05 Jul your body is a wonderland
I was born in 1988. A millennial woman, through and through. Born into a time of low-fat everything, special K commercials, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” the list goes on and on and on. The vast majority of women my age experienced some degree of body dysmorphia and/or extreme pressure to be thin in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, so none of this is particularly shocking or surprising. I drank my first Slim Fast when I was 8. I carried around a calorie counting book in my purse from ages 12-19 (this was before smart phones, remember). I threw up a large majority of what I ate all throughout high school & early college, and I still fight severe anorexic & bulimic tendencies, at 37 years old. I count every calorie that goes into my mouth, and I have for a long time. I run half marathons, I push myself to the breaking point in the gym, with chronic pain & connective tissue disorders, and it has always – ALWAYS – been about becoming thinner.
There have been entire decades of my life when I wouldn’t eat bread, rice, or processed sugar, but I would drink wine to numb the sadness & gain an escape. At my smallest, you could count my ribs – but I was a “normal BMI.” And so I’ve spent my life like this – existing in a “normal” to “slightly overweight” looking body while starving myself most of my years on earth. Forcing yourself to constantly push to exist in a smaller body is utterly exhausting, and it’s also incredibly confusing. I’ve been a size 4 and I’ve been a size 20, and I thought I was absolutely enormous, in both bodies.
And the saddest part, is that there are SO MANY men, women, and children who fall into this same category. If you weigh 90 lbs, they take you seriously – if you look fairly normal, you can tell your therapist “I struggle with restrictive eating,” and they’ll chuckle and say, “who doesn’t?” But the ramifications are damning – constant anxiety, self-hatred, second guessing, depression, loss of joy & pleasure, isolation, the list goes on and on. And those are just the mental issues – physically, muscle loss, osteoporosis, fertility issues, poor sleep, nerve damage, heat & cold intolerance…eating disorders wreck you, both mind & body.
I feel such sadness & fear about this, especially, as I watch our society shift from a period of widespread body acceptance into another era of “thinness.” Weight loss drugs are the hot new thing, and I feel great worry for the people out there who have spent their lives trying to heal from eating disorders only to embark upon this new horizon of, once again, “if you aren’t rail thin, you should be, and you can be – this will help you not eat.” These drugs help a lot of people, and that’s wonderful; but they absolutely make healing difficult, for those of us who are trying to shift into loving ourselves once and for all, at every size.
You are good, and you are worthy, and your body is for you, at every size. It’s the only one we get. Try to find peace with it. I’ll keep telling you – keep telling *myself* – these words, until maybe, one day, they’ll feel true. ♥️
This month’s mental health charity proceeds will go to Eat Breathe Thrive, an international nonprofit working to help individuals overcome disordered eating.