Our culture is one that is obsessed with dieting and body image. We want to be skinny, thick, curvy, toned, longer, leaner, and healthier in everything we do. The diet pill business is booming and people are searching for a get-fit-fast solution. Instagram is scattered with posts about flat-tummy teas and miracle work out programs, and thinspo and fitspo is huge. We as a society are constantly indoctrinated with the idea that we are not good enough and that in order to be ideal we must change our bodies. Anyone can be susceptible to this narrative: men, women, or children. Hell, I know that they have taken complete control over my mind.
Most nights you can find me laid out in my queen-sized bed with my hand on my stomach. I feel it’s dips and curves, squeeze the excess fat and pinch the excess skin. It’s at this time of night when the house is quiet and the night is inky black where I reflect on my body and what I ate during the day. Right now it is guilt due to my chowing down of a Vegefi burger with hashbrowns from Burgerfi earlier. Now, I know that no sane part of me should feel guilty for eating, especially for eating a damn veggie burger wrapped in lettuce. However, my obsession with food is constantly on my mind and has been for years.
Eight years ago I used to sporadically run with abandon on a treadmill that my mother kept in a spare room. The space wasn’t anything special; just a treadmill, a television that would now be considered defunct, and a wooden plaque inscribed with the Serenity prayer. Ignoring the oddity of it’s placement because we weren’t religious in the slightest, I ran and ran with my eyes glued to the TV repeating the prayer on constant loop in my mind. I told myself I was running to be thin so the popular boy in sixth grade would notice me. Now I don’t even remember his name.
God grant me with serenity,
Four years ago I had created the then-seemingly-perfect formula resulting in the right amount of calorie consumption for the day: 420. Four hundred and twenty calories to sustain myself throughout the day. It was a science and I was its master. I had never felt so in control of something in my entire life. Because of this talent (she types with so much sarcasm), I can pretty much eyeball and figure out how many calories are in something. So even though I’m not being anal about what I eat, I still have a pretty good idea of what’s going on calorie-wise. All these years later and the thoughts of does this have too many calories? still follow me and can invoke the harshest form of guilt.
There was a flip side when that all came crashing down: the nights when I wasn’t starving myself where I literally had to pour dish soap on food to get myself to stop eating it. The days I cried because I realized that I had just consumed 3000 calories of buttercream frosting. I once had a panic attack on my birthday in front of my mother and sister because the desert I got at Carrabba’s had some insane amount of calories in it and I was completely convinced that I had ruined my life. There were countless nights where I bounded myself up in sweatpants and a sweatshirt and peddled myself to the closest gas station, crisp ten-dollar bill in hand, to buy as many sugar wafers and Little Debbie cakes that I could afford.
to accept the things I can not change,
I had this strange mentality when I was a child that if no one in my family saw me eat, say, 10 Oreos in one sitting, that it didn’t really happen. For a while there in my mid-teen years it seemed as though I had a bottomless stomach. I could go to a Chinese buffet, pig out, and be ready for a snack two hours later. When I got to college somehow that all changed. Suddenly I was forced to be active and walk to all of my classes and eat on a budget. I was the exception to the Freshman 15 rule: I lost about 15 pounds without even thinking about it. My secret? I think I was finally eating the way I was supposed to be, save for the times that I was so broke that all I could afford was Greek yogurt tubs.
Food will be the cloud that hangs over me for the rest of always. Nothing will get me as excited or as sick. I can still scarf down an entire pizza like nobody’s business – but I feel incredibly guilty about it and hate myself the next day. Having a gluten intolerance makes it that much worse. My body literally kicks my ass when I mistreat it yet I still punish it. When will I ever learn?
courage to change the things I can,
When I was growing up I thought that no person was ever going to love me because of my body. Part of me still carries that, I think. I obsess over how I look and am constantly feeling as though I am not good enough. My body may be physically smaller than it used to but all I see are the flaws I perceive and my brain likes to magnify them at 100 percent zoom. There’s a song called “Am I Pretty?” by the Maine and I feel as though it is on repeat in my mind every time I look in the mirror now. It is a daily struggle for me trying to take control of my body image. This is a fight I will have to endure for the rest of my life, a constant battle of reminding myself to eat not too little and not too much of anything. My eating disorder will be a part of who I am for the rest of my life, living with it is going to be a constant mental struggle. But one thing is for certain: I am not going to let it control me any longer.
and wisdom to know the difference.
