The Power of NO

Originally posted on the National Eating Disorders Association Blog 

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Having both an eating disorder and codependent traits, I am a professional at people-pleasing. From the time I was little, I never really got a fully-informed education in setting boundaries. I have been conditioned to accept what was happening, given excuses, told to “respect my elders,” and assume that they knew what was best for me, even when what they were doing was harmful. 

When I was seven years old, I began carrying other peoples’ burdens for them. When my dad left, I had to accept it. When he got a new family, I had to accept it. My opinion as a seven-year-old girl, as property in a divorce agreement didn’t matter.

I never learned that “no” was a complete sentence, so food became my way of saying “no” to what was happening. I engaged in eating disordered behaviors so I wouldn’t have to feel—all because I believed until I was 22 that I had no power to be anything except broken.

This behavior co-occurred with my disordered eating after a while, even after I started to claim my recovery. The basis for my people-pleasing behavior comes from a need to not stick out, not look different, or have to justify or explain myself.

Eating is a social act as much as it is a nutritional, biological one—but in general, because of our need for instant gratification, eating is hardly intuitive. Which is why for a long time, I didn’t say “no” to food I didn’t want, just for the sake of avoiding having to explain that what I have is an eating disorder. That is, until I recently found acceptance.

A friend asked me to go to Applebee’s with them at 11:30 pm. Typically, I’m not hungry around this time. My recovery practice is, “Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.” I met them but I didn’t feel the need to eat much. I was practicing my own conditions.

“Why don’t you eat more?” they said. I had to quiet the chaos already going on in my head to formulate a response.

“I could eat if I felt hungry,” I said, emphasizing the last part. “And I’m not interested in risking my recovery.”

That was all it took. They looked at me, apologetic and admitted aloud that they just didn’t know what eating disorder recovery; intensive, full-scale recovery, my recovery—was like for me.

But this person’s admission that they just didn’t know was something so parallel to my own act of setting a boundary. The two biggest things we are afraid to do, in my opinion, is admit our own ignorance and to have to explain ourselves. These two fears met right in the middle to create an understanding of each other that I have never experienced before.

In this act of refusal, I built a bridge rather than a boundary. We both understood what I needed, together. I understood more clearly that I needed to start thinking about recovering. I needed to get back to myself. I built a stronger, more solid foundation for becoming better just by saying no.

Being in recovery means that I can say “no” now. It means I don’t have to make everyone else happy anymore. It means that I can say, “I have an eating disorder” to people out loud. It’s my body and my truth.

Recovery from binge eating disorder means that I don’t have to be ashamed, because shame equals “I am not okay how I am.” And I can’t afford shame or guilt; they are simply too expensive. Especially when it comes to food.

And what’s more, I don’t regret it like I know I would regret falling further into relapse. Sometimes I need to refuse in order to recover.

Think about your boundaries. Visualize them as not walls, but as bridges back to yourself. Do you have any? Do you need any? Now’s a time as good as any to start building.

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Connect with me!!!!!

Instagram: @caitisrecovering

Twitter: @caitsrecovering

Email: caitisrecovering@gmail.com

“Are We There Yet?”

This week’s post:

• If, not when
• I’m in the South!
• Sweet tea is the best thing America has ever created
• Meditating saves lives
• Isabel Foxen Duke is my new favorite
• New posts on Thursdays (and Sunday’s still!)
• Y’all 

Calling Others Into Your Recovery (Instead of calling them out)

Anger is the easiest emotion to default to, just as defense is the first act of war. 

In active ED behaviors, I have called people out for anything you could think of, and I’ve done it often. In recovery, I have, too. But the effort taken in calling people out, singling out their ignorance of my experience and the experiences of so many with eating disorders and other illnesses or marginalized experiences, only serves to distance them from understanding and distance me from living out recovery the way I know I need to.

I have, instead, taken to calling people in. 

My first interaction with the idea of calling people in instead of calling them out is from writer Ngọc Loan Trần’s post on the subject. They speak on this with regard to race and social justice, and though it was written four years ago, its something that so many of us could use right now in the wake of what’s happening in Charlottesville.

One thing I have always maintained in my recovery is that sometimes, people don’t understand that they don’t understand. They don’t understand body dysmorphia, compensatory purging behaviors, or the effect that diet culture has on those who already struggle really hard to live inside their bodies every waking second of every day. 

They don’t understand what their words mean.

This past week, someone on my Facebook friends list posted about cutting out carbs entirely and asked for advice on the subject of how to address a nutritional problem of eating too much bread and not drinking enough water. I let her know, based on my knowledge of the deficit mode our brains enter into when we cut out or restrict foods, that she could actually send her body into starvation mode so that it would only just hold onto whatever water she did intake. Healthy discussion, balance oriented, just like my recovery has been since I started really living it out.

But then someone from her family comments, “Love yourself as is!!! Its not like you’re obese or fat.”

Anger became my default emotion. I called her OUT. 

This attitude of “at least you don’t look like THAT” is so pervasive in our culture and society, and it took me stepping waaaaaay back into my own understanding of how I still interact with my body from a perspective I learned to accept rather than formulating on my own.

Since this interaction, I have had to remember a few important things:

1. Weight gain can happen to just about anyone. The problem is that we have assigned meaning to it. And we have been trained by diet culture and the thin ideal to be scared sh*tless of this possibility. In a meditation class I co-taught this week, my colleague responded to someone’s question, “How do you not ever get angry?” (he is also a fellow Buddhist, and a more seasoned one than me) with:

“I have learned to practice not allowing the person to disrespect me. Because someone could curse the hell out of me and if I give it meaning, then I will become angry.

Again: weight gain can happen to just about anyone. But we have been conditioned to believe that weight gain or going up in size actually means something. We surrender our power to this idea, we live and breathe it, we exercise around it. Industries and idealizations create doubt that puts us in a position to worship the idea of never gaining weight. 

2. Every time we hate ourselves, someone makes money. Literally. Fad diets, cosmetic products, weight loss commercials, the (pseudo)pharmaceutical industry, corporate executives and more–they all profit from our self-doubt, facilitate our self-hatred. But only for as long as we allow them.

3. When we are consumed with ourselves, we forget what’s going on in the world. And the big guys I mentioned in number two like it that way. We fill their pockets while they systemically marginalize entire communities. While wars are going on. Diet culture and obsession with weight, food and body distracts us from what’s important–calling each other in, healing, and helping the world do better.

Instead of fighting someone I didn’t know, had never met, who was probably suffering in some way from their own self-perception, too, I could have been educating folks about what’s happening, sharing and signing petitions to heal our broken justice system, or offering support and love and acknowledgement to people of color who are hurt directly every day by the systemic ideologies that create incidents of racial hatred and bias. This would have been a better use of my time.

In my recovery I have learned through exploration of faith and the practice of Buddhist ideas that I personally do not get to decide who deserves my compassion or kindness. Kindness withheld is the ego flourishing. I’m not saying that anger and compassion cannot coexist, they most certainly can. Desmond Tutu said it himself: we have every right to hate people and institutions that do hateful things. But I am no longer a subject of my own hatred, and neither are those who just don’t get it.

I am personally responsible for breaking down diet culture by teaching other people how to treat me, how to show people of size and shape and color and different ability that they are lovable RIGHT NOW, not -40 pounds from now, or lighter skin than now, or two more miles from now, but right now and always all the time. I am responsible for the people who don’t “get” what an eating disorder looks or feels or sounds or acts like, and I’m looking forward to educating them. 

I used to get angry about it; I still get angry that people fat shame and are so adamant that people with different bodies, especially female bodies (thanks misogyny!) deserve more or less love, respect and overall consideration from the world until they “fix” something about themselves. It’s personal.

 

Calling in is also personal. It’s a big action. It requires setting aside the ego and seeing other people as human: capable of mistakes, flawed ideologies, fundamental brokenness, or straight up indoctrination. It invites them into our already really messy spaces to sometimes make even more of a mess. If we are willing to reckon with their missing pieces and fill them in with our stories, there is room for growth everywhere. This is the work of healing. This is calling each other in.

These are somebody’s expectations, and other people’s expectations are not our problem. But liberating people who are still struggling with the idea that they can’t love themselves now, is where the calling in comes in handy. Invite people to stop participating in their own body negativity, and they’ll start seeing you differently too. We’re all warriors; some of us just haven’t picked up the sword. 

 

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Connect with me! (I’m going on vacation and I’ll still be answering emails just maybe not as frequently but I still love you!!! Promise!!!!)

Instagram: @caitisrecovering

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What is Alcohol-Induced Dysmorphia? (It’s why I don’t drink)

Well, as far as a medical diagnosis or symptom, its not a thing. 

It’s what I use to describe the way in which my eating disorder interacts when I engage in ~adult beverage drinking~. 

I contemplated my eating disorder’s relationship to alcohol a few weeks ago, when I also considered my girl Lindsey Hall’s own colloquialism for her experience with “drunkorexia.”

When I drink Malibu bay breezes, the first one is always the toughest to order. I sit there, tasting the sugar masking the cheap speed rack liquor, thinking about what parts of me it’ll stick to (I actually wrote a poem about it using these words) and reminding myself that after a few more, I won’t feel fat anymore and numbness will set in. Usually between number two and three, I order a plate of wings and finish all of them.

From one binge to another. 

Drinking wakes my eating disorder up…and not just for the night I spend at the bar, hopping around between friends taking bites of food and pretending everything’s fine, but the day after. I put myself into a cycle of exercise purging, trying to sweat out the previous night. Trying to forget it. Trying to rectify my ‘wasted’ calories. 

I picture it like that scene in the first Harry Potter movie when Ron, Hermione and Harry  walk into the room with Fluffy the sleeping three-headed dog. Walking into a bar is the pre-contemplation stage. 

 The first drink often means I have decided that dysmorphia is going to win out for the night. “I’ve got you,” it says, “You spent an hour on your makeup and you still look like sh*t because everyone can see your stomach,” ED says.

Prepare for binge!: Drink number two, followed by an order of honey BBQ wings with no ranch. I’ll finish the entire thing by myself. “Everyone’s watching you eat that and thinks you’re a slob,” ED says. I continue to socialize, flirt with someone who thinks I’m pretty despite what ED is screaming in my brain. 

Drinks 3 & 4: By then, usually ED says:

“Nobody even wants you here. You’re barely tipsy but everyone saw you eat those wings. And I know you probably want another order of them.”

“You don’t deserve to eat for the next three days.”

“Better ask [best friend’s name redacted] if she’s got a few hours to walk the entire boardwalk tomorrow. You’ll need it.”

Drink #5: Order the Uber home. Feel your squish roll over your jeans in places that make you more than aware of its presence. Try to quiet your racing thoughts. Go home. Peel the jeans off. Bury your head in the blankets and prepare for the ensuing depression to come.

I don’t need to look for opportunities to treat a disease that inevitably wants me dead like it has anything valid to say. I don’t need something that has already damaged me fiercely until 14 months ago to keep being given permission to be downright mean.

So I’ve chosen to leave it behind, for the sake of my mental health. 

…And ED, you may not like it, but: EXPELLIARMUS, B*TCH!

Binge drinking and binge eating go hand in hand. Many people in recovery say they have  a “disease of more”–and that’s exactly the soul sickness our society suffers from. Socially, we don’t think about how eating more, drinking more, buying more and believing we need more affects our daily lives, our health, and how by walking into these behaviors, we engage our demons in a diverse and vast number of ways.

There’s a reason that cultures with different standards of beauty, ones that don’t implicitly or explicitly engage with the thin ideal also don’t have an eating or a  drinking or a thinking problem. There is a reason that there are countries where people are voted the happiest, and that the country I live in and was born in (good ol’ ‘Merica!!) isn’t one of them. It’s because we’ve defined “happiness” by how numb we can get, how out of touch with our bodies we can become, and how deep into the spiral of shame we can go before totally losing our sh*t. And the companies that supply us with these numbing agents know that, y’all!!

But the bravest thing we can do is stare those standards, those demons, those expectations and those companies that live for messing with how much we love ourselves right in the face and say “Expelliarmus bih!!!!!” Reclaim your time. 

 

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Connect with me!!!

Instagram: @caitisrecovering

Twitter: @caitsrecovering

Email: caitisrecovering@gmail.com

Dear Skinny Girls,…

I have a confession to make to skinny girls. 

Some of you are my friends, family, coworkers, fellows, acquaintances. And mentally, I haven’t been very nice to you lately. But let me make this clear–it’s not because of anything that you did or anything you are.

I’ve been stuck inside my own dysmorphia for the past few days, maybe even the whole past week. My own hyperawareness of inner monologue toward my own body shape and size and being has made me equally hyperaware of how you exist, too. 

My self-conscious attitude toward my own body, and thinking that my body shape meant something bad about me has, on more than one occasion, made me wish I could be, look, and eat like you. I have resented you for living in your own realness, while struggling to live in mine. 

 

Shame is a bitch. That’s one thing I know for sure. When I spiraled out in shame these past few days, I could feel the insidiousness of ED thoughts inside me. The more aware I was of the physical space my body occupied, the bloating, the urgency to exercise and sweat it all out; the more aggressively I had to work to come back down to earth and recognize the origin of these thoughts. 

Since I started shopping in the plus sized section at Forever 21 a few weeks ago, I have gone through many phases of attitude–from “who cares” to “I’m angry that my existence is relegated to a corner of this store while the skinny girls get to take up the whole damn space.” 

But I have had to realize that this has nothing to do with you. In some cases, it doesn’t even have anything to do with me. 

The idea that shopping in the plus size section of any store inherently means something about me is a false belief. One that vanity sizing, diet culture, body dysmorphia and my own disordered thinking patterns have constructed for me. The way that sizes are constructed hurts not only plus-sized women, but all of us. It was discovered a few months ago that American Eagle jeans are actually mis-sized to make women feel like they are “larger” than they are in actuality. Body dysmorphia has become not only a pervasive disorder, but a business model. 

 

I don’t have to explain to anyone how dangerous this is. I don’t have to explain to you that the thin ideal hurts you as much as it hurts me–because the pressure to stay that way or be anything else but small is so real. And for 5% of women, thinness is just in their genetics. 

I feel the need to personally apologize for the fact that so much of reclaiming body positivity has become about creating a narrative that says curvy women are the ones with “real” bodies. That must make y’all feel like sh*t. You aren’t made of plastic just because you’re flat chested, bony, or thigh-gapped by nature. 

The same ideal that pushes size-4-that’s-actually-a-0 and the same mentality that constructed bulls*t songs like “All About that Bass” is what pits us against each other. It’s what makes you afraid of looking anything like me, as if the worst thing you could possibly be is chunky, thick, and a little squishy. It puts fear into you that you could “end up” like one of us.

This is the same ideal that doesn’t realize that it doesn’t take being underweight or even thin to have a full-scale eating disorder (i.e. me). The same system that allows me to feel invalidated as a person recovering from an ED even though I have restricted and exercise purged on and off for years, despite my body shape and type. It’s what keeps me resenting you every time I feel self-conscious or I’m in my disordered thinking. Because I have been conditioned to think that the only “right” way to be is thin, small, quiet, polite, and afraid.

But I am none of these things.

Summer is particularly difficult on my body image. Being eating disordered and dysmorphic means I have mixed feelings about myself on the regular. Some days, I am proud of my thickness and my stretch marks and the lack of space between my legs. Add humidity, however, and constantly peeling my thighs apart gets frustrating after a while. It ain’t my body’s fault, though, and it’s certainly not yours.

Learning to love myself doesn’t mean I have to dislike other people for how they exist in the world. It just means I personally have a lot more work to do unlearning the trash that media, capitalist consumer structure, and pretend “concern” over the state of fat girls’ “health” is doing to divide us. We are worth a lot more than the men and institutions that believe they are truly special for accepting us as if anyone’s validation is a prerequisite to our loving ourselves, “curvy” or otherwise. (Seriously…I’d offer the guy in that article a cookie if I had one to waste that I wanted to share with him).

Skinny girls are some of the raddest, baddest and most resilient people I know. Who they are, how they are, is beautiful. They undergo the same pressures to be perfect as any of us. I’m no longer in a space where I want to exist as they are, or shame them for existing as they do; because who each of us are is just fine. 

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“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

-Marianne Williamson

 

 

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