Content Warning: disordered eating, anorexia, mental health crises
If you have read any of my previous posts, you know that I have written on the topic of my history of disordered eating. In fact, it was one of the first topics I addressed, in "Sausage Legs", in April of 2018. My very first post was inspired by the unsolicited well-intentioned comments of my friends and co-workers who were noticing my recent weight loss, some of which was intentional and some of which was brought on by illness. When I was writing these posts, I believed that my history of disordered eating was behind me. I knew, cognitively, that thin doesn't equate to health or beauty, and that I could be beautiful and healthy at any size. I knew that, and still...here we are, telling another story.
It was shortly after the 2018 marathon that I started dieting again. I had, prior to the event, lost a good deal of weight, in part due to diet and exercise, and in part due to the IBS that I wasn't exactly talking openly about with casual acquaintances. With the elimination diet that helped me isolate the foods that were triggering my symptoms, I reached the thinnest state I'd seen since college. Having food sensitivities and allergies were both a convenient excuse to avoid fattening foods in public, and also a legitimate fear-trigger around eating for me. I was still terrified of foods I wasn't certain wouldn't make me sick. With the help of a full-time gym habit and plenty of protein intake, I was well-muscled, and bore less body fat than I had ever worn before. The compliments were constant. "You look amazing! What are you doing? I can't believe the transformation I've seen in you!" I deflected with self-deprecating humor, because I knew the comments were misplaced and undeserved. I didn't feel amazing. I didn't feel transformed. I felt tired, cold, and hungry.
In the summer and fall of 2018, while training for a 26 mile run, I was healing my battered gut, and the weight started to creep back on. I carbo-loaded like a champ, learning which high-calorie foods my intestines were able to digest easily (tater tots are my absolute fave), and as I trained, I ate and put back on some of the weight I had lost. As soon as the race was over and the blush of having completed such an accomplishment was behind me, it was time to start counting calories again.
Why, after feeling like such garbage at a lower weight would I want to go back to feeling like that? Because now I identified as a Thin Person. Now I had a wardrobe full of tiny pants. Moreover, now I couldn't let down all those people who expressed how pleased they seemed to see me small and sick. It wasn't just a few comments. It wasn't just a few people. It was dozens of colleagues, friends, and fellow fitness enthusiasts at the gym. It was the dentist. It was my waxer. It was the video guy at the school play. They say it's the thousandth tiny cut that makes a person bleed, and in spite of my speaking up and speaking out about the damaging effects of thin-praising (in this very blog, no less), the damage had found its way to me.
I was successful at staying quite thin. Here's the thing, though: I was never lighter than the BMI's official suggested weight range for my age. My body fat was never low enough to be considered problematic. I fit firmly into the current medical standards for a healthy body, and so I never thought that my dieting behavior was a problem that needed addressing.
Chronic dieters love to throw about the expression "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". First of all, skinny isn't a feeling. It's a descriptor. A pencil can be skinny, but it doesn't feel anything. Second of all, if skinny were a feeling, for me, it felt like a constant barrage of digestive distress and frequent respiratory infections. It felt like a weakened immune system and low thyroid function. It felt like a pulse so sluggish, a doctor sent me home with a heart monitor for 24 hours to ensure functionality. Worse, skinny felt like the thing that everyone else wanted me to be, and I would do anything, including sabotage my own health and happiness to be that thing that seemed to please everyone who seemed so much more interested in the person I had become in a smaller form.
I had an image in my mind of what a person with an eating disorder looked like. I had seen the stories of the tragic, emaciated teen, hair falling, out, hospitalized with an IV. A person with a proper eating disorder would be much skinnier than I was. It wasn't until quite recently, when I went to count the olives I was putting in my salad (6 is officially a serving, by the way--worth one point in Weight Watchers, or about 50 calories) the same way I had done a thousand times before, that I thought to myself "I think...I think I can't do this any more." I started opening up to my therapist about what I referred to as being 'on the verge of an eating disorder' and we looked up the official definition of anorexia. Here's what the DSM's most recent publication has to say:
A. Restriction of energy intake relative to requirements, leading to a significant low body weight in the context of the age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical health (less than minimally normal/expected1).
B. Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat or persistent behavior that interferes with weight gain.
C. Disturbed by one’s body weight or shape, self-worth influenced by body weight or shape, or persistent lack of recognition of seriousness of low bodyweight.
Again, I reiterate, according to the BMI , an official(ly debunked) chart (created by white men, using research primarily on white men), my weight was never below "normal". But it's safe to say that my eating (or lack thereof) was having a deleterious effect on my health. My intense fear of re-gaining the weight I had lost was having a deleterious effect on my mental health. I even turned down the offer of anti-depressants during a particularly rough patch because I was afraid they would cause weight gain. I learned which answers to my doctor's mental health questionnaire would require her to have me hospitalized and I lied to avoid it (but I still wasn't about to stop dieting just because I was at my literal lowest).
Eating disorders can look like a lot of people we don't see portrayed in typical media presentations. They can look like your fit friend. They can look like your fat friend. They can look like someone who is doing everything 'right' when they know people are watching. You might think you're being a good friend by encouraging someone's weight loss. Maybe sometimes those comments occasionally do some good, but there is always the chance that they can do harm. In my case, the thousandth tiny cut led to a relapse worse and more sustained than my prior dalliances with disordered eating: two years of bouncing around from diet to diet, alternating between counting macros, counting calories, counting points, counting olives. It's hard to stop counting. I still find myself looking at the 'nutritional' information on packages. I'm still re-learning how to actually recognize hunger and fullness signals. I struggle to remember if I ate or when I ate, since I'm no longer tracking every bite in my phone. I still weigh myself every day (baby steps). I still turn sideways in the mirror and look to see how much fatter I appear than I remember wanting to appear. I still suck in when a picture is being snapped.
If you have a friend who you know is intentionally losing weight, and they're happy and proud of their progress, there are so many supportive things you can say to them: "I'm glad you're feeling well; you deserve to be happy" "I see you're doing a lot of Zumba! It looks so fun!" "What you're eating looks delicious and nutritious! How does it taste?" "Your form on that lift is fantastic--you've made so much progress". What I urge, is to please consider eliminating comments about a friend's size from your list of compliments. Even when well-intentioned, telling a person that you find them more impressive, more beautiful, more valuable when they are smaller sends a damaging message. No one should be encouraged to shrink themselves to be more palatable for another person's viewing. The fetishization of thinness is outdated and unhealthy.
Beauty and health exist at all sizes. If you're interested in more body-positive content creators, I recommend Sonya Renee Taylor, author of "The Body Is Not an Apology" and Aubrey Gordon, author of "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat."
If you read this far, I want to thank you for listening. I'm in recovery, working with a therapist. This was honestly really hard to write. I've been mentally composing it for weeks, and I'm grateful to have it out and on a page. Thank you for your tenderness in reading.
I don't expect to post any further pieces on this blog. I think I've exhausted my interest in writing about wellness, especially since I've learned how co-opted that word has become by the weight-loss industry.
Thank you again for joining me in this journey.
Stay beautiful,
XXOO Dianna
