So You Think I’m SKINNYYY

Let’s talk about food. It is the greatest gift this Earth could give us. When you grow up with Momma Li, you eat like a DAMN KING. I know money can’t buy you happiness, but money can buy you food which will lead you to eternal nirvana. My roommate says I’m a bitch to gift for my birthday because she knows food is the only thing that gives me joy.

Here's how I physically changed since the beginning of senior year of high school.

People have asked why I started soccer, assuming I had the choice to do so, but the truth is so far off from that. At age 7, I quit ballet after a year or so because I didn’t like one of the teachers and those damn leotards gave me awful wedgies. Also at age 7, I learned that I loved to eat, and Felipe, in all his glory, introduced me to exercise because Lord knows I needed it. Little did I know about his mastermind plan to put me in sports and slowly take over my life to become the ultimate soccer coach/trainer/teacher dad. I’m kidding, I don’t think he planned to be as involved as he did, but the bottom line is soccer was his idea, not mine, and it was influenced by food. That’s strike one for food.

Fast forward to junior year, the prime recruiting/ committing year. Sophomore season was a dud; playing time was hard to come by, my body was beat up from trying to keep up with the high level of play on my team that I was not ready for, and all the potential college interests at the time had dissipated. It was a year of growth to say the least, and junior year was the year to use that growth to my advantage. That summer, I was the leanest and fittest I had ever been up to then, while also suffering from an irregular period and looking at food as “good” and “bad”. It was a summer of salads, no processed carbs, no sugar after a certain time, caloric deficits, and sneaking pieces of Dove chocolate into my room when no one was looking. Food wasn’t bringing that much happiness anymore. That’s strike two for food.

The dining hall during freshman year can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It started off as my best friend but quickly became my worst enemy. I always felt like I could not satiate my hunger since high school, so when you a give me a WHOLE PLACE in order to feel full, I want to eat the whole fucking place no matter what’s in it, and this was when the binging started. I wasn’t playing freshman fall, I was extremely frustrated with soccer because I was falsely promised an opportunity to compete, I got so homesick halfway through the semester, but there she was to comfort me, my knight in shining armor, Boulder Dining Hall. I think about how much I was eating back then, and it disgusts me because the food was trash compared to what I grew up with. My parents mentioned something to me when I return home after the spring semester, that’s strike three for food.

I tore my ACL for the first time shortly after freshman year ended. I was weak and atrophied after surgery and had a really tough first 6 weeks of rehab (all for me to find out after my second injury that I was not rehabbed properly but whatever). I endured the hardest semester of my life in terms of mental well-being that fall, but guess who was always there for me, yep Miss Boulder herself. My dad mentioned something again when I return home that semester, and I cried in the gym after stepping on the scale. Was this why I tore my ACL to begin with? I wasn’t letting that happen again. That’s strike four for food.

8 months out of my first surgery during the spring of sophomore year, I was the fittest and leanest I had been since junior year of high school; I PR’ed with my beep test score, I had finally caught up with my rehab, with a couple joint shifts and cracks that I thought weren’t too concerning (lol), my period was still ridiculously irregular, but at least I was back on track to return to my normal, athletic, happy self. Then I tore my ACL again, and all I couldn’t even fathom why. I did everything right; I got back in shape, I sacrificed the food I wanted to eat, I lost the weight that was supposedly holding me back. Had I lost too much of it? Did I become too weak to sustain the movements of my own body? I felt like I failed in nourishing my body properly so in return, it failed me. I was out of tune with it. I no longer knew how to listen to it. I was too sad to even binge. That’s strike five.

I re-tore my ACL at the beginning of the pandemic, so I was an immobile individual living at home from the end of March until October. I kept a food journal to help keep myself accountable from not binging every single Trader Joe’s snack in the pantry, but my mom was also home for the first two months of the pandemic. She had a lot of time to cook, so that she did. Was I going to say no to her sourdough starter biscuits? Yeah, absolutely not. And I was certainly not turning away the wontons with hot chili oil, scallion pancakes, shakshuka, and Sunday brunches with pancakes and omelets. Like I said, you eat like a king around Momma Li. I stopped writing down all the food I was eating, no counting calories, just eating all the delicious food my mom was cooking for us, every night together at the same dinner table for two months, the first time in 8 years.

Still eating to my heart’s desire, I was the skinniest I had ever been that summer. And it wasn’t just my skinny mirror, my grandpa even told me and he’s always the first one to say how gordita I look over FaceTime. My legs were so thin I had a fucking a thigh gap. A THIGH GAP. I didn’t even think that was physically possible for my body. But I hated it. I missed my thunder thighs. I was confused, I thought I wanted this body. But I missed being able jump almost two feet off the ground, I missed looking athletic, I missed being strong.

So now what? I had gotten to a point where I recognized my hunger cues and was able to stop eating when I felt full, but I was a skinny, weak bitch and hated it. I still had another surgery to undergo and what was going to happen after that? Was I going to put myself through the same vicious cycle of restricting to make sure I kept looking the way that I did and risk binging all over again? But how was I going to grow all that muscle again if I was worried about trying to be as skinny as I was? Everything I felt and thought was contradicting itself until my dad talked to me right before my last surgery at the end of the summer and told me in not so many words, “You’ll recover, physically. I’m not worried about that. You need to focus on healing your head and your heart,” because at the end of the day, all of my food problems stemmed from not being mentally okay. I overthought what I was eating, constantly worried about how I looked and how much I weighed. I’m not saying I still don’t worry about it now. I have a long way to go before I get to that point. But when you have three knee surgeries as a 20-year-old, you don’t care about how you look or how much you weigh, you just care about having a healthy body that’s able to move the way you want it to, when you want it to. I can’t stress enough the importance of eating for health and not for looks. It does matter who you eat it with, or if you cooked it yourself, or if you ordered it with a mimosa at brunch, because all of that is healthy for you. So if I want to order Insomnia Cookies with my roommates at 1 AM after a Saturday night out, ima eat the damn cookie.