Believing that my appearance was the sole cause of all this uneasiness, I began to deprive myself of food to lose weight. I gave my snacks away to friends at school, secretly threw food away at home and went to bed with an empty stomach almost every night. I didn’t realize it then, but I had unwittingly kick-started an afflicting relationship with food that persists to this day. In a short while I managed to lose most of the weight I had gained over the past year and by the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around I had earned the nickname ‘sparrow’ at school for my sparse eating habits.
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