intuitive eating

Hello there! This post is part of a series of essays where I am attempting to retrace the pivotal moments that have defined the relationship I have with food and with my body as I continue on my journey of healing, self-love and acceptance. Learn more about the project here. 

I told you all in my last essay about my first diet, the fruit cocktail and tortilla that kicked off 17 years of yo-yo dieting and restriction for me. I’d be willing to bet that my initial diet lasted less than a day. I’m sure I held strong for as long as I could and then caved in to my cravings and ate something that wasn’t prescribed. But, the seed was planted. The gauntlet was thrown down. Within a few years, I was deep in my self-hatred and some really disordered food behaviors.

I believed I was fat and that being fat was a character flaw, so I set out to ‘fix’ myself. I didn’t know that diets don’t work. The media all around me already encouraged me to restrict my food intake to improve my appearance, so it wasn’t a tough decision. I already had a strong streak of perfectionism and a knack for people pleasing, so I believed that I could work hard enough at my perceived flaw in order to make myself more acceptable.

It was just ‘calories in/calories out’, right?

I focused my energies on the ‘calories in’ side of the equation. In middle school, I went from trying to diet my way thin to straight up not eating as a means of control, my own intermittent fasting before it was a ‘wellness trend’. I would do my best to only eat dinner. Dinner was sacred at our home, the time my mom insisted that we come together as a family. Even though my family supported my weight loss attempts, I was still expected to eat dinner. I would restrict all day as best I could.

I remember that time as the ‘Nutty Bars’ chapter. Remember that Little Debbie dessert? It was peanut butter and wafer cookies enveloped in chocolate. I think my middle school sold them for fifty cents. I liked them so much that I would maybe buy one of those for ‘lunch’ and then not eat again all day until dinner. Can you imagine? I was a teenager, still growing. A Nutty Bar wasn’t going to cut it on the nutrition front for an entire day’s energy output.

I became obsessed with food. It was pretty much all I could think about. It was biological. I was restricting, but my mind was trying to feed me, so I was miserable. I would start every day promising myself that I would be ‘good’. I would be so hungry while at school that I’d have trouble focusing. Sometimes I would be able to resist eating anything. Sometimes I would get my Nutty Bar. Sometimes I would get a Nutty Bar, chips, cookies, the whole shebang. Sometimes I would come home after school and eat everything in sight because my body was screaming for adequate nutrition. My family would see it and I would assume that they were thinking I had no control.

I would agree with them.

Around that time, I used to spend the night at my best friend’s house a lot. Her mom was and still is the kindest soul. She was a labor and delivery nurse. So nurturing, so kind, so caring. She paid a lot of attention to us and she was really concerned about my posture. She never said anything to me directly about it, but my best friend would tell me about how much it bothered her mom that I walked around with my back hunched over. She didn’t want me to have health issues because I couldn’t stand up straight. I now understand that I walked around like that because I wanted to disappear. I was ashamed of myself. I hated the size of my stomach, the width of my shoulders, my thick legs. I felt subconscious all the time and I was deeply disappointed in my perceived inability to overcome the flaw of my own genetics. So, I shrunk myself down. I was trying to make myself small by any means. I folded myself in, arranged my bones to be as small as humanly possible because I hated the space I took up.

It’s so painful to write these essays and retrace the steps on my journey. Before I can get to the place where I can tell you all about the fundamental, life-changing shift that happened to me in my relationship with food, I need to try to explain to you how low down I went into my body shame. I need to remember how painful it was to walk around with my shoulders hunched. How hard it was to loathe myself for the times I fed myself well, to retrace how painful my inner emotions felt and how deeply the restriction I attempted with food affected me. I’m trying to explain the pain, but then I remember that chances are if you’re reading this, you already know.

You probably relate to my attempts to starve myself. You probably already know what it’s like to binge. You can relate to agonizing over every crumb that passes through your lips. Most importantly, you probably already understand that it’s no way to live.

So, this is the story of when the disordered eating took root. This was when it all went beyond a diet to behaviors that harmed me for years, even though I seemed happy and smiling on the outside. This was when the food obsession really ramped up and the self-hatred, too. Thankfully, it’s not the end of the journey by any means, it’s just the part where it started to hurt the most.

Hello there! This post is part of a series of essays where I am attempting to retrace the pivotal moments that have defined the relationship I have with food and with my body as I continue on my journey of healing, self-love and acceptance. Learn more about the project here. 

I am writing this post early in the morning. I woke early to meditate, drink coffee and write. I want to give this series the very best of my brain power, so I am rising early and writing when I am fresh. After about an hour this morning, my stomach started to rumble so I made myself my first tomato sandwich of the summer. One of my absolute most favorite things to eat, ever. Toasted sourdough bread, a generous smear of mayo, sliced heirloom tomatoes, salt and pepper. Perfection. I started with one big piece of toasted sourdough and, wow, it was so delicious. After I ate it, I checked in with myself. My body wanted more, so I toasted another slice. The second slice wasn’t quite as good as the first. I felt my stomach getting full. I set my plate to the side with a bit of sandwich left, satisfied. So satisfied.

That is food freedom for me. That is listening to my body’s intuitive wisdom.

Getting to a place where I can eat anything I want at any time I want is nothing short of life changing. It is the ultimate eff you to our world of diet culture where every bite is regulated, everything we want to put into our bodies is second-guessed as to whether or not it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  At first, it was hard to know how to listen to my body because I had been cutting off its signals for a long time. I started ignoring my body’s cues for food super young. It’s funny, because I realize in doing this project that I have no idea of my age when I experienced my most pivotal moments with food, but if I had to guess I would estimate that I went on my first diet when I was ten or eleven. I started therapy to deal with my food issues around age 28, so I was stuck in the diet cycle for about 17 years. 17 years on a hamster wheel of either actively restricting my caloric intake via dieting, ‘binging’ which in my case was just a biological attempt at refeeding myself after severely limiting my caloric intake or ‘eating normally’ for a little while as I gathered enough willpower to start another diet. Nearly two decades in this shame spiral, but it had to start somewhere and this is the story of its genesis.

My First Diet

My mom and stepdad hosted a bbq in our backyard. There were maybe 15 people there. It was a beautiful Summer evening in Arizona, when the blistering heat of the day breaks and cool sweeps over the desert. My mom cooked hamburgers. I love hamburgers, especially my mom’s. She just knows how to put together a great burger. At the time, she had taken to stirring the powder from a french onion dip packet into the meat. It made the most flavorful patties and she went out of her way to assemble all the best accoutrements to accompany our burgers, including the freshest lettuce and the softest buns. I love my mom’s burgers, but I didn’t have one that day because I had woken up in the morning determined to get skinny by eating ‘good’ foods. Instead, I ate half a can of fruit cocktail and a tortilla. Somehow in my twisted child’s mind, that was healthier than a hamburger. I probably learned about it via Cosmo or something, but I acutely remember sitting on a picnic bench with my oldest sister and the pastor of my church eating some fruit cocktail and a microwaved tortilla while longing for a good juicy burger. That’s the feeling I remember: wanting to eat what my body wanted to eat, joining in on the full revelry of the beauty of food that a bbq seems to inspire, but sitting uncomfortably and forcing myself to eat something I didn’t want to eat.

I had no idea, really, what to eat to be skinny but at my young age, I already understood that to be ‘good’ and on a diet, I had to deny myself of the things that I wanted to eat. I had to disengage with my enjoyment of food and with my body’s intuitive wisdom and listen to some external source for what to put into my body.

Diet culture hasn’t changed one bit since my childhood. It’s still based on punishment, deprivation and  someone else telling you how to eat best for yourself. Call it intermittent fasting, plant based, ketogenic, paleo, whole 30, SOS free, clean eating, it’s all the same.

It’s based on disconnection from your own self and it’s so, so toxic and untenable.

That first diet kicked off 17 years of yo-yo eating for me. Sometimes I was ‘good’ and sometimes I was ‘bad’. Everytime I ate was excruciating because I didn’t listen to my own body. That’s the thing that sucks about having issues with food, every four hours or so, you’re faced with your own demons. You know you need some sort of sustenance, but choosing that right sustenance becomes nearly impossible because the goal post for ‘good’ is constantly changing and it usually doesn’t feel ‘good’ to your own body. Keeping track of what’s okay to eat, in what amounts, to keep your body in check with an external standard of beauty that’s probably in direct contradiction to your own genetics is a set-up for unhappiness and feeling like a failure.

When my sister and pastor saw me eating the fruit cocktail and tortilla, they laughed at me and told me I was better off eating a burger because according to their own definition of ‘good’, the burger was probably better than my chosen meal. I remember the way I felt when they laughed at me because I was so confused about it. I was trying to get skinny so that I could be perfect and yet, my chosen path to perfection was causing me to have the disapproval of others. I felt like I was wrong and bad in that moment and that is exactly why diet culture sucks. It’s an impossible situation where you feel bad even when you’re being ‘good’ and you feel ‘good’ even when you’re feeling bad.

There’s lots of research about why diets don’t work, but that research has it all wrong in my opinion. They prove that diets don’t work because they show that people inevitably gain back the weight and then some after a diet. It’s true, but that’s not the real reason for me. They don’t work because they are a mind game of epic proportions. They literally play with your brain chemistry to the point that you don’t know whether up is up or down is down. They make every time you get hungry pure torture. They make living in your own body and mind misery.

That is no way to live, but I lived that way for years. I breaks my heart to think that so many people are still living in the impossible dieting cycle. It doesn’t work, yet they feel like they are the ones who are broken. So many women have their own fruit cocktail and tortilla story, the genesis of the moment where the deprivation began. The beautiful thing for me is to realize that in the same way that the diet cycle has a beginning, it can also have an end. I’m writing the end of that story as we speak and I hope that anyone who is still on that journey can find joy in realizing that they have they key to unshackle their own chains and choose their own life of food freedom. It’s a beautiful thing.

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