The Big Bad Body Image

By Adrienne Terzuoli

*Trigger warning: sensitive content about eating disorders

I have never been considered a small girl, and I have never been petite. My mom is petite. My dad is not. I take after my dad. Growing up playing soccer I was considered lean and strong; I guess you could call me muscular. It wasn’t until I was in fourth or fifth grade, when you start that semi-awkward phase before the official puberty-ridden awkward phase that I became less lean and more full. Full breasts, full hips, full legs; I was full or “filling out,” as that antiquated phrase suggests.

While most young girls dream of that moment when they get to graduate from the proverbial “training bra” to the real thing, I hated all of it. There wasn’t a sports bra on the market that could properly contain my twelve year old double d’s, and my mother could see the embarrassment in my face every time I ran down the soccer field. My dad on the other hand, held in his fatherly fury as he would overhear the boys I went to school with make inappropriate sexual jokes about his daughter’s chest. On the verge of quitting a game I loved to play, my mother suggested we try something a little out-of-the-box one Saturday morning before a game.

I was willing to try anything. She pulled out a regular bra, two rolls of ace bandage, which as a nurse she always had in the house, and one of my sports bras. I looked at her as if she had lost her mind, but realized it was worth a shot. There I was having my breasts taped down like I was trying to conceal or even ashamed of one of the parts of me that truly made me a female. At that age and in that moment, I was. Crazy enough, it worked. I may have looked and felt a little ridiculous, but I found that I wasn’t as “bouncy” as usual. We considered it a small victory, but not something I was willing to do every game for as long as I decided to continue playing. After a long conversation at the end of the season, I decided I was no longer going to play soccer.

When I got to high school, I became a cheerleader. I hated my uniform. I found myself constantly tugging at my top because it felt as if it was cutting off circulation to my boobs. I would press my skirt down with my hands trying to measure just how short it actually was. I was always looking in a mirror or a window at my reflection to assess how much skin someone would see when they looked at me. It was soccer all over again. Different, but still the same.

One day after cheering at a basketball game, while standing with some friends, one of the football players came over to us. He looked me up and down and without hesitation said, “Damn, you’re thick. You could be a linebacker with those legs.” I made a joke and tried to laugh it off, while everyone else just laughed. His words burned a hole so deep that over two decades later I can still hear them as clear as if I’m hearing them for the first time. I looked like a football player? I was a 16-year-old female. It destroyed me.

My life was never the same after that. I’ve read that eating disorders usually start from one triggering moment. Something that replays over and over in the person’s mind until they mentally and physically can’t take it anymore. For me, it started with a few meals skipped here and there and an extra ten or twenty minutes in the gym. It progressed quickly when on the advice from a friend, I started using diuretics and laxatives to push food and fluid quickly through my system. I stopped eating carbs (this was during the height of Atkins popularity), and those extra minutes turned into hours in the gym after school and on weekends.

My dad, a former athlete, never questioned me, while my mom, always concerned, simply thought I was trying to drop a few pounds to be ready for prom. By the time prom came, I was fifty pounds less full, and completely sick. I had chronic headaches and could barely stay awake in class, but that was a small price to pay for someone calling me fat. I remember a friend coming up to me saying how great I looked. My stomach was the flattest she had ever seen on me and my face was so thin. Usually I would smile while touching my stomach or running my hands over my hips and say, “Oh, thank you.” Things like that were a drug to me. For a minute you felt good- great even, but then something clicks and it quickly turns into disgust, so you keep going. Even with my flat stomach, finding clothes was always an issue. My hips were still on the fuller side, my waist cinched and small, and well my boobs hadn’t lost an inch.

A year later, while senior prom dress shopping, I had a full-on break down in the dressing room. Nothing looked right. I couldn’t wear the cute strapless dresses like my friends. I had to make sure that in some way, some how, whatever I wore had straps. Straps that would hold up these horrible reminders of my genetics. I asked my mother for a breast reduction. I begged and pleaded for a week, until my father and she gave in. The week after the senior prom, I had surgery. While everyone was enjoying the summer before we all left for college, I was home in recovery. Recovering from a complete breast reduction was the longest physical struggle of my life (up to that point). I regretted it every minute I was in pain. I cried when my mother would take off my surgical bra to change the tape on my incisions, only to have to put the bra back on mere minutes later. Every movement hurt. Every deep breath took effort. I was miserable. It wasn’t until about six months later when I was able to wear a real bra again that I felt I had made the right decision. But even then, with smaller boobs, my unhealthy body image never left my brain.

College was full of soup diets and gym binges and teaching myself the art of the purge. By that point I didn’t just hate my body, I hated the scars that came from my surgery. Scars that had healed so poorly, they still looked brand new. Scars that I still have to this day.

In my twenties I switched from laxatives, which had stopped working, to over the counter diet pills. They made my ears burn and tingle, curbed my appetite to an almost non-existent level, and caused me to get sick every night. Every single night. By twenty-three I wound up in the gastroenterologist’s office for an EGD scope. I had a hiatal hernia, an ulcer and a severe case of GERD. I had my first colonoscopy at twenty-five after doing so much damage to my colon from years of laxative abuse. I could barely eat. I felt as if I was having a heart attack all day, every day. The only thing that brought me relief was throwing up. I was exhausted from always throwing up. I developed cholecystitis and had my gallbladder removed at twenty-six after an ultrasound showed it was “dangerously inflamed.” I was alone in a Hawaii hospital when I had that surgery. I was slowly killing myself.

Upon returning to New York, I made an appointment with my primary care physician for a long overdue physical. She took a long look at me and said, “You have a problem.” I laughed at first, thinking she was being facetious in her tone. She didn’t laugh back. “This is serious. You have an eating disorder.” Those words echoed through my brain. Eating disorders were for people who starved themselves. People who looked skeletal. I clearly was not. If you looked at me, I didn’t fit the mold for what someone with an eating disorder looked like. However, internally, in both my body and mind, I was textbook. I promised her I would take care of myself. I enrolled in culinary school not long after. I was hopeful that if I studied food it would help my toxic relationship with it.

At thirty-two years old my struggles roared again when in the midst of an argument with an ex-boyfriend, he told me that I disgusted him and “looked like a whale,” among many other disparaging things. I wasn’t even mad at his words, because I knew how I was going to fix it.

You see that’s the thing. I had been on this carousel so many times that I never actually feared gaining weight. I knew that all I had to do was flip that switch in my brain and it would all be “OK.” This time, I lost 80 pounds with the help of a new diet pill I had found, daily two hour gym visits, and a strict 1,000 calories-a-day maximum. My madness brought me within pounds of my high school prom weight. It wasn’t until I got mono and my doctor threatened to put me in an outpatient rehab, that I stopped trying to please the thoughts of what perfection should be. The stigma of being labeled as having an eating disorder and having people look at me as if I was damaged and broken was something I could not handle. I was a culinary instructor at a high school. How could a chef have an unhealthy relationship with food? I was supposed to be a role model for my students.

I shouldn’t be explaining why I never ate breakfast, barely ate lunch, or even worse, why I could eat half of a pizza, but then made myself scarce needing to be close to a bathroom to get it out of my system. Would I ever hit bottom? I was afraid of what that would look like.

Days after my thirty-seventh birthday I met the most wonderful man. For the first time in what felt like forever, someone actually loved the way I looked and called me beautiful every chance he could. I wanted so desperately to believe him. When he would hug me in public I would look around and see if people were looking at us wondering what this gorgeous and incredibly fit man was doing with this pretty, yet not as fit as she thought she should be, girl. In our time together, I lost nearly thirty pounds purely from my insecurity with my body. I never let myself be happy; not in my body, not in my mind. It was time for therapy.

As I approach my thirty-ninth birthday, I find myself still pinching an inch here and there while looking in the mirror. I struggle with the idea of what my body is “supposed” to look like. I have moments and find myself falling into old habits. I judge myself against the girl in the gym who looks as if she carries less than two percent body fat. I hide in the back of photos. But through everything, the most important tool I found in coping is educating myself and not feeling ashamed. It’s a work-in-progress. I try to remind myself that I’m allowed to be loved, and try to accept a compliment with grace when someone tells me I’m beautiful.

I know that having an eating disorder isn’t something you’re ever cured of and I don’t know if I’ll ever get rid of those past thoughts. But for now, I’m learning to embrace that the perfect body for me might just be the one I'm in.

Adrienne M. Terzuoli has been living in the world of media and content production since 2015. As a multimedia journalist, she has worked on feature stories for college and professional sports, as well as health and wellness and all things food and drink. She considers herself a storyteller and looks for the unique perspective in telling a story that is not only engaging, but purposeful. Adrienne has experience in sports and lifestyle photography, social media content production, special features writing, as well as radio hosting and podcasting. She owned a catering and consulting company for five years, as well as held the title of teacher at the secondary level in the New York City Department of Education. In July 2020, Adrienne started a clothing line, Beyond the Field Apparel: a line made for women, by women, who love football! Currently, she is working on her memoir, which has yet to be titled.