I sat crossed-legged on my hospital bed for nearly two months before I earned an afternoon pass to go to the mall with my mother. The privilege came just in time; I felt unbearably large and desperately wanted a new outfit under which to hide gained weight. At the mall, I searched for two hours before finally discovering, in the maternity section of Macy’s, a shirt large enough to cover what I perceived as my enormous body.

With an hour left on my pass, I spotted a sign on a shop window: “Body Fat Testing, $3.00.” I suggested to my mother that we split up for ten minutes; she headed to Barnes & Noble, and I snuck into the fitness store.

I sat down in front of the machine hooked up to a computer, and a burly young bodybuilder fired questions at me:

“Age?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Height?”

“Five nine.”

“Weight?”

“Ninety-nine.”

The young man punched my statistics into his keyboard and pinched my arm with clippers wired to the testing machine. In a moment, the computer spit out my results. “Only ten percent body fat! Unbelievably healthy. The average for a woman your age is twenty-five percent. Fantastic! You’re this week’s blue ribbon winner.”

I stared at him in disbelief. Winner? Healthy? Fantastic? I glanced around at the other customers in the store, some of whom had congregated to watch my testing, and I felt embarrassed by his praise. And then I felt furious. Furious at this man and at the society that programmed him for ignorant approbation of my illness and my suffering.

“I am dying of anorexia, ” I whispered. “Don’t congratulate me.”