The Skinny, in Numbers

This essay was written by Courtney Kocak in Chloe Caldwell’s 12-Month Essay Collection Generator

Girl Gone Wild is a collection of essays about drugs, delusion, and dysmorphia. Actress-turned-writer Courtney Kocak transplants herself from the quiet cornfields of rural Minnesota to the filthy heart of Hollywood and takes readers on her heady metamorphosis from girl to woman—from getting paid to kick a guy in the balls to selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour, from abusing laxatives to getting hooked on Adderall, from having an abortion to being bad at breakups, and beyond. It’s a wild and cringeworthy ride, while also hilarious, heartbreaking, and highly relatable.

The essay below, “The Skinny, in Numbers,” is excerpted from that collection.

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0

If anyone asks, I no longer have an issue with food. “This is the healthiest I’ve ever been,” I say.

5’6” 110 lbs.

The height and weight of Kate Moss, according to one website circa 1997, burned to my memory since puberty and the dawn of the Internet, although I’ve always questioned the validity of that stat. Who reported it? Was there guessing involved? If not, was it naked at-home post toilet or like a doctor’s office situation? A doctor’s office scale is the grimmest possible reporting of one’s current weight. How can anything that bulky be accurate? Doctor’s office scales probably cause more eating disorders than the media. Now that is a statistic I would like to see.

1983

The year I was born. Also: the year Karen Carpenter died. My mom loved Karen Carpenter and sat me down to watch The Karen Carpenter Story when I was 8 or 9. It seemed really important but at first I didn’t know why. I watched the movie intently, trying to decipher the message my mom intended for me to receive, but I got distracted by how glamorous Cynthia Gibb looked with her feathered hair and matching pantsuit in the scene where she breezes into brunch, lying to her friend about how she can’t partake in the meal because she “just had a huge breakfast.” By the end of the movie, what I know for sure is that: 1) Early in her career, a music critic called Karen the “chubby drummer” (I thought she looked normal; she looked like me), 2) A decade later she died of a heart attack, and 3) I don’t want anyone to call me chubby.

11

My age when I went with my grandparents to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to visit my uncle during his stint at the mental hospital for depression and a gambling addiction, and, in an attempt to not feel like the fuck up of the family, he let it slip that my mom had gone to in-patient treatment for an eating disorder in 8th grade. I had never known this about her. I always thought she was perfect. So that’s how you do it, I thought. I would spend the next four years trying to be perfect enough to land myself in the hospital.

1

The number of junior high birthdays I spent in the emergency room because I was constipated and had a bowel obstruction from eating exclusively apples during a DIY fall cleanse. Thank you for the birthday enema, Sanford Worthington Hospital emergency room. It was an extremely special gift since it saved my life!

8

The number of chocolate laxatives I would choke down in one sitting, an abuse repeated countless times throughout high school. The recommended dosage says only take two at a time, but what does the box know? Nobody cares how much the box weighs. How hot the box is. Sometimes eight wasn’t enough. It depended on the binge. It depended on how much I hated myself at that exact moment—usually at least eight rectangles worth. But often as many as ten or twelve. Once I ate a whole box of sixteen.

33

The number of states my scale has escorted me to. I carefully pack the handcuffs to my eating disorder in my suitcase on almost every trip I take, ensuring that my scale’s ability to weigh me isn’t compromised on the journey. It’s accompanied me to every state in the Union that I’ve visited, except Hawaii, where I was free from weigh-ins for a mere 36 hours. My scale has also taken several international flights. It’s better traveled than most Americans. It didn’t come to Ireland, or years later to London and Paris. But that’s okay because I came home ten pounds lighter on both trips, afraid to indulge without immediately knowing the consequences. Baguettes are good, but I’m better.

4.0

Academic perfection, which I strived to attain throughout my education. Though, it turns out, “A-students are boring. B-students are cooler, more fun, and have better priorities in life,” insists my thinnest, blondest, most perfectionist grad school professor. I try not to roll my eyes in front of her. We both know she weighs herself twice a day, and so do I. She gives me a B. Wow, what a cool bitch! I’m tempted to go over to her house and break her scale.

2000

The magic number of calories I can eat in a day without gaining weight or going crazy. This is a post-recovery stat, though recovery is hard to define. In my late twenties, I took a workshop with a writer who is now famous, but even then she was notable, and as we rode the elevator together, she casually asked what I’d been writing about in my journal. I blurted out: My calories. As soon as the words left my mouth, I was desperate to shove them back down. After that, I went back to keeping my calorie count on post-it notes.

$60

My weekly spend, bare minimum, on the copious amount of weed I need for my mind to be a tenant of my body. Frequently, it’s twice that, and it’s considered an essential part of my budget. I smoke all the time, but I never get the munchies—either that or my desire to be thin is a stronger urge. Before recreational pot was legal in California, I had a medical marijuana card on the basis of anxiety and insomnia. I wonder if I could’ve gotten it for body dysmorphia.

3

The maximum number of items I feel comfortable having in my fridge at any given time. And I prefer those items to be Diet Mountain Dew, Diet Mountain Dew, and Diet Mountain Dew. DMD is the shorthand when I ask my boyfriend to pick one up for me on his way home. Or SFRB for Sugar Free Red Bull—recently further reduced by two syllables to “beezer”—my new drink of choice. I’ve always gravitated towards uppers. I like my heart to be working out even when I’m sitting still. When I was single, I had an amazing night of sex with someone new. He opened my fridge the next morning and couldn’t believe his eyes. “Oh wow, this is crazy.” He took a picture of the contents, which were three half-empty DMD bottles, and sent it to his friend. Then the tall, handsome bread-maker looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I don’t think I could date someone who doesn’t keep food in their fridge.”

113

The goal weight I fantasize about, as well as my actual weight when I met my current boyfriend in 2016. Since then, it’s only a number I see in my dreams. Falling in love is the fastest way to gain five to ten pounds. Why is it so hard to be sated and skinny at the same time?

50

The maximum number of pounds allowed before your luggage is deemed overweight. “Excess baggage,” the airlines call it. I weighed 2.4 times that according to my last weigh-in. I’m a woman, not a suitcase, but in my mind, the term “excess baggage” still applies.