Dead Girl Walking
The Numbers Game, pt. 2
Full disclosure:
This post discusses eating disorders and other heavy topics.
But please, my dear friend, know this: I cannot talk of God’s deliverance without telling you what He delivered me from. God is relentless in His pursuit of our hearts.
His love has saved my life.
Let me tell you how.
I lifted the toilet seat lid and hunched over the bowl, trembling.
I have to do this. Just once. Just once.
I stuck two of my fingers into my mouth.
My body heaved.
I pushed my fingers in further.
Stop, Allana! STOP!
I pulled my saliva-covered fingers out of my mouth and sank to the floor. My heart ached as I stared despairingly into the empty bowl. The smell of sewer water made my stomach queasy.
I tucked myself between the toilet and the wall, curling into an anxious ball.
What is wrong with me? Why in the world did I eat those two slices of pizza for supper?
Tears burned in my eyes. I could feel the cortisol pumping through my veins, every muscle tense from stress. The cheese pizza felt like a slab of concrete in the pit of my stomach.
If John hadn’t commented on my dinner, I might not have resorted to this.
I had just finished working out, and I really wanted pizza for supper. Pizza was a once-a-week treat for me, something I indulged in only when the cafeteria’s undercooked chicken and frozen vegetables looked less appealing than usual.
I was already anxious when I sat down next to my boyfriend. My heart thumped in my chest, my mind racing: Was this a good idea? Should I have taken the fried chicken they were serving instead? Would this pizza ruin my weight loss goals?
Then John just had to open his mouth.
“Whoa!” he said, raising his eyebrows. “That’s not a very healthy dinner.”
My heart sank. He was right. How could I have been so stupid? I should have stuck to the salad bar.
I looked at my plate in despair, mumbling some excuse about my dietary choices. With my shoulders hunched in shame, I picked at my food, eating my greasy slices of pizza in embarrassment. Sometimes I could leave my meager plate half-finished, but tonight my stomach was grumbling too loudly for me to waste the food.
Still, guilt choked me with every bite.
After dinner, John and I walked down to the Student Lounge to join our friends for a game of Loop-it (our favourite group-style ping-pong game). As we approached the laughing, cheering crowd of students dancing around the ping-pong table, shame settled on me like a wet towel. My stomach felt like iron.
I excused myself, mumbling something about having to finish a paper. John looked exasperated and annoyed as he watched me hurry out the door.
And now here I was, slumped on my bathroom floor, wishing I could regurgitate every last bite of that stupid pizza into this stinky toilet.
Why? What is wrong with me?
The Hungry Heart
Believe it or not, that was not the night I realized I had an eating disorder.
That realization didn’t hit me for another four months, after John and I broke up.
I could write a whole book about overcoming my eating disorder, diving deep into the psychological impacts of my childhood trauma and its adverse effects on my relationship with food, but for the sake of time, allow me to sum up my seven-year psychological analysis with this conclusion:
I was starving for love.
As I discussed in my last blog post, my troubles with food and weight loss began when I was an overweight child in a dysfunctional family.
My parents divorced when I was ten years old, and my maternal grandparents followed suit two years later.
That’s a lot of upheaval for a little girl to deal with in two short years.
My whole world felt like it was collapsing around me. I was swirling helplessly in a raging whirlpool, sinking deeper and deeper into chaos.
I was desperate for someone to reach down and save me . . . someone to grab my hand and pull me out of the dark waters.
Like others who feel out of control in times of crisis, I clawed frantically at anything that might give me some semblance of stability in my life.
Food was one of those things.
I couldn’t control the way my father lied to me, or the fact that my grandparents’ marriage had collapsed, but I could control what I ate.
The seeds of my eating disorder took root when I was twelve years old. That’s when I first started starving myself, inventing crazy food rules, and pushing myself to exercise harder every day even when my body was sick or exhausted.
That was also the age when I first started longing for a boyfriend. I felt like everyone in my family was abandoning me, leaving me in the dust. It seemed like they were all too busy with their problems to care about me anymore.
I wanted someone to love me unconditionally. Someone to hold my hand, kiss me on the cheek, and make me feel wanted.
But I couldn’t get a boyfriend if I was fat, could I?
I had been told often enough that I was “too heavy.” So, if I was going to win that boyfriend I wanted so badly, I needed to lose that stupid weight.
But guess what I discovered at nineteen after my first boyfriend and I broke up?
It didn’t matter how much weight I lost. John didn’t care about me, and he was never going to love me, no matter how skinny I was.
Losing twenty-two pounds in eight months wasn’t enough to secure John’s affection. In the end, we still broke up.
That’s when I woke up and realized I had an eating disorder.
I was a dead girl walking, and I needed someone to breathe life into me again.
Taste and See
I’ve been working through Beth Moore’s Breaking Free for the second time in my life, and one of her recent lessons focused on Psalm 107. The passage was not unfamiliar to me, but a fresh reading brought its truth to life for me in a new way:
“Some became fools through their rebellious ways
and suffered affliction because of their iniquities.
They loathed all food
and drew near the gates of death.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he saved them from their distress.
He sent out his word and healed them;
he rescued them from the grave.” (Ps. 107:17-20 NIV)
This was me.
If I had persisted with my disordered eating too much longer, I might have literally starved myself to death.
Was that outcome likely? Perhaps not, given that I had a watchdog of a mother who cared enough to intervene the summer after my break-up once she realized how severe my disorder had become.
But on a spiritual and emotional level, I was starving to death.
My heart was starving for perfect love, and there was only one person who could satisfy that hunger.
I was clinging to food in a vain attempt to control my life, not realizing that it had a death grip on me.
Meanwhile, Jesus was desperately longing to heal my body, mind, and soul. He didn’t want me to starve myself to death. He wanted me to experience life to the fullest, satisfied and unashamed.
Once I was willing to release control and surrender myself to him, he tenderly started nursing me back to health.
I didn’t need to lose any weight before Jesus would love me. He always had, and he always would.
As Beth Moore reminded me in her lesson on Psalm 107,
God stands by us until we are free. He uses various forms of discomfort to woo us to cry out to Him, but He never forsakes us. God is the only one who is not repelled by the depth and length of our needs. Although God never excuses sin and rebellion, He is fully aware of what drives our actions. In fact, He understands things about us we cannot even understand.1
Thanks to Jesus, I am no longer a dead girl walking. Though it took years for me to fully embrace my identity as such, I can finally say with confidence that I am a girl without a number, beautiful and free.
Today, I sing of the Lord’s redeeming love:
“I sought the Lord, and he answered me;
he delivered me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant;
their faces are never covered with shame.
This poor girl called, and the Lord heard her;
he saved her out of all her troubles. . . .
Taste and see that the Lord is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. . . .
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Ps. 34:4-6, 8, 18)
Want to learn more about how I went from being a dead girl walking to a girl without a number? Subscribe to my free newsletter so you never miss a post!
Tune in next week for the third and final installment of this series, The Numbers Game!
In case you missed it, here is last week’s post:
P.S. By the way, God is crazy about you too. If your heart hungers for perfect love, bask in the truth of this beautiful song by Tauren Wells:
Beth Moore, Breaking Free: The Journey, The Stories (Updated Edition) (Brentwood, TN: Lifeway Press, 2023), 180.
This is so powerful. I really appreciate your openness!