Marcel Winatschek

Forty-Three Kilograms and Still Working on It

Samantha hasn’t eaten anything in forty-eight hours. She’s turning eighteen in April. She lives in a large single-family house in one of the greener, quieter districts of Berlin, and when I come by after school to talk to her about food—or rather, the systematic avoidance of it—her best friend Sandra is sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. We’re together basically every afternoon, Sam tells me. A chaperone, obviously. In case I try to fuck her. You can never be too careful.

We go up to her room. Everything in it is white. A colorless, girlish world stripped of feeling—no photos, no posters, just a large mirror taking up most of one wall. She lies down on the bed with a full two-liter water bottle that she’ll finish before we’re done talking. Her long blonde hair keeps falling across her face and she brushes it aside with this effortless, practiced grace. I stand awkwardly in the middle of the room for a moment before finding the desk chair and planting myself there.

She weighs 43.5 kilograms at 165 centimeters. BMI of 16. But that’s not where she wants to be—her target is 38 kilograms, and she describes it the way other people describe a promotion they’re working toward. Other bitches have done it before me and they were only half as motivated. She started because of a boyfriend who left her at fifteen, almost three years in. First love, first time, the whole thing. Near the end he started making comments: fat ass, baby fat that wouldn’t shift, belly button running the wrong direction. She looked at photos from that period later and she wasn’t fat. She wasn’t a model either, but she wasn’t fat. He dumped her anyway and immediately started sleeping with someone thinner. She spent months crying and couldn’t eat from the grief. When the first few kilos came off, she just… didn’t start eating again.

The temptation to eat doesn’t seem to trouble her much anymore. She has a folder. Inside it are plans—what she can eat, when, how much. She started with the ABC Diet, Ana’s Bootcamp, then moved on to something called Giovanni’s 30, and now she’s experimenting with the Russian Gymnast Diet. The underlying logic is the same across all of them: fruit and vegetables, enormous amounts of water, exercise layered on top, and a ceiling of five hundred calories a day. Seven hundred on weekends, as a kind of indulgence. Swimming, running, gymnastics. The longer you do this, the easier it gets, she tells me, and for a moment she sounds exactly like someone describing a marathon training schedule.

Her parents are rarely home. Her mother is naturally thin, so they’ve apparently chalked it up to genetics and left it alone. Sam is careful not to walk around in underwear or a bikini in front of them. The only person in the family who knows is her little brother, who came to her room one night crying because kids at school had called him a fat meatball. Since then she’s been helping him lose weight. She describes this as a secret pact between them with what sounds like genuine warmth.

She had a friend once who was in it with her—Kathi, blood sisters, kitchen knife and the whole ceremony. They monitored each other’s meals obsessively, cried together when their periods stopped and they panicked about being pregnant, made each other throw up when one of them slipped. Then Kathi went sideways. One night she showed up drunk outside Sam’s window and screamed up: If you get fat, I’ll kill you! She ended up in an eating disorder clinic somewhere in Bavaria. Sam visited at first, but she says if you’re there for more than two hours you start having suicidal thoughts. She doesn’t know how Kathi is now. Or if she’s still alive.

The internet fills the gap. Forums, blogs, a loose community of girls with the same problem, weekly meetups in real life, recipes and photos and techniques shared freely. Tips accumulate: swallow bitter orange extract, scrub yourself hard in the shower because even dead skin cells add grams to the scale, over-salt anything you’re forced to eat so it tastes bad enough that you leave most of it. Many things are logical once you think about them, she says, but someone has to tell you.

She doesn’t pretend this is healthy. Of course it’s a problem, she says, almost impatiently, like I’ve asked a stupid question. Most of the girls in her circle aren’t stupid. They know the magazine covers are Photoshopped. They know about tooth enamel and esophageal damage and the ones who’ve died. But we don’t give a shit. What she wants is simple, stated plainly: to be satisfied with her body, to have a flat stomach, to stand naked in front of a mirror and have her thighs not touch. She’s mostly stopped purging—she just eats less instead. That calms her down. But she’s clear-eyed about what it is: a disease she can’t undo.

The pressure has to go somewhere. Some of the girls she knows cut themselves in places nobody sees and use the days-since-purging count as a kind of score. She used to cut too, but she says she’s a coward and can’t do it anymore. So she has sex with her boyfriend instead, as often as possible. He likes having a pretty, thin girlfriend and shows her off at school. When he notices something and says something she doesn’t want to hear, she makes him food or fucks him and he’s quiet again for a few weeks. The anorexia has taken her breasts down to almost nothing—she describes them as just nipples now, smaller than the kids’ sports bras she used to wear. He doesn’t touch them anymore during sex, just ignores them entirely. That, she admits, makes her a little sad.

After we’re done she and Sandra are going to the Alexa mall to buy spring clothes. She makes a comment about Sandra’s legs and the junk food Sandra eats at every opportunity—says it like a diagnosis, not quite cruelty but close. Then she tries out a couple of motivational phrases on me, testing which one lands better, the way you’d workshop a slogan. She settles on: Those who give up can never win. Sounds better than the other one, she decides. I don’t argue. I close my notebook and let myself out.