Smaller by Sunday

Anytime I am offered food, savory or sweet, I always say no the first time. Regardless of my hunger status, I reply, "No," and wait patiently for them to ask again. This way, when I eat the food they offer, it feels like it was out of gratitude or politeness rather than greed and gluttony, and somehow that means the imagined calories don’t count. That, and a long list of other made-up rules I have for myself, is how I know I have a food complex.

I’ve struggled with the idea of food for as long as I can remember. My mother often said that my palate was as limited and unadventurous as a toddler’s, stubbornly rejecting anything unfamiliar or textured. Aside from imagined calories, because I refuse to read food labels anymore, texture is my biggest qualm with food. That said, there is no consistency with my picky eating. I love tomatoes, raw tuna, and raw steak accompanied by a raw egg. I don’t, however, like leftovers, ground beef, various fruits due to their fur, cottage cheese, or lasagna for some reason. Other than texture and imagined calories, though, the act of eating is just difficult for me, mainly because I lack balance. I either eat everything or nothing. For a while, I have resided in the latter category, hopeless and hungry.

As I sit here typing this on my laptop, I am starving, I am hungry. It’s 1pm, and I have spent my morning washing and cleaning things to distract my mind from one of the most daunting tasks I can imagine, which makes it even more pathetic to say out loud- eating my first meal of the day. I do not wish to therapize myself or rehash past events that led me to this fate; alas, here we are. Reason aside, while eating physically is not strenuous, mentally, it can be taxing. Not because I don’t love to eat, one of my favorite activities is going out to dinner and trying new restaurants, but rather, I just put so much pressure on what comes after eating, like bloating, stomach aches, and potential weight gain. I have always feared potential weight gain, probably because I spent a lot of time on ED Tumblr and YouTube in my more impressionable years, and that would go on to plague my mind for years to come.

In high school, I somehow survived a day of classes and extracurriculars on one meal and an assortment of liquids, convincing myself I wasn’t hungry. A large iced coffee in the morning, a vitamin water in the afternoon, and a Diet Coke in the evening. Mixed in there somewhere was a granola bar or some applesauce, and I only had a full lunch because my friend Avrey would make sure of it every day in between school and field hockey practice. Sadder than all of this disordered eating and restricting food wasn’t even the effect it’s had on me now, it was the reason for it back then. Each week began with the same shitty habits, the same routine, and the same hope: to be smaller by Sunday.

Smaller by Sunday didn’t mean a lower number on the scale; I refused to weigh myself. Smaller didn’t mean down a clothing size; it didn’t mean losing inches or losing fat. To me, being smaller wasn’t about a number on the scale or the size on a clothing tag—it meant erasing any visible trace of fat from my body. Disappearing proof that I ever took up too much space, or god forbid, ate anything more than a salad. There was never a finite goal, or even an attempt to achieve it healthily; each time Monday came around, I just wanted to be smaller.

To be honest, so much of my desire to be smaller was tangled up in wanting to be wanted—specifically, by men. My self-worth hinged on the hope that being thinner would finally make me attractive enough, lovable enough. But as I got older, my body changed in ways I hadn’t expected, and no one ever talked about how normal that was. I clung to the belief that one day, in my twenties, I’d just magically “thin out.” When that didn’t happen, I felt like I had failed at something fundamental.

After all those years in middle and high school, striving for a smaller frame, I finally found peace in my last three years of college, when I fell in love with myself and what I looked like. This transition from self-hatred to self-love was by no means fast or easy; it was more like forcing myself, every day, to like and love and feed myself because that’s what I deserve, and I was happy and fulfilled, until I wasn’t. Looking back on that time of my life, that shift happened fairly recently, when I was 23, suddenly and noticeably thin, and all my previous fears and worries came to fruition.

Over the past year—spanning late 2024 through October 2025—I lost around thirty pounds. I only know this because my annual physicals are both weigh-ins and emotional roller coasters. In October 2024, my doctor told me that I was fat and needed to lose weight. Flash forward to October 2025: I’m thirty pounds lighter, still with no serious explanation or Ozempic prescription, only to discover my doctor has now upgraded my chart to “obese.”

When someone says, “You’ve never looked better,” and you’re at your thinnest, the words linger. Like gum stuck to the sole of your shoe, that comment clings to your mind. No matter how many steps you take to shake it off, a piece always remains. Even if the shoe looks clean, the residue never truly goes away, and it’s only a matter of time before you step in gum—or something worse—again.

Here’s the truth: comments about my body—no matter how well-intentioned—are never just compliments. They’re loaded, and they land like a punch to the tit. Even when someone says, “You look incredible, what are you doing differently?” what I actually hear is, “You were so much bigger the last time I saw you. Are you bulimic?” It’s not their fault for making an observation or attempting a compliment. But it’s not a kindness either. It’s a reminder that my body is always up for public debate. My worth is measured in shrinking numbers. That’s not a compliment. That’s a blow to an already weakened system.

I can't speak to the conscience behind disordered eating for others, but for myself, the general assumption was that I needed to be smaller to be more desirable, more likable, more successful. The fear I had that led to my years of fighting with food was that by being “fat” or “heavier,” I was undeserving of love and likeness, which obviously is not true. However, when you do suddenly lose 30 pounds and keep that weight off for a while, that fear settles for some time. After a while, though, you’ll start hearing compliments you’ve never heard before, and that fear creeps right back. And that cycle starts all over again. It’s now 2:30pm, and I still haven’t eaten; I'm sipping the same coffee I made this morning. But I have never looked better, and I am moving from a size  large to a medium.

There is a motif in every journal I own, from 8th grade until now, where I ask myself if I’d really be happier if I were skinnier. Pages upon pages of me tearing myself apart for not being a size two. While I am no happier than I was before, I am less naive. The previous ideology I lived by, equating my worth to my weight, was neither right nor totally wrong. While this problem does say something about me and my mind, it says more about our society and the pride we place in being the beauty standard. I am still not a size two. It’s highly unlikely that I could ever be, for that matter. That doesn’t strip me of my value, my beauty, or my worth. Size and shape are not measures of who I am; they are just facts, not verdicts. We are human, not numbers on a scale. And while believing that is hard, the hardest truths are usually the ones worth fighting for.

My shoes may be clean right now, and I cannot fear going for a walk just because I might step in something that sticks to the bottom of them. I write this to release these thoughts for the time being; if you find yourself in a similar situation, I encourage you to do the same. It may be easier said than done, but it doesn’t hurt to try to help yourself. My goal for the new year isn’t to be any smaller by Sunday, by summer, or even by September. My goal is simply to have a better relationship with food and eating than I do now. My goal is to give myself and others more grace when engaging in conversations such as these. It’s now 4:30pm, I have eaten, and I am looking forward to my next meal, regardless of whether it will make me smaller by Sunday.

See you soon,

Paige B.