*Trigger Warning- This post will talk about disordered eating and my personal relationship with food as well as weight and body image, and medical issues.
I am making a choice to share my story and history online. I do this because the process of being open this spring has lifted years of burden and weight off my shoulders. It has shown me that I am not alone in much of what I have experienced, and created stronger bonds to people in my community. I am also aware that people may have negative reactions to what I put online. I ask that you keep those to yourself.
I have been tall and thin for my whole life. I was over 5'4" on my 10th birthday. If you look at the women on my dad's side we are all basically built the same at different heights. If you want a strong indication of what I will look like in my 80s look no further than my grandmother. However that lead to strong comparisons between myself and my more athletic family members (I am a total klutz for those who don't know me well). As well as a desire to main the model like build that I was often referenced as.
The words we use towards and around kids matter. Looking back I am sure my grandmother meant no harm when she would give me clothing saying she bought them for herself but they were too big for her. And I am sure people meant it as a compliment when they would repeatedly say I could be a model. But those sentiments had lasting impacts. Sure when I was a kid and over 5 feet tall and hadn't gone through puberty yet, I did have a certain body type, but there was an internal pressure to maintain that as puberty struck, and thus started a nearly 2 decades long battle with food.
When you start to restrict food and no one knows about it, but you continue to receive verbal praise for your looks, it positively re-enforces that behavior. No matter how unhealthy, and the voice of the eating disorder becomes louder than any rational voice telling you to stop. My teen years were filled with lying to everyone about having eaten. If I wasn't eating at school I'd had a big breakfast or a snack during study hall. If I wasn't eating at home, I'd grabbed food during play practice or on the way home. But because I had always been thin, and was genetically built to be leaner, and wasn't restricting to nothing, and still ate something every day, no one noticed.
In high school we had surveys every fall to identify need for counseling support and I was honest for the first time with anyone about my issues with food. I was in a support group throughout high school for people mostly girls with eating disorders. It also got me out of PE or English every week, which was fine with me. I have mixed feelings about support groups for people actively living with eating disorders. I think they can create a hierarchy and internal comparison and besting mentality. I could always tell myself I wasn't really sick, because I didn't need to be hospitalized, or because people couldn't tell, or because I had self-control. I wasn't like I threw up. - Yes these were the actual thoughts of teen-age me.
As I neared the end of HS and started to think about my future, I realized that in college, there weren't going to be people who knew me earlier in life, I could re-create myself. The first 3 college years were fad diets or trendy things. I tried gluten free, dairy free, vegan, vegetarian, pesca-tarian (fish), there was a solid month or so that I basically lived on baked potatoes. And inevitably I gained weight. Then came the Disney season of life.
When you work in a place surrounded by overweight people all the time, eating insane caloric meals and treats all day long, your brain can start to play tricks on you. From the start of Disney to the end (6 months) I'd gone down 2 sizes. Which for some people who are trying to loose weight safely 2 sizes in 6 months is probably fine- just look at a Jenny Craig add from the 90s. But when you don't have that weight to loose it's not okay.
After Disney I moved back to the mid-west and got back to college. This time dating someone who was very athletic. There was a pressure in my head- that in order to maintain that relationship I needed to be a good "fit" or match. Looking back- he wasn't a good fit, and it wasn't a relationship I should have been fighting to hold on to. But we all make mistakes in our 20s. This was the first time in my life that working out obsessively started to kick my eating issues into overdrive. Again positive reinforcement from those I was surrounding myself with at that time kept my behavior heading down a negative path. Additionally, after years of restrictive eating, I found that this stage in my life that I rarely got hungry. When I did I could often think back days since I had eaten. It took a very unique professor and a class my last year of college to finally start to get my head on straight about food. I took women's health and we had an entire month long unit on eating disorders, of which my professor was an expert on. There was no hiding myself or lying to this women. She could see through all of it. The books we worked through in her class made me finally face the long term consequences of what I was doing to my body. She was louder than the voice in my head.
After college I immediately started grad school on the east coast. When I am extremely stressed I find I forget to eat. Not trying to restrict, just actually forget to eat. Needless to say that was most of grad school. I remember going shopping with my mom for clothes for student teaching, and I was a size 4. I had graduated college as a size 6.
My first 2 years teaching after grad school were some of the most demanding years in teaching (including quarantine). I was often in risk of physical harm in my classroom. I rarely got a break for lunch or a planning period. I maintained myself as a human, survival was my only goal those years. My mental health in many facets took a back seat. I was in a relationship the last 2 years in NY where my size was rarely mentioned. I felt more comfortable to eat when we were together and I got back to where I was in at the end of college. During my last 2 years in NY I also attended monthly support group meetings with adults. The Other AA as we called it- anorexic's anonymous. Grownups will call other grown ups out on their shit. We were all also at a stage in our recovery where we wanted to be in recovery, we wanted to he healthy, it was more helpful than the group in high school.
6 months after I left the east coast I had a mental health break, I was hospitalized and was put on medication to help with anxiety and depression. But like all medication, there is side effects. In my case-weight gain. Which was horrifying. Within 4 months of being released from the hospital, I took myself off the medication for 6 months, then I started to feel "crazy" again for lack of a better term, and went back on them, at a lower dose. If I realized in that time, that If I had to live at a higher weight to be able to live, that was something I was going to have to learn to deal with. Because I want to live.
A few months after that I got engaged. Bought a wedding dress- the pressure to say the exact same size is REAL when you spend over a thousand dollars on a dress you will wear for 1 day. I got married at a size 8. We then packed up everything and moved cross country. Learning to live with someone new has it's own unique set of challenges. The stress of finding a job has it's unique set of challenges and through all of these challenges I gained weight. By my first doctors appointment where we live now I was up to 155lbs which is the highest my weight had every been and I was horrified that I'd "let myself" get there, also that was pretty close to what my husband who is 6 inches taller than me weighed at the time, which creates it's own issues.
Over the last 3 years since moving, my weight has stayed the same. Through quarantine my weight has stayed the same. I am learning to accept and love this version of myself knowing that this is a weight that my body is happy at, even in the months that my body is not happy.
Starting in late February I started to struggle with food in a whole new way. I started to throw up after eating. Even just a bite. Without warning, my body rejects what is has been given. Sometimes the sickness passes quickly, other times it takes away my entire day. I am actually thankful to quarantine in a way. There was no pressure to go out and eat, so this was my hidden reality, that no one else needed to know about or be burdened by. But I am ANGRY. I finally reached a stage in my life where I am not restricting my diet, where I am finding joy in all foods in moderation (and sometime excess) and my body decides it doesn't want to play along. This has made me afraid to eat food, because there is no indication of what I will react to. I can eat the same thing for 4 days and get sick on the 5th. I am working with my doctor to find solutions. I had a myriad of testing done, everything came back normal. Which when you are sick all the time, is honestly really hard to hear. I am on medication to decrease stomach acids (I feel like that ages me), and take proactive anti nausea pills if I am going to brave eating out. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Honestly the fear I now have around food is the biggest reason I am scared to go back to work at this point. What happens if I eat during lunch and am then out of commission for an hour- and stuck at work? Do I just not eat at work? My fear of food issues at work is bigger than my fear of getting Covid at work. That's the level of control food has on my life right now. Which sucks. I want to be past having these kinds of life altering experiences with food. My struggles with food have been a roller coaster for the last 18 years. It would have graduated HS this spring. I still get triggered by people who reference their diets, or needing to stay a certain size to like themselves. In fact if I hadn't written it, I probably wouldn't read my own post because of the impact it could have on me.
To summarize-
- Think about the words you say to people about what they look like- especially our youth.
- Realize that someone's weight at a given time does not dictate if they are dealing with an eating disorder- you don't have to look like a skeleton to have a problem.
- People don't drastically "get better" one day. Issues with food are often long battles and daily challenges.
- If you are going to talk about diets, weight, body image, or mental health related content, please include trigger warnings.
With that I will sign off.
-C
