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.
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