Growing up, I was always on the chubbier side and so when I was 13 and found out I was going to be moving schools the following year, I no longer wanted to be the fat funny friends and so decided to go on a diet. It was successful, I lost about 2 stone in 6 months taking me from a podgier person to a fairly small girl. Now, although this was a success for my levels of body fat, the way I lost the weight was incredibly unhealthy and left me terrible body image issues and eating habits which I still struggle with now.
This all happened in 2010/2011, before social media really took off and so for that reason I am so GLAD that it happened then and i managed to avoid the extra pressure of health obsessed people on instagram and model bodies filling my timeline 24/7. However, this was back when Tumblr used to be a thing, and i would follow so many 'thinspo' blogs which encouraged me to eating nothing, drink loads and exercise even more. Thinking back it actually freaks me out so much how dangerously I was loosing weight. Initially it started off pretty healthily, but as soon as i discovered that I could just eat a bit less and the numbers would go down even faster, I was hooked. As someone with an addictive personality it was a dangerous path to go down, but at 13 I didn't know this about myself, and so it just went on. These blogs I would follow would show me pictures of hip bones and thigh gaps, all asking me 'would you rather eat pizza, or see your pelvis sticking out?'... shit like that. I would save hundreds of pictures of SKINNY girls on my computer, put them as my background on my phone as inspiration... it is crazy. Anyway... as time went on i got more and more obsessed, I became scared of eating more than 1000 calories a day & would write the number 1000 on my hand with biro everyday to remind myself. A full day of eating would go like this: i would wake up and eat an orange, go to school and have 2 more at lunch, come home and go to the gym where I would try and burn 100 calories per machine, then come back home and eat vegetables and whatever meat my mum made for dinner. And that was it.. everyday. Somedays I would AIM to be in net-calories. Following this, I then tried out being sick after food. The first week I did this after every meal I lost 5 pounds. I can't even explain how excited I was & so that continued. It got to the point that my form tutor pulled me out of class & asked me if I was ok, because I looked like shit and had no energy. I was exhausted ALL the time, so grumpy and was loosing considerable amounts of weight. They started to make me go to see the school nurse everyday Tuesday to get weighed and drink milk cos they thought I was deficient in loads of minerals etc. I remember once I was walking home from school with some friends and I told one of my friends that they were making me see the nurse cos they were worried about me, and he replied something like 'well your obviously not anorexic' whilst laughing. NOW this really resonates with me... just cos i was not 5 stone, it DID not mean i didn't have an eating disorder. I think thats a really common conception with ED's, its like you have to be skinny 'enough' to classify. Only my best friend knew bits and bobs about what was going on, and she was really really worried. Anyway, when I started this all i promised myself that on my birthday (June 12th) I would eat a slice of my birthday cake. Having started on Jan 6th 2011, after 6 months, somehow I literally snapped myself out of it on my birthday, and many of the habits stopped. I honestly dont know how I managed to do this, but it is something I am SO proud of myself for.
Now, my mum also suffered with anorexia when she was a teenager too, and my grandma has pretty fucked up approaches to eating and her appearance, so I'm sure thats where most of it stems from for me. All of the really dangerous behaviors pretty much stopped from about 2011-2015. I moved to a new school and was still obsessed with my figure, always thinking I was fat and always wanting to change it, but never to such a massive degree (i think). The way that I viewed my body was very damaged, and I still harbor those thoughts about myself subconsciously now in many ways.
For me, eating is a means of control. When I feel happy, calm, stable and in control of my life, I do no feel the need to restrict my eating. I can just live my life and not worry so much about my food. It's interesting actually, because the first posts I wrote on this blog were written at a time of total and complete relapse for me. During the 3/4 of my first year at university, I would say many of the super dangerous eating habits came back. I was extremely lonely, isolated in my room, with nobody checking on me. My boyfriend at the time was aware of this stuff but obviously couldn't do anything / didn't know anything about what I was doing. He was also a massive part of why I was doing what I was doing too, although I didn't really know it at the time. I am sure that it all started again because I felt so unhappy and out of control at uni that food was something I could control to a tee, and so I clung on for dear life. It started with massive restriction, setting goals for myself to eat 2 meals a day (each about 400 cals) and nothing else. To walk 16000 steps a day and just burn as many calories as I could. I would say that in about 1 month I probably lost 1/2 a stone. The bad eating properly started after Christmas (where i had been at home for a month, had been super happy and so had eaten normally and probably gained a little bit..., but who the fuck doesn't over Christmas!!??). Anyway after going back, i know it was my ex's bday in Feb and we were all going out and so I wanted to loose the weight for that. So I dieted, and at around the end of jan/beginning of Feb i started being sick again. I literally remember on the weekend of his bday going out for dinner w his family, and I thought I'd eaten too much and so making myself sick in the toilets of the restaurant. It sounds so weird talking about it now. Now, the reason that I think my ex was part of the problem (but in no means his fault), I had started realising that he probably wasn't the right person for me. We had had a really intense relationship, he was deeply in love with me, and had spoken about marriage and the rest of our lives. I was 18, and knew it wasn't the right thing for me, and so I think I used the eating as a means of control because emotionally i felt totally out of control. It's the hardest thing being with someone who is so in love with you, and although you love too, its just not the same but the worst thing in the world is hurting them. So instead of facing the problem, I obsessed over food and my weight instead.
Now, 2 years on from all of this, a lot has changed. We broke up and since then I haven't had any properly bad eating times since. Having said that, I have been going through a different health problem (Which i will write another post about) since then (summer 2016), which has pretty much taken over any fears about weight etc. I am now a lot more interested in my HEALTH and not my physicality, but it still very hard. I have been vegetarian for about 2 years, and vegan for amounts of time within those 2 years. My weight has probably fluctuated by about 7lbs up and down since then, and it I still struggle with my body. I always find myself comparing myself to old pictures, where i am convinced i was smaller and skinnier etc. I am still trying to pin-point my eating, and work out what works for me and how I can be totally happy in my body. My current boyfriend is very encouraging of me, and we have both found that going to the gym really helps me.
As I'm writing this now, I feel OK about how I look. I don't love it, I don't hate it. I am constantly striving to be happier in my appearance, which is hard but I'm not sure is always a negative. Provided I can do it healthily. Since moving to California, I have been and am hoping to continue with my diet of almost totally vegan, with 1 cooked meal a day and lots of fruit and veg for the rest of the time. Having been diagnosed with PCOS in January, the weight-gaining aspect has really become apparent to me, and I definitely find it harder to lose wight then I used to. Which is why I'm even more set of doing this super healthily, to try and get my entire body in good shape instead of jut being the lowest weight possible. I still have major insecurities and body image problems to work through. I feel like I still place so much of my worth in my appearance, and although i no longer seek as much validation from males and other people, I still obsess over my looks all the time. I'm sure it'll come with time, and i'll learn to love my outward appearance as much as i love who I am as a person!! If I could give any advice to anyone who is struggling with food/eating, don't try and unpick the eating problem. It is just a symptom! Look at WHY you are doing what you are doing, why you feel the need to be in so much control of the food. Work on your inside first, and the outside will come with time.
I hope if you read this you enjoyed it & helps you to not make the same mistakes I did with my eating!!
Zoe xx
No comments:
Post a Comment