Ellie's amazing body

Ellie is four years old 

 

Her amazing heart now beats at 80 to 100 beats per minute. She has over ten thousand amazing taste buds. Her brain has a genetic preference for sweet things. 

 

She loves chocolate, and she particularly loves chocolate wrapped in packaging with pictures of princesses and fairies. She has treats on birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Friday nights, and often when Mum has no time to play with her or just to stop her from crying. 

 

Often what she really needs is a cuddle, but because Mum is too busy, she learns to comfort herself with food. 

 

Ellie likes chocolate cereal with pictures of her favourite cartoon character on the front. 

 

She also really, really, really loves splashing in big puddles. 

 

Ellie is Seven years old 

 

Ellie’s amazing legs allow her to do star jumps, walk in the crab and jump around the playground at School when she plays tig. She is very creative and often invents new games with her friends. 

 

Ellie is not able to move as much as she would like, because she has to sit down a lot at School, she has a lot of energy but is told to be quite and pay attention. 

 

She stands on the scales and looks disapprovingly at the numbers, just like she see’s Mum doing. She overhears Mum talk about diet, and she starts to see food as good/ bad and wonders if she too should go on a diet. 

 

 

Ellie is thirteen years old 

 

Ellie starts smoking. She learns that this is a good way to stop eating, along with chewing gum. The cigarette smoke contains over four chemicals’ which poison her amazing body, the carbon monoxide binds to Ellie’s amazing haemoglobin which renders its ability to carry oxygen. Within ten seconds of the first puff the nicotine has hit Ellie’s amazing brain. She will continue to smoke until she is twenty five years old when after a dozen attempts she eventually manages to quit for good. 

 

She is developing sexually and is now capable of bearing children. She has an interest in boys but no idea about how to be around them, her friends all seem to be pursuing things. 

 

Ellie is fourteen years old 

 

Her amazing brain is prepped for learning. It copes well with the demands of a dozen different teachers, the location of her locker, her homework assignments and an ever complex social structure with other girls trying to secure their place at the top of the popularity table. 

 

She does not like PE at School, because she feels inadequate and shy. She’s just not sure if she’s doing things properly and her self-awareness is now restricting her. She’s come a long way in these short few years since carelessly spinning cartwheels in the playground. 

 

At home she is told by her Dad that she is starting to get “fat”, she is then bought along to a slimming group by her Mum where she learns about the calorific value of food and each week she is weighed and judged according to the scales. 

 

Ellie really likes the word “ skinny”. 

 

She is really into music, she notices that women need to dress a certain way to be attractive, she observes that her favourite singers are on the front covers of magazines looking great, she wishes that she looked like them, she wishes she had their life instead of hers. 

 

In the magazines they give interviews and talk about how easy they find it to stay skinny. She wonders why she can’t do this. 

 

Ellie has no idea how depressed some of her idols are, she has no idea how restricted their diets are, and she has absolutely no idea about the computer trickery that made her idols look the way they do on the magazine covers, how they covered up the acne, skin blemishes and cut over the hanging skin folds on their waist. She wants to look like them, but even they do not look like them. 

 

Ellie is 17 years old 

 

She has met a boy who makes her amazing heart flutter; which by now can beat up to one hundred thousand times per day. It has 62 beats per minute on average and pumps about five litres of blood around her body per minute whilst she is at rest, if she was a trained athlete, this figure could be up to 25 litres per minute. 

 

She thinks that the boy will not like her, and so she does nothing about it for the fear of rejection. 

 

Her body looks amazing, and unbeknownst to her she is the subject of much of her male class mate’s fantasies. Few of them approach her because they don’t think they have a chance. 

 

She is tall, with long shiny brown hair which is naturally curly but she straightens it. She has a gorgeous smile and deep blue eyes. She is slightly below the weight she should be at, and this requires much effort. In fact it’s a daily battle. 

 

She hates having photo’s taken because she thinks her amazing legs are fat, she often compares herself to friends and feels woefully inadequate. 

 

Ellie is at college studying A level business, Maths and English. She is a good student and tries very hard to please her teachers, at the same time she starts to experiment more with alcohol, and 3 nights per week she drinks cider with her friends whilst attending nights out with friends. 

 

Ellie is twenty five years old. 

 

She can’t do cartwheels any more, she’s just out of practice, with some training she could do, and she still has an amazing body, it’s capable of jumping but she doesn’t use that often. From this age her metabolism will slow down 3% every decade, making it easier for her to gain weight, she will also lose 5lbs of lean tissue per decade. 

 

Some activity could help offset much of this. Occasionally she may hit the gym and spend time on a treadmill, but this only usually last a few weeks. 

Her amazing body is now 26% fat, this is about average, and it causes her a few issues. She often thinks people are looking at her, she looks in the mirror and feels disgusted with her own body, and she won’t go on the beach in a bikini because she is worried about being judged. 

 

Ellie has just finished a University course in marketing and media, she now works for a large pharmaceutical company as an office assistant. She takes rye bread and cottage cheese into work most days, and drinks diet coke under the assumption it will help her lose fat. 

 

She has settled with a man and they have been living together for 8 months. 

 

Ellie is Thirty years old 

 

From this point on in her life her amazing body will start to shrink a little. 

 

She no longer has time to work out, and the daily battle with food became too much to keep up, she is about a stone overweight, she finds herself hideous and her relationship is affected. 

 

Ellie is very busy, she still works in the pharmaceutical company but now she is a personal assistant to the head of marketing. She tries very hard to be perfect and often works late into the night, she feels overwhelmed at the amount of work she has to do. Ellie often feels very tired. 

 

Every night she drinks half a litre of wine. Her amazing liver works hard to detoxify this, which means it has to delay it’s usual duties, one of which is breaking down fat. Her amazing body copes with this by laying down new fat cells to cope with the increased calorific load. 

 

 

She no longer has time to go to the gym, even for short stints. She goes on a few diets each year and sometimes loses some but often puts more back on. As this cycle continues her metabolism becomes impaired and it is now much easier for her to gain weight. 

 

Ellie knows that if she could just lose a stone she would feel better, she tries a new diet plan where she can only eat meat, she loses a stone, she does not feel better. She caves in and goes back to her old ways, she is now two stone more than she should be. 

 

Ellie is forty five years old 

 

Her amazing skin is now losing some of its elasticity and she is developing wrinkles. She buys expensive creams to remedy this. They tend to make it look a little better for a few hours. She would look much better, (and feel much better) if she ate healthier and got more sleep. 

 

Ellie goes on a night out to a club with some work colleagues where a musician is performing, she sits on the front row, she needs to go to the toilet but she dare not stand up and walk whilst the musician is performing for fear of people judging her. 

 

Ellie is 50 years old 

 

She looks at one of the few available photos’ she dared have taken of her as a 17 year old, she compares her saggy backside and wobbly thighs to her legs back then. She would give anything to look like that again. She cries by herself with a bottle of wine. 

 

Around this time Ellie’s amazing Ovaries stop producing eggs and her levels of oestrogen and progesterone drop rapidly. She experiences hot flushes, dry skin, brittle hair and sleepless nights. She now feels emotionally overwhelmed and unable to cope with her body and how it makes her feel. 

 

Ellie is now sixty years old 

 

Her amazing bones are not as strong now, she has developed osteoporosis and feels fragile. 

 

She has taken retirement and now spends most of her days engrossed in Television, she rarely leaves the house except to go shopping. 

 

Ellie is seventy years old 

 

Her back often hurts, she can no longer jump, she has never broken out of her self imposed prison. By now she has lost 50% of her taste buds, which makes most food taste bland. 

 

Ellie sees puddles and walks around them, she mutters and complains about the terrible weather. 

 

Ellie is eighty one years old 

 

She has lost over half of her muscle tissue now, this is her last day on earth, she feels ready for it, her life has been boring for some time, and she has had nothing to look forward to and certainly nothing to live for. 

 

Ellie’s amazing body is dead, 

 

Underground it is eaten by insects, they move on and are eaten by other insects, they in turn are eaten by other animals, birds carry her amazing body all over the world whilst Ellie watches from above. 

 

Ellie is no longer in any torment, she was a spirit having a human experience. 

 

She no longer feels any internal pain. 

 

Time goes by, everybody Ellie ever knew, her parents, friends and everyone she ever met are now gone. The contribution they made to the world in which they lived is now duly noted, and the next generation continue.