Singing Meant Everything To Alice:
Until Her Loyal Friend Returned
Alice Montgomery knew, at the age of eight, that one day, she would be famous, adored and a beautiful young songstress with which to be reckoned. From using a hair brush and glancing at herself in the mirror as she hit the high notes in "Amazing Grace" to winning a teenage talent contest at thirteen, Alice seemed unstoppable. She was comfortable in her own body, even though she still carried the remnants of stubborn baby fat on her large-boned frame. Life was going much as she'd envisioned as she sat, bored and distracted in her grade school class. "I don't belong here," she lamented, tapping her pen on her desk. "Soon I'm going to blow this stupid popsycle stand and soon everyone will know my name!"
Everyone marvelled at Alice's self-confidence and dogged determination to turn the popular music world by storm. Whereas her school buddies dreamed of their favourite boyfriends and looked forward to their high school prom, Alice spent her money on voice lessons instead of teen magazines and was intent on honing her craft while her impressed family looked on with admiration, encouraging her and told themselves that their daughter and sisters had the world by its tail.
But even with all those positive sentiments, Alice's mother, Estelle wasn't as keen on her daughter's music career as she let on. Her father, Bruce, on the other hand, was delighted that Alice would one day soon, be a giddy success in that often hard and overly perfection-obsessed field of popular music. Alice had all the confidence in the world to be anything she wanted to be. There was just one small problem: Alice Montgomery felt fat. Very fat and disgusting. Just the other night, during a sleepover at her friend Emily's house, she asked Jodie, one of the thinnest and most beautiful of all Alice's buddies, how she looked, weight-wise. "Would you say I was---well, a bit on the heavy side?"
Jodie paused for a moment, a moment that seemed an hour to Alice, before saying, somewhat self-consciously, "Well, I wouldn't say you're overweight. Just----normal. You aren't too thin or too fat. Just in the middle."
Alice reacted as though she'd just heard the distressing news that nuclear war was imminent. "So you think I weigh too much? That I'm a long, long way to being skinny? Jodie, how could you??!!"
Jodie's best friend, Storm butted in. "Jeez, stop being so freaking sensitive. You're not fat, Alice. I think you are just itching for a fight, for some kind of mental war of the words or something. Why are you ruining this party?"
That was all Alice needed to hear. At five foot eight inches and one hundred fifty pounds, she felt immense and now, Jodie and Storm had validated what Alice knew all along: She needed to lose major weight. Like fifty pounds of disgusting blubber. So it really wasn't in her head after all. She was fat, gross, a hideous corpulant beast who didn't deserve to live.
Alice grabbed her things, eager to be as far away from Jodie's house as was humanly possible. Without saying good-bye, the frantic girl ran out into the night. No more of this weighing one hundred fifty pounds. I lost it once and I can lose it again! Just watch me!"
Alice hadn't always been overweight. In fact, two years previous, she'd been anorexic and weighed only eighty pounds. She'd lost most of it in the summer and the following school year in grade ten, she received many, many accolades and numerous gasps of admiration and jealousy from her fellow students, like, "Oh my God---You're absolutely skeletal! How did you do it? You look AMAZING!!" Her close friends, Jodie and Storm couldn't get over the transformation. It was such a heady time for the previously overweight teen. She'd been validated by her peers and that was so cool. It felt great.
She knew that she would be famous, particularly with this new, svelte figure. Nobody would want to be my favourite performer if I was a fat singer. Now I can picture all these screaming fans clamouring for a chance to have an authentic autograph from me:
Alice felt special, a perfect body for all the school to see. She had previously weighed over one hundred seventy pounds and looked like hell. Fat crept out of her too-tight top, swelled in awful "muffin tops" and her thighs were absolutely huge. Add to that chubby arms and a round, doughy face and Alice had the perfect formula for self-hatred and overwhelming shame. Nobody liked fat people. All of the guys in her school preferred skinny girls and would cite Hollywood celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie and wished out loud that all the girls could be as like-weighted. Even Lane Cummings, a cute guy Alice had had warm fantasies about, thought that all girls should have a BMI of eighteen or less. Thanks to an ever-shrinking society at large, Alice and her friends felt low self-esteem and ashamed of their less-than-perfect bodies.
But Alice Montgomery was the only one who took those weaknesses to heart and decided to do something about it. She would work hard over the summer holidays until she lopped at least fifty pounds from her big-boned frame and show Lane and all the other popular guys that she was just as gorgeous and amazing as Mischa Barton and Kate Bosworth. Even the much-admired Victoria Beckham seemed to represent a goal that could and would be reached.
School got out for summer ten days after Alice's resolve and she could hardly wait until she could diet and exercise her way to a svelte, beautiful body. First on the agenda was a written plan of action that included the number of calories she'd consume and the daily hours to be logged in at the gym so that Alice could lose fifty pounds in less than three months.
But since she had once been deathly ill with anorexia, her parents were ever-vigulent and she realized that she would have to hide everything so they wouldn't get suspicious and hound her relentlessly. She was an old hand at pretending to eat much more than she actually consumed. Unwanted food could easily be put into napkins or fed to the family Jack Russel. Daily workouts at the Y would involve exercising heavily for four hours per day, but in order to throw her family off the scent, she'd lie and tell them she worked out for just one hour and would spend the other three at the library. Alice knew that Mom and Dad would heartily approve of reading for hours on end, so it was insanely easy for her to diet and exercise "underground."
There was no way they would tolerate their daughter to resemble this again:
Alice had decided to document her shrinking figure from the first day until she reached her goal. She knew that this would encourage her and give her more resolve as the curves disappeared and those much-coveted bones became more and more prominant. She had gotten a digital camera for Christmas the year before and was happy to find that the pictures were turning out better than she had expected.
First of all, she put a picture of herself she had just taken the other day and beside it, one of her favourite past pictures where she was thin and beautiful. By positioning them side-to-side, Alice would garner a great deal of willpower. I WILL look that way again, dammit!"
* * * * * *
Alice swam for an hour, took spinning classes for sixty minutes and then went on a glorious run for two hours every single day while consuming less than three hundred calories per day. The weight came off slowly at first and was quite disheartening to the ever-fatigued athlete, but, five days into her routine, the pounds seemed literally to fall off her. Stomach rolls began to disappear, her thighs were losing some of their girth and she could see her face growing thinner, with ever-jutting cheek bones. The only real problem was her diminishing energy level. While slavishly sticking to expending far more calories than she ate, Alice discovered, by the end of July that she was experiencing muscle weakness and was growing ever more breathless each and every day. Would she be able to keep this up, or would her stamina eventually quit altogether?
As it turned out, she found that nervous energy had taken over and she was happily shocked at how the swimming, spinning and twenty kilometres of vigorous running seven days a week was becoming easier by the week. Alice discovered that she was able to cut her calorie intake to less than two hundred per day without letting up on her workout sessions.
Everything was better than she'd ever expected and by the end of August, Alice had shrunk from one hundred eighty pounds to a skeletal ninety-five. And because she had been wearing six layers of clothing for the better part of the summer, her shrinkng body was well-hidden from the watchful eyes of her parents. It was all coming together. When school began in a mere ten days, she would be the envy of every fat girl in her class. She could hardly believe that her weight had dropped eighty-five pounds. She had reached her goal and then some. Nobody could take the euphoria of knowing she'd accomplished the near-impossible. Yes, life was good. Very good.
* * * * * * * *
One morning, as Alice arose at the early hour of 5AM----she was aware that her extreme hunger robbed her of much sleep---she lamented, for the first time since school had let out, that her music was suffering greatly and she realized with some sadness that she had thrown it all away, once her dieting and exercising consumed each and every waking hour. But she didn't let that negativity linger in her mind for very long. Her beloved guitar was gathering dust and she hadn't sung anything for many weeks. Her mother finally pointed out to her daughter, "Why aren't you spending anytime with your music and songwriting?"
"Well, you and Dad never really wanted me to get into the music field anyway. I figured you'd be pleased when I abandoned it. Isn't that right, Mom?"
"Alice, we never said we didn't like you to put all your eggs into one basket, but music had always been the focal point of your life and it seems pretty strange that you'd never sing, play or write anymore."
"Damn, you and Dad are never satisfied! When I was into music, you felt I would be much better off concentrating on my schoolwork and put my dreams on hold in lieu of attending university in a couple of years. Now that I have spent the entire summer at the Y and the library, you feel I'm still not doing the right thing. Make up your mind, for fuck sakes!"
"Stop swearing like that! You know that word is unacceptable in this house. I cannot believe how much you have changed in such a short period of time. And for God's sake, can't you wear anything else but that extremely baggy clothing, Alice? You have a darling figure and I can't understand why you are hiding it so much. And it's still summer! You're dressing like it's the middle of the winter!"
Then, as if that weren't enough, Estelle Montgomery placed a large slice of chocolate cake in front of her, telling her daughter, "You never did have a piece of my birthday cake the other day."
She's practically shoving my face in it," Alice thought bitterly. She made a big scene of it, pretending to chow the cake down and nearly choking on it. "There."
Alice, you bearly touched that cake! What's gotten into you?"
"I'm leaving!" Alice cried. "You're really bringing me down!"
Just as she was turning to dash out the front door, she tripped over a loose shoelace and fell hard, landing on her arms, with legs akimbo. Before she had a chance to struggle to her feet, Alice's mother grabbed her daughter and was instantly sent into a severe panic attack. "My God, Alice! You're nothing but bones! What have you done??"
Mortified, Alice struggled to her feet, her head getting thick and spots danced in her tired eyes. "Leave me alone! I decided to lose a little weight and not be such a heiffer when school starts again. You're never satisfied with me, Mom!"
I never said you were fat, Alice. That's all in your head. I can't believe that you would want to do down that dangerous road of anorexia again. Wasn't once enough?"
"No, Mom. It wasn't. Ever since you put me in that God-awful hospital, where they stuck a tube down my nose and force-fed me Ensure until I was ready to explode, I've been depressed and really upset about getting so big. One hundred eighty pounds was just AWFUL! Everybody in middle school made fun of me, saying things like, "What happened to you? You were so skinny and now you're really fat." Do you have any idea how that made me feel, Mom?"
In spite of her mother's meddling and pleas for her to "at least gain some of the weight back. You don't have to be one hundred eighty again. But you are absolutely emaciated."
When Alice got to the gym, still shaking from the dismal encounter, she hopped on the spinning cycle and spent the next three hours working up a sweat and burning calories she couldn't spare. Something had to get the taste of her mother's prying out of her mouth.
When she returned home that evening, Alice expected to find her parents waiting to force her into the hospital. To her surprise and a bit of disappointment, they were both sitting in the family room watching television. Secretly, she was expecting another battle royale and although she was relieved, she couldn't figure out what caused the change of heart.
Alice went upstairs to her room and took the last picture of herself at her present weight. She took off most of her clothes and stood in front of her full-length mirror and looked critically at her body for the first time in weeks. Whereas the previous time she had not seen what was really standing there, but rather all she saw was a fat and disgustingly ugly slob. Now, hoever, she marvelled at her protuding bones, her concave stomach and stick arms and legs. Putting on a child-size bikini, Alice gleefully took her picture and then posted them all online in a "pro ana" message board she'd been frequenting the past three months. Her pictures elicited gasps of admiration and disbelief. "You're so skinny! You lost eighty-five pounds in three and a half months! Wow!" Thus, it was possible to trace Alice's journey from overweight to emaciated goddess, by looking at the pictures on this page. Alice had reached her goal. Nobody would ever look at her and claim she was fat again. She had won the battle and had done it all on her own. Now her life was worth living again.
