Author’s Synopsis
“Cadet Beaudean, I think you’d do better on the fitness test if you took a few pounds off,” suggests my squad leader at West Point.
“How is it going with your weight?” asks my father over the phone.
Every moment of my West Point experience and my life is grounded in the understanding that if only I were thinner, all would be well.
Whatever the Cost begins with “R Day,” or Report Day, for the West Point class of 1991. The first day is like stepping off the tip of the diving board into ice water. Perhaps even a step into hell. But for me the day’s stress, with its head-reeling immersion into military life, is overshadowed instead by the terror that I won’t satisfy the Academy’s weight requirement.
Jenifer Beaudean: Class of 1991 USMA
Through my first two years at West Point, I struggle to adjust to military life, with one funny and tragic mishap following another — Private Benjamin style. And the men in my life play a pivotal role. I worship my father and my squad leader, the latter a military “natural” with whom I fall madly in love. But with each man and each relationship my weight is the topic that is front and center.
I weigh 140 pounds and am a healthy young woman.
But in American culture, one can never be thin enough.
Whatever the Cost weaves two stories together – the difficulty of cadet life and my personal battle with my weight and self image. Through my four years at West Point there are moments and debacles that are meaningful, tragic and sometimes humorous. But the most important moment of my day, every day, is the moment I step on the scale.
In my third year at the Academy I make the decision to place my health second to my size. Weary of the constant scrutiny of others and in a fit of desperation, I put my finger down my throat and begin the cycle of self-induced vomiting that typifies bulimia. As my final year at West Point begins, I am addicted, binging and purging every day. Bulimia is no longer a choice.
I successfully graduate from West Point in June of 1991 with no one aware of my secret. I become a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers and marry a West Point classmate. Over the next seven years, my bulimia takes on a personality. Sometimes it rages, my head in the toilet several times a day. Other times it is quiet and I wonder where my friend has gone. But in 2000, with my unresolved grief over the death of my father and my impending divorce, the bulimia takes over and I begin purging up to five times per day.
This is where bulimia is witnessed in all its ugliness — at my darkest hour, throwing up by the side of a highway with the traffic speeding by.
Purging in a service station restroom with urine splattering my pants.
Binging on a dozen Dunkin’ Doughnuts only to turn around and throw it back up.
My life has become unrecognizable.
In 2002, my mother and sister intervene. As I begin treatment at the Renfrew Center in Wilton, Connecticut, Whatever the Cost explores the grueling process and hard work required to get well.
My therapist heads my treatment team.
“I want to get well, but I don’t want to be fat. I’ll die first,” I tell her.
“If you don’t get well, you may get your wish,” she replies quietly.
Along with my therapist is the psychiatrist who treats my depression and a dietician at Renfrew who helps me learn how to eat again. Over the course of eight months, I slowly rebuild my life.
Whatever the Cost is a unique story because West Point is an extraordinary and singular experience – and perhaps more so for women who make up only 15% of the Corps. Who would think that in the midst of rigorous athletics, combat training and tough academics, female cadets at the world’s most prestigious military academy are sticking a finger down their throat or restricting food? The message is clear — if bulimia can happen to a cadet at West Point, it can happen to any woman, anywhere. And it is everywhere.
Bulimia runs rampant across not only college campuses, but also across the lives of professional women and housewives, all determined to achieve the physical “perfection” venerated in fashion magazines and among Hollywood movie stars. That perfection sends hundreds of thousands of women to their bathroom scale each morning in the pursuit of a physicality that, in American culture, equals success.
We can never be thin enough.
But at what cost?
The ultimate message of Whatever the Cost is one of hope — We don’t have to live like this! We have a right to a healthy life in the body we were given. Women who suffer from the debilitating addiction of an eating disorder can get well and live healthy lives.
Wishing you health and happiness,
Jenny