half truths ,, l.s

1

It didn't start with a snarky comment or a model in a magazine. There were no life-changing epiphanies about being overweight, no diet that went wrong. The hate he receives daily on Twitter didn't suddenly get worse and lead him to starve himself, and Louis still loved him like he always has, so it wasn't that. Harry doesn't really know what set it off.

Maybe it's about control. It's the only thing that makes sense to him, the only possibility he one-hundred percent relates to in those lists of causes he reads on online at night, in secret. As far as he can remember, he started feeling wary about food in the middle of One Direction's first headlining tour. None of them had any privacy or freedom, which could've led him to grasping for control elsewhere, and maybe his eating was the first thing his hands grasped that didn't slip through his fingers.

Looking back, Harry can differentiate the stages of it. It started with conscious eating, with trying to know exactly what was in his food and not wanting to put garbage into his body. Gradually, he started to work out more. And then came the restricting, where he slowly reeled back on carbs and fatty foods and sugar. But it wasn't too bad yet. All it was was thinking extra hard about his food choices and avoiding certain things. It was okay.

Eventually, it stopped being okay.

It gradually turned from being conscious about what he was eating to being full-blown obsessed with it. Counting calories, reciting what he had to eat that day so far in his head during interviews, refusing to eat in public. He was only nineteen and at the end of his second tour when he made sure he had two water bottles before each meal so he felt full already. He became a nervous-wreck in regards to anything to do with food; cooking, eating, others eating around him, grocery shopping. He got snappy and irritable, constantly prepared to defend himself about his habits. Nobody ever really asked questions, but he was prepared anyway.

Somewhere between the Where We Are Now tour and the On The Road Again tour, it became about his weight. The obsession with food never, ever dwindled, not even in the slightest, and then it became paired up with the unexplained urge to be thin. That's when it got reckless.

It's not like he didn't eat. He did, just. . . not as much as he should've. Enough to get him through the day, but barely. The life he lived didn't allow him to just completely stop eating, even if he really, really wished he could.