(This post is part two of a three-part series. Start at the beginning here.)
Ready for Change
By the time I got help for my eating disorder, I was tired of all the pretending, all the fear, all the unhappiness. I wanted to just be happy and love myself, to be real to others, whatever the cost. Or so I thought. I questioned those wishes when I started going to a dietitian once a week.
Now, I was fortunate to not have as severe of behaviors as many others who have eating disorders, so I will say right now that my path to recovery will look and sound different from them. Even when things were at their worst, I couldn’t act out as much as others do. I couldn’t purge no matter how awful I felt. I couldn’t starve myself completely. Some part of the deeper things about my worth had sunk in enough that I felt unable to go too far. Because of this, I was able to do out-patient therapy. I was in this strange place in my sickness where I knew I wouldn’t be as thin as I wanted to be without hurting myself, but I also felt very deeply that it would be morally wrong to do so. (More on what kept me from getting in too deep in a later post. Suffice it to say that I am beyond grateful for what saved me from losing myself completely.)
What I didn’t realize until I started going to counseling is that I already was hurting myself. All the rules about forbidden foods and certain times of day I wouldn’t eat, of eating as little as possible to get me through my intense dance major schedule, of eating more around others in order to fit in. Of adding to my list of rules when I felt I’d gone astray. Of weighing myself obsessively. Of working out or taking laxatives to make up for out-of-control eating when purging wouldn’t work. Of constantly thinking about my weight and the extra fat on my body. Of all the hateful, shameful self-talk. All of those things were hurting me. And deeply.
New Ideas
When I started going to a dietitian, I was pretty tired of all of it. I had raised the white flag and wanted to surrender. She assigned a book for me to read (called Intuitive Eating, check it out here
I can remember going to a weekly class that my dietitian held at her clinic near my college. There was only one person in the class with me, another college-age girl. We’d both come in quietly, place our backpacks on the long table we sat at in the middle of the room, sink into our chairs and avoid eye contact completely. As our dietitian went through each Intuitive Eating
I was scared to try these new ideas. I was afraid of my hunger. I didn’t trust myself to actually stop when my body was full, cause I often wouldn’t. Eating too much was often this scary thing I couldn’t stop, I’d feel so empty emotionally and would eat in attempts to somehow fill that void. There was no pleasure in eating. It felt like a punishment because it was tied to lots of feelings of shame as well. All the arbitrary rules I’d given myself had nothing to do with honoring my hunger or my body. They had everything to do with not trusting myself, not trusting my body or its signals.
Have you ever been rock climbing? Those rules were my harness, rope, and belayer all in one. They were my attempts to not fall off a cliff when my body betrayed me again and made me eat too much, which made me gain weight, which showed people how much of a mess I was inside. Those rules seemed to be my only comfort, and here was this ridiculous book, that sounded loving and wonderful, but I didn’t really believe it. Not deep down. It was like saying, “I want you, novice climber that you are, to climb this sheer cliff face, with no safety equipment,” while also openly acknowledging I had absolutely not enough strength to get there on my own. All trying was going to do was to see how far I’d get before I fell.
I told my dietitian I’d try. And I did “try”, but for the first couple of years (yes, years), I just felt lost. I still wanted to lose weight, but I did decide to stop doing what non-purging bulimics like me did— I stopped compensating for what I felt was out of control eating with exercise and restrictive rules.
First, Things Got Worse
I gained a lot of weight. To me, that basically proved that I was right: all my rules were actually necessary to stop me from gaining weight. But I was tired of the rules. Though I was skeptical of the idea of trusting my body, I wanted it to work. And I knew by then that if I couldn’t love myself with a higher number on the scale, I wouldn’t love myself with a smaller one either. (I’d been there and done that, so to say.) Nothing I could do would be enough if I based my feelings of worth on certain conditions. So, that is the work I did first.
The work of loving myself as I was.
So, yes. I gained weight. And fast. More than 30 pounds in a few months. I went on anti-depressants. And I had to sit with the embarrassment of unknowing roommates commenting on how many cookies I had in the pantry (my dietitian had challenged me to buy more than I could possibly binge on and finish in efforts to learn to be at peace even with treats around me, which by the way, didn’t work). I had to deal with the shame of having to replace all of my clothes as my body expanded, of being told for the first time ever to strap down my breasts in dance performances since they had grown so much with the weight gain and they were distracting. I evaded invites to go hot tubbing with boys I was dating, and spent an entire school year avoiding socializing as much as possible so I could hide. I almost flunked out of a few classes in school when I’d never in my life received less than a B grade before because my insomnia was so bad that I couldn’t get up in the morning.
It sounds like I was miserable. And I was, for the most part. But, it’s actually a time I look on fondly, because I did learn to love myself anyway. The things I was most afraid of happening had happened and I was still standing. I still had people who loved me even though I fell apart. I started letting go of my focus on losing weight, and I was, ever so slowly, learning to listen to my body.
What I Learned
I learned how to eat again. The way my body was designed to do. I learned to pay attention to what was going on inside of me before I ate, while I ate, and after I ate.
I began to notice, and honor, hunger signals. To notice, and honor, fullness signals too. And by doing that, I learned that food stops tasting good when you’re not hungry anymore. I learned that I could eat a big meal when I was hungry, and not feel shame about it. I could eat certain foods, like peanut butter or desserts, without overwhelming feelings of guilt. I learned other things to turn to when I was feeling empty, because food wasn’t what I needed in those moments.
And as time went on I even learned about how the food I ate affected my emotions and sense of well-being. I learned that too much rich food made me moody. I learned that staying away from refined grains and refined sugars, and replacing them with whole foods, solved my hypoglycemia and helped me feel strong and whole. I started making choices about what to eat and when based on how the food made my body feel. I began getting into health foods not because they’d make me thin, but because I enjoyed nourishing myself. This was so much better of a way to be because sometimes I could decide that yes, I did want to eat that cookie, and it wasn’t a big deal. (What a relief!)
I learned to respect and love my body. This amazing body of mine was giving me all kinds of signals to take care of it and my life went better when I listened to those signals.
And I learned grace. I learned that when I neglected to listen to my body and relapsed in some way, it wasn’t the end of the world. I could actually forgive myself and try again in the morning.
I learned that I was going to be okay.
And somewhere in the midst of all that learning, I stopped obsessing about what I weighed because I was busy doing other, better things. Things like deciding what I really wanted to do when I graduated, and how to open up to a few people about my feelings, and how serving others made me forget my own problems for a while, and how perfectionism was stunting my growth, and how to be happy without a pill, and how moving my body was the best medicine of all (more on all of this later). I was busy working for my happiness.
And then, as time went on, this crazy thing happened: my clothes started getting loose. I started losing weight. Without even trying. Just like the book
I made peace with food by making peace with me.
(To read the final piece of this series, click here.)