Introductions
Who Is This Girl, Anyway?
Let’s just get this out of the way: my name is pronounced “Yoo-nah,” like with a soft “J.” If you call me “Joo-nah” with a hard “J,” I will get horrible flashbacks to roll call on the first days of school for seventeen years of my life. Please don’t do this to me. The reminder of outfit choices alone is enough to make me want to crawl into a hole in the ground like a human gopher. I was born in Albania, and at age four I had a really severe allergic reaction to a common cold medication, which basically left my vision severely impaired. Before you freak out—it’s OK!! I’m fine! My eyes are the reason my family and I left Albania and came to America. They’re the reason I have gotten to do all the awesome things I’ve done and to meet all the awesome people I’ve met. If it weren’t for that allergic reaction, I’d be married with sixteen kids, raising goats and chickens in a rural eastern European village! Plus, I get to cut lines at Disney World now.
I’m joking, I don’t. But wouldn’t that be awesome?! My vision is largely irrelevant to this book and this story, but I need you to know so that when I make blind jokes, you’ll chuckle to yourself instead of thinking I’m a callous oaf. To give you a sense of what I can see, imagine looking through a very, very foggy window twenty-four seven. Faces are usually blurry blobs, text on my computer has to be an inch high for me to read it, and glass revolving doors are the bane of my existence—but back to our main topic at hand.
I was never technically “overweight” but also never “skinny.” I grew up with two very thin sisters and two very Albanian parents. This meant that I got a lot of comments: “You have such a beautiful body; if only your stomach wasn’t so chubby.” “You and your sisters just have different body types; you’re much more like me and your grandfather … doughy.” “Juna, I have a great idea! Your sister could be a model.… and you could be her agent!!!”
As we all know, every little girl grows up dreaming of being her sister’s modeling agent.
Like any good immigrant child, I took these comments to heart and started doing crunches at age eleven during commercial breaks in my Saturday morning cartoons. I knew what “mountain climbers” were at age twelve. I knew that I could not eat two pieces of pizza at piano recital receptions. I knew to say no or “only a little” when offered cake at birthday parties. And I was acutely aware that my sisters could wear tank tops and shorts with no commentary from our parents, but when I did, it was as if I were making my debut as a porn star.
To be fair to my incredibly hardworking parents and beautiful, loving sisters, a lot of my attitudes about bodies, food, and exercise came from places far outside my family (and I’m not just saying that because I know they’ll be reading this, hee-hee). Among my friends, we religiously talked about how we could lose weight. As prom approached, Akirah bought a waist trainer and wore it every day, telling me how it “must be working” because she could barely breathe, while chomping on her favorite lunchtime delicacy: two bags of Hot Fries. Julia, another friend, would update me weekly on what new comment her mom had casually made to her that week: one time it was “cottage cheese knees”; another it was “thunder thighs.” Pretty creative stuff.
Even the adult women I knew—piano teachers, family friends, mentors—always seemed to be on diets and practically bursting to tell me about them. I remember thinking that rice cakes and dry salads must just be “acquired” tastes that came with maturity, the same as black coffee or alcohol. It was only when I started my own calorie counting that I realized these were common “diet” foods. It pains me to look back and realize that none of my friends were “overweight”—not that that would make the behaviors any more condonable. But just the thought that all these fifteen-year-old girls, regardless of body size and shape, were even at that age trying to be thinner is particularly sad to me after reviewing all the research on intentional weight loss.
All the women in my life talked constantly about how much they hated their bodies and how I would “understand when I was their age.” Oh, what a future to look forward to: condemned to a life of salmon and sparkling water, and a body that stayed the same slightly squishy mass, hovering approximately fifteen pounds above an “acceptable” weight, no matter what you did. Desserts were out of the question, unless you spent the entire time making sure everyone knew how “bad” this was and how you “really shouldn’t.” Truly inspiring.
My parents were insistent on my losing weight, and I was insistent on never giving them the slightest inkling that I was listening to them. So I hid all of my “weight-loss” behaviors as much as possible. But the truth was that I was dying to order supplements online, weigh myself without hiding the scale, and openly eat leaves and drink gallons of water without being judged by anyone. And college was my chance.
When I got into college, everything went into overdrive. Firstly, I had fulfilled every immigrant parents’ wildest dreams and gotten into not just any Ivy, but the Ivy: Harvard College. This did make me feel like the shit for approximately 2.5 seconds, until I realized the minute I set foot on campus that every single person there was infinitely more accomplished than I was. I lived in a dorm, where no one watched how much or how often I ate. No one saw what packages I received. No one monitored my exercise. I could do whatever the hell I wanted. And for me, that wasn’t partying or drinking alcohol; it was crash dieting and obsessive exercising. As you can tell, I was obviously one of the cool kids.
Freshman year was an absolute blast; I made almost no friends, spent all my time alone practicing piano (I wanted to be a pianist once upon a time), and went hard core into operation Finally Be Hot for Once.
For breakfast: fruit.
Lunch: salads and Greek yogurt.
Afternoon snack: a run on the treadmill.
I was a rewards member at the GNC. I got my first bottle of garcinia cambogia weight-loss pills and quickly hid the bottles at the back of my underwear drawer so my roommates wouldn’t see them. This would be the magic thing I had been waiting for. I had seen Dr. Oz rave about it in YouTube clips, and he’s a doctor, right? This secret mission of losing weight gave me a purpose: it made me feel like there was something I was actively working on, which, once achieved, would solve all my other problems along with it. It was certainly easier than facing the fact that I was not really making friends the way I thought I would, and I had no idea what I wanted to major in.
At the end of freshman year, I looked amazing: I could see my abs, was constantly showered in compliments, received heartfelt apologies from my family and enemies for their past digressions, and had so many guys hitting me up that I created a separate calendar on my phone called “Date Nights.” My sister even became my modeling agent!
Not.
I was the heaviest I had ever been and gained the “freshman twenty.” Ever heard of it? It’s when you gain the oh-so-familiar “freshman fifteen,” but being the overachiever you are, you decide to go the extra five miles. “How did this happen?” you may be asking yourself. “Weren’t you not eating? And exercising? And in general, not going out because of your mild yet potent social anxiety?” Yes, yes, you are very right, my wise and insightful reader, but I have not told you about my snack drawer.
The bottom drawer of my desk in my freshman dorm was gigantic. Almost a foot and a half tall. And every two weeks, my dear mother, bless her heart, would bring me gifts from the utopian wonderland of the Costco snack aisle. Single-serving peanut bags and granola bars, all in big bulk boxes that fit perfectly in the black chasm at the bottom of my desk. They were all “healthy” snacks, and the perfect size for a little pick-me-up mid-homework or between classes. The problem was, I never ate them “as a snack”: I would starve all day long and run until those little numbers on the treadmill finally read “400 kcals,” and then come home to work. By the time it was getting dark outside (at the ripe New England time of 2 P.M.), I was hungry.
I would be working on some economics or psych paper, clock ticking away, music thumping around me from down the hall, and I would reach down and eat one 300-calorie pack of peanuts. The second the fatty nut touched my tongue, it was like heaven. I was eating so little dietary fat at this point, even the slightest morsel would make my mouth water. I would blink and, next thing I knew, had eaten four packs, my lips puckered from the salt. Four packs … four packs … I would frantically do math and feel my face getting hot and my heart thumping as I realized I had eaten an entire day’s worth of calories in the span of six minutes. Panic would set in. I would do more quick calculations: if I skipped breakfast and lunch the next day and ran extra on the treadmill for two days, I could still make everything work. Needless to say, it did not work. This was the beginning of my eating disorder (more on this in chapter 8).
Copyright © 2023 by Juna Gjata and Edward M. Phillips
