The first thing people noticed about Ingrid was her frame. People frequently commented on how slender she was, willowy, lithe, they employed every synonym of the word. Strangers she didn’t know demonstrated how they could wrap their fingers all the way around her cinnamon stick limbs. In the bathroom, girls would sigh to her about how they wished they could lose weight. Someone once told her she could be a dancer, she had the perfect body for it. She had a fragile beauty about her, like she could blow away in the wind, so easily broken.

When her friends told her they wished they had been blessed with a fast   metabolism, she didn’t have the heart to tell them she had ruined hers, making it so her body clung to every bit of food, paranoid about starvation. When they urged her to “show off your body more instead of wearing all those layers” she couldn’t tell them how it’s because she’s always cold. When she made a tiny plate of rice and could only bring herself to eat a few grains before feeling sick her cousin said “I wish I had your self control.” She bit her tongue, not knowing how to tell her that she had none anymore, even if she wanted to eat for, she couldn’t physically do it. When she stood up she had to lean against a wall until the rush of dizziness passed. Even the short walk to the kitchen left her weak heart pounding and made her joints ache. As time passed, people began to look at her with concern. They eyed her angular features with confusion in their eyes. “Why would she do that to herself?” Strangers seemed to say. They saw her thinning hair, dry skin, and listless eyes, and gawked.
When Ingrid went out, which became less frequent as her energy was so low even with hours of sleep, people called out of car window things like: “Get some meat on your bones” and various expletives. She lost interest in almost everything, too tired and preoccupied by thoughts of food eating her up. Her parents tried to help her, but they didn’t know how to fix her, it was as if their little girl had disappeared and had been replaced by an apathetic skeleton.
Therapy came next, a slow but vital inch towards progress. Some days she’d sit on the floor for hours, too unmotivated to get up, wondering if she could ever be fixed, or if she even wanted to. Everytime, no matter how long it took, she got up. Even with bad days, she soon found her appetite returning, and soon food began to have taste, and she could eat without wanting to cry. Her skin once again had a youthful rosy glow, and she had an increase in energy. It was hardest to accept the weight gain, and to change her skewed body image. She knew it would be a long time before she could be truly healthy, and she’d aged her body many years that she could never get back. Although most people were glad to see the change what terrified her the most was those who told her how she looked better before, those who merely acknowledged the aesthetic differences in her body rather than how unhealthy she had been.