Flash Back to the 5th of January 2021. I am on my phone, looking back at some old pictures of myself at my thinnest for some motivation, as I prep myself for a run in the cold. I have just finished a Chloe Ting abs workout and I am determined to lose all the weight I put on over the last few months. I do not eat breakfast, because I can easily last until 3 o clock without even feeling hungry. We are in Level 5 lockdown, so there is nowhere to go, and as a result, that night, by the time I go to bed I have not hit 10,000 steps on my fit bit. I decide the best solution to this is to pace around my room for 15 minutes.
PART ONE: DESTRUCTION
As a child, I was always a small bit heavier than my friends, but it honestly didn’t matter to me. I liked drama and poetry and playing make-believe, and I hated sport. My size didn’t matter to me because my mother raised me to believe I was genuinely the most beautiful girl in the world. However, sadly this kind of self-love is something that cannot last in a society that does everything in its power to make you hate yourself. I managed to make it until I was about 14 before the belief systems of everyone around me started to really penetrate my psyche. All of a sudden, we were thrown into the world of boys and ‘who likes who’ and teenage discos. I would be embarrassed getting ready at my friends houses for discos because my clothes were a few sizes bigger. I would compliment their outfit and they would say ‘borrow any time’ and my cheeks would flush because we both knew I could never. I felt a feeling in my gut that there was something wrong with me. I decided my body was the enemy between me and my perfect life. I dreamed of going on shopping trips where the changing rooms didn’t reduce me to tears. I dreamed of being the girl that all the boys thought was beautiful, to be involved in that gossip rather than to always observe. By the time I was 15, I was trying out no-carb diets, and skipping breakfast, at 16 I tried my first ‘skinny tea’ and by the time I was 17 I was in the gym for 2 hours a day, weighing myself every morning, freaking out weeks in advance about going out for food.
The reaction to my weight loss from everyone around me was, disappointingly, exactly as I expected. Everybody told me how beautiful I looked, how jealous they were. They told me they wished they could do what I did. My worst nightmares were confirmed; people had been basing my worth on my appearance. And now that I was smaller, they deemed me more worthy. I was finally beautiful.
From here, started a cycle of extreme-dieting and weight fluctuation. Every time I inevitably put the weight back on, I would start a new diet. Low carb, no dairy, ‘if it fits your macros’. I ate twice my weight of grams of protein every day because my favourite youtuber told me to. When my results started to plateau, I would knock 200 more calories off my daily goal on myfitnesspal. Each time they got more extreme. I once went to the gym 42 days in a row. I kept a food diary where I wrote down as little as ‘piece of orange’ or ‘drop of milk in coffee’. Losing weight became my entire life. I missed out on half of my year abroad because I was scared to go for dinner or drinks. I thought about food every second of every day, because I was always, always hungry. I was constantly aware of where I ranked in any room in terms of size, constantly comparing my body to everyone else’s, constantly looking in the mirror. This overwhelming obsession lasted for years. I couldn’t understand that there were people who didn’t think like that.
PART 2: REALISATION
A lot of you reading can probably relate to what I have just described. A fear of gaining weight so big that staying small becomes the entire focus of your day. You think to yourself, ‘God, I wish I could be one of those girls who just eat what they want. I wish I didn’t have to try so hard.’ But the fear of gaining weight keeps you going.
The main thing to ask yourself when you have thoughts like this why are you so afraid? Why are you so scared. What is actually scary about going up a dress size. The answer to this for most of us is that we live in a society that teaches us from very early on that thin is good and fat is bad. A society that also (wrongly) teaches us that the number that shows up on the scale is entirely within our control, that it’s just a matter of willpower. In doing this, your weight becomes symbolic of your morality. Start to question who benefits from this? Who benefits from your fear, from you hating your body so much you would try anything to fix it? Could it perhaps be the diet and wellness industry that is projected to be worth $295 Billion Dollars by 2027? Once you really sit with this, really realise how insane it all is, it is hard to keep being a part of it all.
(I implore you all to start doing your own research about this stuff:
As a starting point, I recommend the work of The Fat Doctor (@fatdoctoruk), @intuitive.eating.ireland , @alexlight_ldn, and podcast Maintenence Phase which debunks diets and wellness trends.)
PART 3: REPARATION
Yoga helped me learn to love my body again.
When I started my Yoga Teacher Training, one of the first things we were taught to do is question everything. Ask ourselves where our thoughts about the world come from. I started really digging deep about my thoughts about my body, and my fear of gaining weight. I came to the conclusion that my fear was entirely based on the opinions of others. That they would like me less, that I would be less beautiful or less valuable. And then it hit me. I was putting my self-worth entirely in the hands of imaginary people and what they might think of me. I realised then that I would never ever be happy with my body if I was constantly trying to change it. You can never be truly happy in your own body until you stop setting yourself goals conditions that you think will be acceptable to love yourself at.
One day last March, I stepped on the scale, and I started crying because the number staring back at me was the exact same number that I had started off at all those years ago. The number I had always been so afraid of. I sobbed and I sobbed. I was so exhausted. I knew then, that I couldn’t put myself through all that again. I didn’t have the energy. It was at that moment I swore to heal my relationship with myself from the inside rather than trying to change myself on the outside.
PART 4: CHANGES
- The first thing I did (and the best thing) was get rid of my Fitbit. I realised that I had been rating the value of every single day for the last 6 years on a set of arbitrary numbers set up by a marketing team. We are not machines and our bodies and their movements should not be reduced to statistics. I had come to this realisation years before about calorie counting apps, but for some reason it took me a bit longer with this. I started skipping my evening walk in the freezing cold after a long day of work on my feet, for an hour of gentle yoga. This was something I would never have done before; yoga had been a treat for days that I had already squeezed in a run – exercise always got priority. I had always needed to optimise my movement.
- The second thing I did was start being unbelievably kind to myself. I’ve been journalling daily for about 5 years now, and I know the power it can have in terms of changing your perception, but until this point I had not been ready. I would write in my journal every single day, all the things I (did not yet) love about my body.
‘I love my belly, that holds all of the delicious food I eat, ‘I love my big strong thighs that have helped me climb mountains and travel the world’, ‘I am beautiful at any size, and my weight does not define me‘. I continue to write this kind of stuff in my journal every day. - The third thing I did was stop limiting my food. I ate whatever I wanted to eat. And I gained weight pretty fast. And I was so terrified that I would never stop gaining weight. But I trusted in the process, and then I did. One of the main causes of binge eating is restriction. Once you stop having off-limits foods, and stop creating so many rules, you stop craving all the things you weren’t allowing yourself. When you are allowed to eat everything, the novelty of certain foods wears off. After a few months of committing to quitting dieting, eating when I want and what I want, my body and my cravings calmed down. I started to crave vegetables and smoothies more than I craved chocolate. Now, I eat until I am full every single time I sit down for a meal, and then I forget about food until I am hungry again. This might sound normal to some, but it is revolutionary to a girl who used to be constantly hungry, constantly thinking of the next meal. I’m not sure at what point it happened, but somewhere along the way, I also stopped counting up all the calories I had eaten that day in my head throughout the day.
- The fourth thing I did was forgive myself. I forgave myself for all of the years of hunger and obsession. I forgave myself for not thinking I was good enough as I am. I forgive myself for looking at old pictures of myself longingly. Some days I look at my body and I hate how I look and I know that that is ok, and I forgive myself for being so unkind.
I will of course acknowledge at the end of this how fortunate I am to live in a straight-sized body that is not shamed by society. I am lucky to be able to eat pizza without people judging me or making presumptions. I am also lucky to have been in a place when I came to these realisations where I was not deep in the throes of an eating disorder, and I could overcome a lot of these negative thoughts on my own. Most are not so lucky, and that is why it is so so important to get some help if you feel like this is too big of a battle to embark on your own. It is important when you look for some help to try and find someone that is trained in Health at Every Size (HAES) and intuitive eating (there are some great therapists listed in this story highlight.) Fat-phobia is so prevalent in our society that it trickles down into so much more than you could ever think. The body positivity and body neutrality movements are harmful if they do not work for those in fat and disabled bodies, if we only use them to benefit those in smaller more accepted bodies. Until you stop judging anyone at ANY size you will never heal your own relationship with your body.
Overall, 2021 was a year of healing, unlearning, and throwing entire belief systems out the window. I hope some of you reading can find some help from reading this. It is so normal to feel trapped in this cycle, afraid of gaining weight. But you literally only get this one chance to be alive and exist in this body as you. Imagine living your whole life in this body never being happy in it? That is the saddest thought in the world to me. Something that is a lot scarier to me than a dozen kilograms extra on my body is the idea that I might one day turn around and realise I’ve wasted my youth and missed out on the true essence of living trying to be thin. So why waste another day.
Big Love Always,
Isabelle.