Not Otherwise Specified
i.
My mother told me that when I was born, the first thing I did was vomit blood.
I cried hysterically for months before they could figure out what was wrong with me. She says the lining in my stomach was weak. Doctors tell her I have gastro-esophageal reflux. My grandmother tells her it’s nothing. She’s a colicky baby; it’s normal.
Statistics show that out of four million babies, 35% will have gastro-esophageal reflux (GERD) in their first year. The thing is, human beings are helpless and some do not automatically adjust to their new living conditions. Science says not to worry; she’s supposed to outgrow this.
As a first time parent, my mother didn’t know what to do with all the crying. Somehow, she’d conditioned my baby brain into thinking that the easiest way to feel good was to let it all out, baby burp-vomits to make it all better.
The truth is, I don’t remember when it started.
I do remember growing up always complaining of stomachaches, my dad constantly teasing me that it was just a little bit of gas in my stomach. I never liked bubblegum, but because it was supposed to give you gas and make your stomach feel funny, I wasn’t allowed any of it.
Stomachaches were stomachaches until they started getting more frequent; until they started getting worse; until they started feeling like you’d swallowed a knife and it was stabbing at your gut, trying to force its way out; until rushing to the bathroom meant your lunch would be in the toilet before you could enjoy it and still, the urge to vomit lingers even after you’ve purged everything, when all that are left are bubbles you learn later on to be acid.
The problem was, as a child, they could never get me to eat. What it took was spoon-feeding by force: my sister’s nanny carrying me to the dining table on several occasions. Sometimes, my dad threatening to ground me. Even then, they could only get me to sit still for three bites and then I ran off to play.
Eventually, I was diagnosed with hyperacidity. My understanding of that was: no iced tea. No soft drinks. Nothing too acidic. Sour mangoes to a minimum. Don’t skip meals. Don’t over eat. These days, I take three sips of soda and feel my insides burn. By sixteen, the hyperacidity has developed into a full-blown ulcer. I take Zantac for the pain.
My mom says I’ve had this since I was a baby.
ii.
As of 2011, experts have categorized four types of eating disorders.
The two most popular and officially recognized ones are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The other is the binge-eating disorder. Of the four, the one unknown to most people is EDNOS: Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.
EDNOS, not be confused with anorexia or bulimia, has symptoms of the two combined. It’s easy to mistake one for the other or as a combination of the two. Experts say the signs to watch out for are almost the same — but not quite. It’s severe, but the key word is almost.
Watch out for people with distorted body images. People who restrict eating or compensate by purging and/or too much exercise. It’s easy to fall into the trap of mistaking these people for every other teenager on this planet. There is a need to be wary of that.
Because the eating disorder is not widely recognized, people suffering from EDNOS may not know that they are.
They aren’t always overweight; they aren’t always underweight. They don’t intentionally vomit as often as those who are suffering from bulimia do; they starve themselves on very rare occasions; sometimes the closest thing they get to it is entertaining the thought.
On the surface, they are obsessed with eating healthy, sometimes putting themselves on diets that are “doctor-approved.” More importantly, people suffering from EDNOS always feel the need for exercise, but don’t necessarily follow through with it. A person suffering from it could look as healthy as an athlete but never really feel that way.
Recent studies show that in 2012, EDNOS has become one of the most prominent eating disorders, occurring in people of all ages.
If left untreated, people suffering from EDNOS are at a risk of developing long-term psychological and physical problems that are closely related to the eating disorder to which their symptoms are closely related. Some of these long-term effects include: irritability, self-loathing, anxiety and depression.
iii.
You are 107 on a good day.
#1: When you wake up in the morning, everything is still. You get up from bed and you stare at yourself in the mirror — nothing. Your heart is not pounding fast against your ribcage and you don’t feel the need to rush to the bathroom because you can’t breathe. You ate too much the night before; there were too many options you just had to try; it was your best friend’s birthday; you told yourself you were going to burn it the next day — so what? The good news is, you don’t feel anything.
#2: It’s eleven in the evening. Your running shoes are on the floor, the sauna suit and cling wrap already laid out for use but you are already comfortable. You are already settled in your four-poster bed, watching the brand new parakeets from your window, the ones your brother’s best friend gave him for his birthday. The urge to run is dwindling.
#3: There is a pack of instant coffee on your desk and a glass of hot water filled three-thirds from the rim that remain untouched. You don’t move from your seat and proceed to work without coffee. You tell yourself coffee has high levels of acid which means coffee is bad for your health. Coffee will have you rushing to the toilet, half-regretting the fact that you had next to nothing else to eat. Coffee will leave you with a bad taste in your mouth and a petrifying lack of remorse for consciously choosing to have it that way, so you have none of it. You tell yourself you don’t make room for the things that make you feel bad about yourself.
You are 107 on a good day. And by good day, I mean, ideally.
iv.
My best friend has a habit of squishing my arms when he sees me, making sure to emphasize the loose skin from my once toned triceps, calling me fat. It’s his show of affection — almost a greeting.
Every so often, exasperated, I tell him that if I ever get an eating disorder, it’s his fault. We’ve rehearsed this exchange a million times, perfected it. I complain. He laughs and tells me it’s impossible. I love food too much. I tell myself he’s right.
When he’s around for our twice-a-month catch-up sleepovers, he brings cake and ice cream and peanut butter kisses. He pays for our meals. He says it’s because he has a new job, that it’s his way of giving back for having housed him for almost our entire college life.
One night, while examining himself in front of my mirror, he asks if we have a scale. I took out the batteries, I tell him. He doesn’t ask why.
There was a time where that glass, digital weighing scale was my first thought of the day. The first thing I did in the morning was stand on it, mentally taking note of my “starting value.” If I were home and proximity allowed it, I’d run back to my room just to check if I’d gained anything after every meal, stripping down to bare essentials and sucking my stomach in every time I had to.
The weighing scale, now stashed away with the rest of my unused things, used to sit comfortably in front of my mirror before I decided to remove the batteries, before I decided to put it away.
Every time I had to check my reflection, it was impossible not to step on it. The only way to get a good look at yourself was to take that step and to pray that the numbers don’t go past 110.
I can’t recall the last time I stepped on a weighing scale. In my head, I call that progress, but the truth is: I’m just scared.
v.
By the time my mom gave birth to my little sister when I was five and a half, I had already spent a good enough time alone that adjusting to someone else was completely out of the question.
For the rest of my prepubescent and adolescent life, this unspoken pressure to be better, this imagined constant competition will hound me like a guard dog trained to react to an exploding bomb — always waiting for it, dreading it, my existence secretly revolving around it.
At five and a half, my sister joined gymnastics — recruited into junior varsity for our school after a couple of sessions. Because of that, for years I jumped from sport to sport to sport, one varsity after the next — fencing, softball, firing, tennis, flag football, and occasionally (much to my regret and embarrassment) my batch’s cheerdancing team. Where my sister managed to stick to one sport her entire life (thus far) and excel at it — her bedroom’s walls lined with medals and her bookcase with trophies — I floated along. I tried everything, never really sticking long enough to one, always refusing to compete. Regardless, I’d like to think that one point in our lives we were both equally athletic.
It wasn’t until I hit fourteen and had turned into a walking temper-trap that my parents thought it might be smart for me to take up something that would aid my anger management. There was a boxing gym near my place, and it got to a point that at the height of my anger, I hit my sister one too many times that they figured it might be funny if one day they left me at the door of the boxing gym to fend for myself.
Much to everyone’s surprise, I went along with it and found that I really enjoyed myself. It was there I learned that if you stay long enough, the coaches would eventually take a liking to you. That lost, angry girl who walked into the gym alone and intimidated would soon become a crowd favorite: sparring in the ring occasionally, despite her father’s protests, lifting twenty pounds instead of the five she started with, training religiously, every day after class instead of once or twice a week.
At the time, 115 on the weighing scale was never problematic, it only meant muscle weight, and for a long time, because your body is constantly building muscle, it needs the energy; your brain will be conditioned to thinking that weight gain is a good thing, even when it no longer is.
Two years later, my priorities changed.
I stopped feeling the need to compete with my little sister. I was sixteen and thought I’d gotten nothing out of my chosen sport except the occasional bruised, bloody knuckles and bragging rights that I was tougher than most of the boys I knew. On the other hand, my little sister was eleven and had already competed internationally twice (to be followed by several international competitions in the years to come), already bagged all-around champion several times in local competitions and was unofficially being groomed for recruitment into the Junior National Gymnastics Team of the Philippines. What was a swift, clean uppercut to that?
I was a couple of months into my first serious relationship. She was my friend before anything else, and for a long time, we justified our intimacy with excuses like: she’s moving to the States next year, we just want to make the most of what we can.
Because we thought we were always running out of time, we always found ways and excuses to be together. Eventually, I’d reverted back to training once or twice a week, and then after some time, even that wasn’t enough. I stopped training with my boxing coach altogether, only attended Softball practice when the annual intramurals were coming up.
What I did not know then was that being in a relationship did not mean you had to drop everything else to have more time to spend with each other.
Nobody told me that once you stop training like an athlete, you could no longer eat like one.
vi.
For a long time, the problem had always been elsewhere: my eyesight and the sudden need to wear glasses, the fact that mom felt I was going to lose them and would only purchase the ones that came with strings to wear around your neck; my unfortunate penchant for nail-biting and absent-mindedly plucking hair strands at the back of my head whenever I felt anxious; eyebrows that were too thick; permanent teeth that started growing misaligned; the overbite that seemed amplified every time I smiled; acne from the acne years; scars on my legs, my arm, my chin, from childhood rough-housing that up until then I never once felt the need to cover up.
Pants sizes, shirt sizes, cup sizes, shoe sizes — they all meant the same thing to me: I was a growing kid. By the time I hit fourteen, I’d settled (un)comfortably into UK size four, Extra-Small-Small, 32A, 7 ½.
I would step in front of the mirror, and never really see that my eyes were a bit smaller than usual because my cheeks were bloated; that my limbs were not proportional to the rest of my body; that my stomach was extra pronounced.
These days, I try to look at myself and I can’t even notice anything else. My gaze held by the girl standing before me — a figure over the years I have found I no longer recognize. What you learn the hard way is that the longer you stare at yourself, the bigger and more bloated you feel.
To combat this, you start to come up with excuses, reasons, spiels to justify your behavior. For example: the camera adds ten pounds.
I say this to myself every time I sit in a dark room watching the first preview of anything I act for. At photo-shoots, I hold my breath before I hear the click of the camera and the shutters go off. Always desperately trying to make my eyes look bigger, my face longer than it is. When I see bootlegs of a show I was a part of, I cringe a little every time I come on screen.
Here — something I have never said out loud: my favorite part about doing Spring Awakening was that the exhaustion I felt from playing Martha Bessel manifested in my weight. A couple of months into rehearsals and I had dropped back to 105. During our cast party, the day after closing night, my ex-boyfriend gives me a congratulatory hug: the familiar squeeze, his hand lingering on my waist. Feigned concern and all, he jokes: ang payat mo masyado, kumakain ka ba? I take this as a compliment.
For all of the shows and films I have been a part of thus far, of myself this much I’ve learned: the difficulty of acting is directly proportional to being able to look at yourself in the mirror and being happy with what you see.
How many times do they have tell you: the size of your body is not equivalent to your self worth? What they don’t say is that the bigger you are, the more room there is to hate yourself.
#1: The camera adds ten pounds. #2: The symptoms of peptic ulcer include: abdominal pain, nausea, copious vomiting, bloating, weight loss, loss of appetite. #3: It isn’t an eating disorder if you don’t force yourself to vomit. #4: You can’t skip meals. You have an ulcer. #5: Running will keep you alive. When your lungs feel like they’re on fire and your calves are shaking, you’re doing something right.
I learned to beat asthma this way.
vii.
The truth is, I can pinpoint the exact year it started.
I was a senior. Seventeen years old. 2009.
I ballooned to 130, a weight that was too much for my tiny frame. I was lethargic but restless. Every attempt I made at trying to get back to my old lifestyle was thwarted by my newly diagnosed asthma. A year and a half without training and I was terribly out of shape.
I could no longer recognize myself in the pictures people would post online.
This took a toll not only on my self-esteem but also on my already troubled relationship. After a year of struggling to be with my then girlfriend, the delusion that we would make it no matter what, I realized I was tired. I was tired of looking at myself in the mirror, unable to find my cheekbones — what was once one of the most prominent features about my face. I was frustrated at having to purchase new clothes, new underwear, new shoes: UK size 6, sometimes 8, Small-Medium (sometimes Large), 36A, 7 ½–8. I hated my hair, the fact that I had to hide my face behind bangs I always knew did not look good on me; I hated the fact that every time someone would take a photo of me smiling all I could see was the weight I’d put on my cheeks; I hated the fact that every time my mom would offer to take me shopping, I would have to ask the sales lady for a bigger size; I hated standing in front of the mirror, finding that almost more than half my lifetime’s accumulated muscle was nowhere to be found. Gone were the toned abdomen, slim arms, long, lean calves. I looked in the mirror and all I saw was 36–30–37: measurements that were far too big for a girl who was barely five feet and three-thirds of an inch tall.
For the first time, I knew what it meant to be so unhappy you refuse any love coming your way. To my then girlfriend and my family, I stopped saying I love you back, pretended not to hear when it was said to me because how can someone love you, when you looked and felt like that?
That was the first time I ever put myself on diet after diet after diet.
That year, I learned what it was like to be hungry. Here, have a banana for breakfast. Make it last the entire day.
That year, I developed a love-hate relationship with arrows, and numbers, and pounds, and calories. By the time the pointer on the scale found its way back to 115, I was out of a relationship and angry at the world.
A couple months later, in my freshman year in college, I drop to 105. My sister tells me it’s the best I’ve ever looked.
The truth is, I might have an idea why:
This is my mother’s favorite detail about her college life: at almost 5 feet tall, she weighed a little more than 85 pounds. She tells me it’s because she scheduled her classes in such a way that she only had ample time to run from one building of the campus to the next one.
Having studied in the University of the Philippines, she says it was impossible to grab food during her breaks.
Sometimes, she forgot to eat.
Much later in her life, this habit she’s developed will come back with a vengeance:
In 2009, my family was supposed to leave for Australia to accompany my dad on one of his trips abroad. I chose to stay behind for many reasons, one of which was school. It was mid-July and the annual Sabayang Pagbigkas competition was coming up — something, at that time, I would not trade for a trip to another country.
In the morning, while everyone else was busy saying their goodbyes, telling me to stay out of trouble for two weeks, my mom pulls me aside. It takes a moment before I realize that she’s pale and that just standing there in front of me took huge amounts of effort.
She tells me in a whisper too tired to raise her voice: I think I’m passing blood.
She’d been taking these weight-loss pills and lived off of coffee.
She was hospitalized for a week — internal bleeding, ulcer; the lining in her stomach had gotten so thin, she wasn’t allowed to eat crackers or anything “sharp” because it might tear through the hole that had already formed in her stomach.
When my uncle and I rushed her to the hospital, I remember her ask in the chaos that was the emergency room: What’s happening? Am I dying? I’d never seen nurses look so tense. Weaving in and out of our temporary confinement, shouting orders I could not understand.
I’d seen this situation before but it never looked this bad. What’s happening? Am I dying?
That same year, she promised to stop watching her weight. I was seventeen.
My sister is still a gymnast. She is now part of the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics National Team of the Philippines.
Almost sixteen, she is two inches taller than me, long-legged with toned arms and a defined abdomen; my grandfather calls her svelte. If her weight teeters past 104–105, her coaches call my mom telling her that she is too heavy.
The running joke is that she looks like a lady, eats like a man. Some nights, I come home with a box of Sonja’s Cupcakes or jars of cookie butter for my sister and our mother gets upset. Over and over again, she tells me: your sister is a gymnast; she is not supposed to gain weight. How is she supposed to lift herself on the uneven bars? How is she supposed to do that Yurchenko-Tsukahara tuck now?
Recently, my sister got confined for dengue and lost a lot of weight. She spent almost two weeks recuperating and hasn’t been able to resume training. The other night, I bought my sister a burger from McDonalds because fast food was all we could afford. We meet up with our parents for a movie, she buys popcorn, and after the film she asks if we could have sushi for dinner. My mom gives her the trademark haven’t-you-already-eaten look and teases: Kain ka ng kain; tataba ka lang niyan, wala kang training ngayon.
We end up eating at my dad’s choice restaurant. When our youngest brother hands her the menu, she shakes her head, looks at my mom and says: I’m not eating.
The truth is, who can blame her?
Before sleeping, my mother drinks this tea that’s supposed to help her digestion. A laxative. An easy, organic, non-invasive, non-harmful way to weight loss.
My mother’s stint with internal bleeding has left her unable to drink her diet pills. She’s been taking this every night for four years. It’s become a ritual.
She doesn’t feel well in the morning without it.
viii.
This is what stress-eating looks like: there is a bag of Ritz: Baked Cheddar chips lying on the floor, almost empty; a jar of Trader Joe’s Cookie Butter, a silver spoon balancing on its rim; a plate of toyo and rice. You lie on your back; too full to move and swear you will go for a run the next day.
And some days, you do it. You do get up in the morning and despite your body’s protests, you go for a run until you feel like you’re no longer on the ground but underwater, unable to breathe from pushing too hard. Some days look like coffee in the morning and a desperate attempt to ignore the palpitations hammering against your rib cage from too much caffeine intake and not enough of anything else. Some days, you look at yourself in the mirror and you notice that your cheeks are rounder, arms are bigger, softer and you waste a good hour trying to put on make-up as if something artificial could cover up how you feel; some days you refuse to leave the house altogether. Some days are ugly, but on the upside they don’t always look or feel like this.
You have good days.
Sometimes it takes longer to get there, but you do — and when you do, you slip on those worn-out, yellow running shoes just because it makes you feel good about yourself, because your body is used to expending copious amounts of energy on end and the run will wear you out, help you sleep earlier. You have three slices of pizza for dinner and maybe split a lemon cheesecake with your little sister; maybe even throw in a glass of milk tea if you feel like it. When your best friend asks you, do you want anything from the mall? You immediately tell him yes, I want a Crunch bar and a box of macarons. When your friends ask where you want to eat for dinner, you say anywhere and you mean it. You sit down for an hour and a half and enjoy a good meal with good company, without mentally calculating what time you have to get home so you can exercise to burn whatever it is you ate. When you get home late at night and you find your mom waiting up, you walk over to her, sit down across her and ask: do you want to have midnight coffee with me? And she will agree and the two of you will sleep at four in the morning, exchanging stories, catching up.
One night, after a show, we have dinner with the rest of the family.
My aunt, my mom’s older sister — a vegetarian in her mid-fifties (who still manages to be thinner than me), eats about as much as a rabbit — takes a good look at me and says, Lara, pumapayat ka ata. I tell her it’s because of the show and she tells me it’s unhealthy.
My sister laughs and says no, she’s fat. As if on cue, my best friend squeezes my arms to emphasize this. I roll my eyes: a default reaction to my sister’s unforgiving sass and the dynamic bullying duo she and my best friend bring to the equation. My mom, who has been casually listening to our conversation adds, Wala nga ‘yang ginawa kundi kumain eh, pero okay lang kasi kailangan niya yung energy para sa show.
Later that night, when I ask my mom for money for a cupcake, she gives me that look and says, Wag na. Tataba ka lang.
Never mind. It’ll only make you fat.
Before I open my mouth to reply, there is a moment of hesitation. My automatic instinct is to agree. To walk away from the sweets and to hobble over to my dad to ask him if I’m fat; to look for assurance from my little brother who will always tell the truth, no matter how blunt, whose answer would’ve probably gone along the lines of: yes, but I still love you; to ask my best friend if he wants to go jogging when we get home later that night.
Instead, I turn to my sister who makes a face, and then back to my mom. At fifty years old, she is almost my height. Wrinkles have formed around her eyes from age, I’d like to think that more than anything they’re laugh lines — signs of a happy aging. She’s gained a significant amount of weight since her hospitalization, but still, she remains beautiful: defined cheekbones; full, red lips; big, brown eyes; shoulder-length, curly brown hair.
I walk over to her, playfully squeeze her arms and with a laugh I tell her: Between the two of us, I think I can afford it.
