldn't end. I still looked the same to myself at 128 that I did at 138.

So then I decided to stop being retarded, and so every morning I would make a conscious decision to eat that day. And after a while I didn't have to make that decision anymore, I'd just eat. And I haven't been as skinny as I was last summer and usually I'm okay with that.

I haven't been able to jog lately either because I thought I broke my foot this summer. A few weeks ago I got it xrayed and apparently it's not broken, but it still hurts and so I can't go jogging. And I'm more okay with that than I should be. I'm really lazy.