Part 7:I'm in your pantry, eating your biscuits.

Some people wonder how I ballooned up to the size of a small planet while a child, often people assume it was due to some vile negligence on behalf on my parents, but that offends me... Both my parents tried really hard to help and guide me into making sensible choices. The problem is I have always possessed a cunning mind, especially when it came to junk food. It was my fix, I needed it... and I'll tell you how i managed it.

I gave myself rules, some made sense... others not so much. The principle rule was don't get caught, but there was also the rule never to open something, because I'd be blamed for eating it all and this way who knew how much someone else had eaten before me. I also stayed away from the chocolate that the girls would like the most and ate bread or crackers instead hoping it wouldn't be missed. 

My Mum tried to motivate me into exercising by letting me keep my bus money if I rode my bike to school, but to my detriment on the way home I'd stop off at the dairy and grab a big bottle of fizzy and what ever lollies my bus money would get me. Sneaky sneaky. How did I dispose of all the bottles? well I hid them under my bed and dropped them in a bin when I biked to school.

Surely that means I ate lots at school right? well actually I ate very little. When I did have food on me i'd go somewhere alone to munch it, because every bite I took I felt vulnerable to mockery or pity. It got to a point where friends of mine worried that they had never seen me eat, which got me more attention than had I eaten around them in the first place.

I look forward to reaching a point where eating for me doesn't bring on anxiety about how i'm perceived by others, but I know I need to understand why I feel so compelled to eat before I can start fixing it and that's a conversation with myself I have avoided for twenty years...

Eli Nelson