So, I joined a gym: Week 1

During and after college, I used to be an avid attendee at my local Planet Fitness. Then exercise bulimia got in the way.

I would often go to the gym twice a day, especially after bingeing on dining hall food to the point where I would make myself sick. Exercise became a punishment, a compensation, a labor.

I took this behavior home with me after graduating from college, too, even when I started to recognize my eating disorder for what it really was–a disorder. I was obsessed with my body and food and unwilling to compromise with myself. I slowly began to resent the gym and movement pretty much altogether, and was restricting enough so that the gym wasn’t necessary for compensation anymore. This led me down a dangerous path.

I was also a track and XC kid from 7th to 10th grade, when my knees wouldn’t let me run distance anymore and I had to give up the sport. I used this, as you can probably guess, to my full advantage when creating my elaborate eating schemes and compensation behaviors. I ran and ran and calculated each mile ran or walked down to the 1/10th of a mile. I did crazy sprint drills on the bleachers at my high school (when I was home for the summer) and strength exercises like the football players do in movies.

 

Until one day just before my college graduation, after a really memorable experience of feeling so disgusted with myself on an elliptical that I couldn’t keep going after fifteen minutes, I swore off exercise machines for life.

What I didn’t realize then was that it wasn’t the gym’s fault that I had this attitude; it was my intention and (over)use of the gym itself that created an association with disorder, misery and self-consciousness in my own head.

Now, I was born with a displacement in my hips; one is a few degrees higher than the other, and it makes my right knee joint work harder to reach the ground (knee pain), AND, to top that off, I have flat feet.

So basically, from the waist down, I’m pretty prone to a lot of clicking and pain in my hip joints. I feel like one of the Golden Girls and I’m only 25 (if I were a GG I’d absolutely be Dorothy btw).

Recently, I re-joined a gym for the first time in about three years. I’m back at the same Planet Fitness I used to belong to in college and would visit frequently on my breaks from school and weekends home. Except I signed up with a new goal in mind–health and strength first.

My hip pain motivated me to go get stronger, and I’ve since been doing that. Often times, fat folks get diagnosed as fat when they’re in pain–and it’s not always incorrect, because there are certain joints in our bodies that bear weight (load-bearing joints); and to stress them out creates mobility compromises for some folks. But for me, my knees have always been jacked up, fat or not–hips too.

But just as often as fat people get told to lose weight to improve their health, thin people don’t. Thin people with the same joint problems I likely have will be told to stretch more, strengthen and work out more–but I guess when it comes to fat folks, it is assumed that we can’t, won’t, or aren’t already doing those things for our health or to maintain strength in the areas that cause us pain.

So I went to the gym telling myself “I’m going to make my left hip pain less frequent and severe,” and that’s just what I did.

So far, I’ve been there twice since signing up, and I did two weight circuits, a stretching sesh, and some specific leg training stuff like lunges. I even made time for the stair climbing machine of death that I used to be terrified of because I fell off once. I went on for only five minutes because it was like reaaaaaaaallllly hard, but I took what I could and didn’t do it past my threshold of enjoyment. That’s what exercise is all about, I’m slowly learning–our intention and the ways we plan to connect with and interact with our bodies while we move them.

To extend this bada** gympowerment thing even further, I told my mom not to comment on my appearance or physical activity and especially not to connect it to weight loss since that’s not what I’m there for–and so far, those boundaries have been maintained which is so tremendously huge for me. There is nothing better than to be seen and heard and respected all while getting to improve my health in a way that has nothing to do with weight loss, and to receive the recognition that there is worth–and health–beyond my weight.

Stay tuned for more updates from the gym!

Letter to an unaware fatphobic workshop presenter

This week, I went to about 10 minutes of a twelve step study workshop before I shut down. 

Literally, full trigger tears and an overwhelming sense of being immediately alienated from the room.

This person opened a workshop about the 12 steps by addressing and creating alarmism (a “hook” for her audience, if you will), around the “obesity epidemic” and the faulty statistics that go with it.

In my recent work on steps 6&7 in my eating disorder recovery, I have been learning to still give feedback that is important for the cohesiveness of my existence with the world, without stomping on that person’s truth altogether and making them feel small simply because I am hurt by their actions.

A close friend encouraged me to give the feedback, because as she said, so many people are unaware and feedback (but not attacks on their personality or their lack of knowledge), ultimately makes us better people. So I wrote an email when I got home.

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Hi (name redacted),

My name is Cait, and I am a volunteer and regular participant at (organization redacted) I was at your workshop briefly this evening and I want to address some feedback that I have regarding some of the opening statements you made.

As a person in solid recovery from three different manifestations of eating disorders, and someone who lives in a body that is probably classified as either “overweight” or “obese”, I found myself immediately shutting down when you brought up these statistics and let them stand on their own to be falsely conflated to the disease(s) of alcohol & drug addiction.

(Organization) is the place where I was able to explore the information I am about to share with you, and personally, it was really triggering for me to hear the opening of your workshop in this context, as this very process of disembodying the social construct of weight being a function of “disease” used in this way is inherently somewhat problematic.

This kind of thinking is the very same thought pattern that perpetuates the diet industry, which makes more than 65 billion dollars a year letting people know that they are always one bite away from being a walking health risk (despite the fact that our consumption often has little to do with it, as 77 percent of our bodies’ health predispositions are determined by genetics), that they are broken people who can be fixed by following a magic set of rules that will change not just their body size, but how the world perceives, welcomes and includes them. 

Obesity as a standalone issue in our society is socially constructed, and in a lot of cases misused to create outright prejudice around the people who meet the ‘criteria’. It is a fact that any qualified statistician can tell you that the very act of weight causing disease and weight being correlated with any given disease are not empirically the same set of information.

When you said 70 percent of Americans are obese, there was no acknowledgement of the fact that there is buy-in from a diet consumer culture that creates those statistics. I know that “breaking down weight stigma” isn’t the workshop you’re running—but letting this statistic hang in the air as a way to analyze the steps seemed to serve only the purpose of creating a “wow” factor that confirmed sizeism and healthism among members of your audience.

Several years ago, the set of standards for what “obese” is was shifted, such that millions of Americans became suddenly obese overnight, based not on consumption of food but on a deliberate, fatphobic shift in the data. This shift in numbers was purposeful and meant to create a panic—we live in a world where politicians have literally said that fat is more of a risk to American society than terrorism. In one fell swoop, our war on terror became a war against fat—and thus, against fat people.

Food as an “addiction” has also been long debatable. I am an ex-member of Overeaters Anonymous, and it is my truth that the way I was guided by almost everyone I interacted with to view food and my body in that particular fellowship made me more paranoid, obsessed with food, and disconnected from my body’s needs than I’ve ever been.

It actually kickstarted the most recent manifestation restrictive end of my eating disorders, which were a part of my life for nearly 15 years. It is no surprise that OA works for so many, because it still has a mental framework that props up weight loss as a back-burner goal. It is a function of diet culture.

Letting this rhetoric about “obesity” and the idea that “food addiction” and substance abuse are biologically the exact same process circulate is potentially harmful to people, and frames shame around people in larger bodies when this stuff is spoken about.

Eating disorders—because that’s what we’ll call the whole spectrum, from restriction to exercise bulimia and orthorexia to compulsive eating—are similar, but not the same, as drug and alcohol addiction. I have experience with alcohol abuse and if I treated my ED the same way I recovered from alcohol, I assure you I probably wouldn’t be alive to write this feedback to you today.

Compulsive eating is just as much an eating disorder as anorexia, but neither are an “addiction”. What people with ED’s are addicted to, most of the time in one way or another, is perfectionism and a sense of self that involves intense anxiety, control issues, and body dysmorphia. 

Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence yielded from studies done on humans that food addiction actually exists. The brain lights up in response to food being eaten, but that’s literally what it’s supposed to do. It’s our body’s way of reinforcing that it needs to be fueled in order to survive, and to work together with other complex body systems to help us do just that using the nutrients we put in. When we eat, we create neurological connections that form patterns that make this behavior a regular occurrence for the sake of our species’ existence.

Food is meant to be a pleasurable experience that drives us to do, be, achieve and think clearly. Anything that suggests food as an addiction positions the so called “food addict” into a shame spiral and this thinking is rooted in diet culture and weight bias/stigma. Addictions are not eating disorders, and eating disorders are not addictions, and both come with their own degrees of shame on their own. This gets further reinforced when we try to carry this mode of thinking over to something that our bodies need in order to survive, that we have no choice but to have a working relationship with from birth until death. (See Christy Harrison’s episode of Food Psych Podcast for this exact information, articulated so wonderfully by Marci Evans).

Food is a substance, just as water or hydrogen peroxide are substances, but not a “drug”, and is something we need to regulate our bodies for the purpose of sustaining life. I gained more weight in my recovery than I ever did while actively in my eating disorder, and am in perfect health—but that’s not the fat person’s job to justify to the world.

Creating discourse around this that lets obesity stand alone and conflate a lot of its causalities with drug addiction doesn’t leave room to explore the socially unjust implications of disembodiment in this process. It is statistically, sociologically and psychologically known that weight stigma is actually far more of a health risk than being fat itself is. There is empirical information to support this, which I would really recommend looking into.

Some of the best resources I have read to this point are Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch, Body Respect by Dr. Linda Bacon & Lucy Aphramor, Health at Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon, and The Fat Studies Reader by Ester Rothblum & Sondra Solovay.

Their work is integral to breaking down what we have been conventionally sold about our bodies and how they work, how they should be treated in society over a certain size, and how to deconstruct this information using research that supports all bodies.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email.

Cait O.

My Big Fat Insatiable Rant

 

Today in our culture is a fatphobic mess: I’m sure you’ve seen the trash that is Insatiable all over the internet today.

For those of you who are new to the fatphobic, absolutely disrespectful and diet-culture laden series trailer premiere, welcome.

I’m not going to post the trailer itself here for people to view. You can look it up on your own if you want to see the word “fat” weaponized back into its pejorative form, stereotypes about binge eating perpetuated, and bullying toward a fat person (who isn’t actually a fat person) normalized and used as a feature plot for “revenge.” 

Yep, it’s everything terrible you thought it would and could be.

Basically the main character, Patty (chosen because it rhymes with “fatty”…how original)…who is actually just Debby Ryan in a fat suit (which I don’t even have to tell you is insulting), is being bullied for her weight constantly. At one point in the trailer, she is assaulted via being punched in the face, causing her to have to have her jaw wired shut for an entire summer. During this time, she loses a bunch of weight (apparently) and becomes thin and “hot”, (two words not synonymous by default) and uses her new appearance to get revenge on the people who hurt her emotionally and physically throughout her teenage years.

I’m not going to use the rest of this post to take my anger out on Debby Ryan (I already did that on twitter for most of today), especially after she defended her role in the show for the purpose of “spreading awareness about binge eating disorder” … which we all know is a bunch of absolute BS considering that the show’s literal premise is that now that Patty is thin after restricting for a full two months, she has infinite possibilities to be “a brain, an athlete, or a princess” (none of which her fat was stopping her from doing in the first place).

I found the entire show’s poor excuse for a plot line even less disturbing than the advertisements for it, laden with stereotypes about fat people, loaded fatphobic language, and outright justification for the show’s existence.

Ryan Seacrest even had the audacity to use the term “binge-watch” to encourage people to view a show that does nothing but validate the mistreatment of fat people until they are thinner. I guess binge watching is more okay than binge eating because you don’t get *gasp* fat from watching too many terribly written TV shows. Maybe the thin privilege reeking from this series will enter my life by osmosis!

It makes it seem a lot like the whole “inside every fat girl there’s a thin girl dying to come out” trope pushed on us to be not just a point worth making, but one that fat girls should be expected to hear and take seriously. Not just that–it propagates the myth that once we find ourselves under all that fat, we will somehow be more deserving of respect than we were before. 

Let’s address some realities of binge eating disorder, from someone who has more than 10 years experience with the behaviors that come with it–and then some.

Debby Ryan did get one thing right when she was trying to justify her role in this atrocious Netflix Original. Binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder on the spectrum. This is according to both NEDA, BEDA, and even the DSM. But despite this, BED wasn’t even recognized as a disorder until 2013–so for a long time, people with BED have gone largely misrepresented or underrepresented altogether. And it’s not okay.

The creator of the show, Lauren Gussis, even revealed her own struggle with an eating disorder in adolescence. But anyone who has survived an ED, who lives in a fat body (which she doesn’t), should know that content like this is irresponsible and dangerous. 

It’s also worth noting that #insatiable is netflix’s second offense on the ED population. This is “To The Bone” for fat people. Fat voices, scream and make a mess about this. Thin people in recovery, stand by in solidarity as best as you’re able #NotYourBefore #EatingDisorders

— theinbetweenqueen (@inbetweenqueen_) July 20, 2018

People who have had my disorder haven’t been represented because BED is something that people think can be fixed by sheer willpower alone. I tried to mitigate this behavior through exercise bulimia from age 12 forward. I would binge and then exercise excessively to “get rid of it”, and lived in a “normal sized” body for most of my life.

Binge eating disorder stole my happiness, my ability to enjoy exercise for literally twelve years, some/a lot of my friendships, my self-worth, my ability to form romantic relationships that were healthy, my intimacy, my self-assuredness, my self-respect, and my perception of beautiful. I didn’t have trouble getting into relationships because of my body, I had trouble with healthy relationships because of how I saw my body. It was a personal hell that I would do anything to never have to live through again. I’m 24 today, and I’ve literally been in and out of binge/emotional eating/purge/restrict/severe dysmorphic cycles since before I was ten years old.

I was able to fly under the radar despite my behaviors, hours a day working out in my basement or in a gym or running, and avoid appearing “sick enough” to need treatment. My behavior was normalized. Binge-exercise cycles are normalized as “diet and exercise” or “wellness” in our entire social structure. Strangely enough, it wasn’t until my recovery, when I gained weight, that concerns were expressed about my “health”.

At 17, my assessment for an eating disorder went as follows: “Stand up, take off your jacket” ([male] doctor glanced at my body), said “Okay, if I prescribe you __________ it should make you lose weight or stop eating as much.”

I was given medicine. Not behavior intervention, not nutrition referrals, which are standard for ED treatment.

I continued to binge despite this, for all four years of college thereafter. My senior year when I came home, I tried OA, and let me tell you how much it didn’t work. I spent four months restricting, made myself 26 pounds smaller, and gained all the weight back plus about 50% more, just like diet results statistics predicted I would. I was less emotionally healthy than I had been when I started. OA is a narrative that has been present in representation of fat characters like Mike & Molly, a show that lasted six seasons starring Melissa McCarthy.

I like to think it’s not on anymore because people are really tired of seeing fat people only take up space in weight loss narratives. These roles literally shrink us down to nothing on so many levels, and hold up the myths about binge eating disorder as a widely diagnosed but incredibly misunderstood disease.

This show perpetuates everything about fat people (who don’t always have binge eating disorder, by the way) that isn’t always the truth. We are ALL not worthless, lazy, disgusting, self-hating eating machines. We are not all sitting at home “stuffing our holes” (a REAL classy line from the Insatiable trailer itself) while thin people are out having intimate lives that we somehow, as directly implied by Debby Ryan’s voiceover, don’t deserve because of our body size.

If we are here to tie BED and fatness, fat shaming, and fat hate and all that comes with that together, let me tell you: they need better excuses, because not all people with BED are fat. And not all fat people have BED. For like, 8 years of my disorder, I wasn’t.

And to address the title directly,  I was not insatiable; because it was never about the food.

Hey @DebbyRyan I had binge eating disorder for upwards of 14 years and let me tell you, being punched in the face and having my jaw wired shut wasn’t how I recovered. Don’t you DARE justify fatphobic content you’re complicit in to equate your work to my history. #insatiable

— theinbetweenqueen (@inbetweenqueen_) July 20, 2018

In fact, this word is loaded with really negative emotions for me specifically.

When I was seven years old, my parents were divorcing and I was just NOT coping well (understandably). My life was all over the place, and being in second grade and having both parents be first-responders in 9/11 who were gone a lot was already really hard. Emotional eating became a big part of my life, and I wasn’t really super conscious of that because at seven years old, self-awareness only runs so deep, you know?

Until an after school program teacher said, to my seven year old face as I asked for more Saltines for snack:

“It’s like your hobby is eating. You never stop!”

This is literally, the defining characteristic of insatiable.

I was not insatiable, however. I ate when I wasn’t hungry more times than I could ever account for for like, almost fifteen more years after those words were said to me. I ate past the point of fullness just so I could become less and less myself. Because I didn’t like myself, and the society in which we live helped make that concrete. Enough was something I never knew existed, because I never felt like enough.

I ate past my full signals more times than I can ever account for. I ate more calories to get away from myself and burned them hours later for the same reason. 

I exercised for more hours than I will ever be able to get back, purely out of self-hate.

I was not insatiable. I was destroying my body from within, and nobody thought to stop me because we live in a world where the very act of self-mutilation by restriction is ACCEPTABLE. 

I have never known what “enough” was, until I found recovery. And guess what? I’m bigger than I’ve ever been, but I’m also happier than I’ve ever been, no matter what anyone has to say about it.

This show is about teaching thin people how to hate fat people, including the fat girl/former fat girl herself. It’s more fuel for the fires of thinspiration, thin privilege, weight stigma, and size discrimination all at once. I will not be erased or silenced by sizeism, and I won’t let anyone else be, either. And trust me…the pushback that this show is receiving is giving me a lot of hope, despite being sooooooo tired of having to tell people why it’s okay for girls/guys/folk like me to exist as we are. 

Looks like I’ll be watching Dietland in a puddle of my own happy/sad mad cleanse tears this weekend.

Big Bodies are NOT a Big Problem

…But thin privilege is.

Why are we talking about this? 

I was recently at an eating disorder support group where I expressed ‘fat’ as a term that resonates as part of my identity. It has been paramount to my recovery in recent months, especially with all the noticeable changes/stretching my body has done since last summer.

I was told that my use of the word ‘fat’ (even though I was using it in a manner that is strictly self-referencing, not as a slur or to denigrate anyone) is “triggering, negative or may be harmful.” 

“Fat” has the connotation of being morally equivalent to bad, undisciplined, lazy, out of control, and so many other harmful narratives that I have experienced in my own lifetime. It is a catch-22 of “I’m not fat yet, but I could be, and that would be terrible” (for thin-bodied people) and “I’m already fat, so therefore I’m worthless, undeserving, lesser than”. It has always been as if fat was the worst thing that could or would ever happen to me. 

Fatness is viewed as nothing to aspire to, celebrate, or be okay with, much less reclaim. It is not thought possible that people in larger bodies could have eating disorders, and if we do, it’s because we have absolutely no willpower.

These notions remind me of one of my favorite poems, “When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny” by Blythe Baird. She says:

“When you have an eating disorder and you are thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. When you have an eating disorder and you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.” 

 

How else would fat people suddenly “look great” and lose a whole bunch of weight? There is no magic to the behind-the-scenes obsessive weighing, restriction, working out to the point of injury or bodily stress and exhaustion. When people lose weight rapidly, it’s probably because they’re sick. Eating disorders are a valid, but often overlooked, form of ‘sick.’

 

Fat people are often associated/stereotyped with binge eating disorder, when the truth is that many fat people have used dietary restriction (myself included) as an eating disordered behavior. There is also evidence that dietary restriction is actually directly correlated to fatness, or higher set-point weight. In other words: the more you “diet”, the larger your body will be over time; because you are increasing your body’s threshold for fat preservation by frequently forcing it into deprivation/survival mode. 

The reality of the matter is that when someone in a thin body is discovered to be eating disordered, treatment is the first thought of those around them. When someone in a larger body is noticeably engaging in ED behaviors, the first thought is “Just lose some weight!”

Actual “suggestions” from people who noticed me bingeing, but didn’t acknowledge it was bingeing/that there might be an issue to further explore than just my “lack of discipline”:

• “Take human bites!”
• “Haven’t you had enough?”
• “Save some for everyone else.”
• Do you want to go to _(insert exercise plan the speaker claims to swear by)_ with me?”
• “If you want to lose weight, you need to portion control.” (I did not want to lose weight, nor did I indicate that I did)

Fat people get unsolicited advice in the interest of their “health” all the time; but no one ever stops to think about the effect that this has on their mental health. It takes away from the things that fat people can and are doing like getting up every day and taking care of themselves, going to school, finding cures for really crazy diseases, teaching someone else’s children, or volunteering to help bring food security to low-income families. We are not seen for what we are, for who we are, all because physically, we are “kind of hard to miss.” So why are our other attributes so easy to dismiss?

 

The answer is simple: there is a blatant prejudice that exists against larger bodied people thanks to the media, the medical industry, the diet industry (which, by the way, grosses $60B annually). We are not given a solution other than an unending list of “If you would just”s. 

We are instructed to aspire to thinness or “normal” weight, and used as an example of what not to become. We are invisible because the society at large is afraid that if people see us, they will think that (gasp!) you can be happy while you are also not thin. Thin people fear us because they desperately do not want to look like we do.

 

 

But wouldn’t that be glorifying obesity? Ah. No. I am not walking around telling everyone they NEED to be fat, they need to live in a larger body, that they MUST subject themselves to the everyday size discrimination and ridicule and invalidation that fat folks experience!

If anything, our society is doing the opposite; going to any lengths to glorify thinness–thin people are visible everywhere, and “fight the fat” ads troll local strip malls with exercise studios where I live in the suburbs. There’s a very strategic, discriminatory reason that there are advertisements for Weight Watchers, South Beach, YourWeigh, Nutrisystem and a gazillion other corporate diet garbage being projected into our consciousness. This is not the same as fat people asking for representation of their reality; the presence of fat people doesn’t immediately suggest that they are “pushing their lifestyle on the world.” They are simply asking to be seen and heard without being asked to change anything about themselves. Diet culture doesn’t ask–it demands–that we change everything about ourselves. I live in a society that tells big girls that the only way to exist is to be small–and eternally is reminding us that we aren’t doing it right.

There is no natural way for a fat person to keep up with “normal” weight standards without dietary restriction, invasive/ineffective surgery, or laxative abuse; shouldn’t that tell us that maybe the answer is to altogether stop trying to manipulate our weight? 

 

 

To tell someone who lives in, identified with, and accepts their larger body in an eating disordered community that they cannot refer to themselves as fat takes away their identity, cuts off access to their own reality and renders it a ‘problem.’ It is nearly as harmful as “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful!”…as if they cannot be both all at once. Fat is not a bad word, it is not a blemish or a curse. It is just as much a part of me as being white, female, queer, or a teacher or a graduate student.

But to dismiss it altogether privileges recovery of thin-bodied people in a way that says they deserve compassion while suggesting that fat people aren’t “really” eating disordered. It keeps the word “fat” in negative terms, further other-ing fat people in the eating disordered community specifically. Taking other peoples’ fatness away from them minimizes their experiences, and perpetuates the fear mongering around a larger state of existence that our society can no longer afford. 

It also doesn’t take into account that maybe a person’s large body and acceptance of the fact of their body can be a way of liberating themselves from their eating disorder–their decision to not engage in behaviors like obsessive weighing, portion measurements down to the gram–and just acknowledge that their weight will fluctuate the way it needs to based on stress levels, water intake, hormone reactions, and other body chemistry related factors. 

I took back the word fat as a self-referencing term because as was said by Audre Lorde: “Nothing which I know about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” For a lot of my life, in school and at home in my basement where I used to work out for hours, in the pages of the journals I used to tally up the amount of calories I burned just standing, I was preoccupied with never letting fat “happen” to me. Even when it was hurled at me in the hallways of my middle school or brought to my attention by a teacher, I internalized my otherness to mean something dysfunctional about me.

Now, it is a reality that I have come face to face with and not only just accepted but made complete and total peace with. It makes getting through brain-induced dysmorphia days a lot easier. It makes freedom a lot easier. Freedom from the venom of the word “fat” has been my entry into freedom from fear; and I’m never going to stop saying it. 

 

 

A lot of folks are triggered by the word ‘fat’ for a lot of different reasons. Maybe it was used to invoke violence on their psyche on the playground growing up. Maybe it was a value that permeated the walls of their household before, after and during meals. Maybe it’s the thing that people aspire never to become.

And I encourage those who resonate with the latter to understand that this fear of fat is rooted in nothing more than fat phobia. Maybe you didn’t intend for that to happen. You probably didn’t. Society sucks, like I’ve already mentioned–it sucks for thin people and fat people and people of color and trans people and LGBTQ+ people and disabled people and indigenous people and all marginalized people. But if ‘fat’ invokes fear in you, it’s time to fight back against the current that perpetuates this myth that fat means something bad.

Because if fat phobia continues to exist in spaces where people are trying to heal, recovery becomes less accessible to all of us. 

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I’m walking in this year’s NEDA Walk on Long Island! Please donate! Any little bit helps in the fight for eating disorder recovery. Love & Light ❤

 

Healthing while Fat 😎

• Food shopping & stuff (alone!)
• Finishing the recovery guide
• Becoming my own recovery guide (and you can, too!)

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Another Sunday installment of the in-between queen blog. How’s everybody’s week going? 

I have a meeting with my doctor tonight to discuss my moods, health and how things have been going since I made a few adjustments last time we saw each other. I called my therapist for the first time in close to two months this past weekend. I’m in a relationship now (!!!) I am a week into my second-to-last semester of graduate school and (surprisingly) not behind on my reading or my assignments (yet!)

It feels like all my health behaviors are falling into line, after spending the past year or so layering them on top of one another one at a time.

It’s really unusual to feel this good, especially with a baseline of depression/low affect that has lasted for the past, I don’t know, forever, but I’m actually really enjoying feeling leveled out at contentment. 

I finished reading Kathryn Hansen’s Brain Over Binge Recovery Guide, which I am going to recommend to everyone I know, eating disordered or not.

I learned so much about factors affecting eating disordered behaviors like bingeing, nutrition, how the brain responds to deprivation; and I was able to make neurological and psychological sense of some of the things I used to do to maintain my idea of perfection as I saw it.

Being taught all this new stuff about health and wellness from a weight neutral perspective has made me realize just how much I have no desire to lose weight or maintain it, especially not as a measure of ‘health’.

Health and weight are not conclusively a cause of each other, and there is more to being healthy than appearing healthy or being thin. 

So many doctors don’t take into account that physical health and mental health deserve the same amount of attention and priority.

Even though I’ve “relapsed” in my recovery since it started two years ago, I have also discovered a layered approach to my behaviors that has worked for me to get me to this place.

There was a point at which I wasn’t exercising at all until I could do it without using it to purge or compensate; there was a point at which I only focused on my mental health, and surrounded myself with weight neutral, body positive, fat accepting social messages; now I’m taking care of what nutrition means and layering on intuitive eating; I have been really interested lately in nutrient density and the quality of foods, since I feel confident about my mastery of quantity as someone with binge eating disorder history.

Some people are really invested in diet culture, and I admit that it’s taken me a lot of work to divest from it, too.

But the idea that a fat person’s objective in life should be losing weight as a penultimate measure of health actually reinforces the weight stigma and marginalization that causes eating disorders, whether a person lives in a fat or a thin body.

I was involved in a good ol’ Facebook argument about the character of Kate (Chrissy Metz) from This is Us, and how they do a great job of pushing the “funny fat girl” trope onto American viewers for the gazillionth time and how Kate’s narrative of constant body insecurity (which she clearly *eyeroll* deserves because she’s fat) is a tired one for fat people to consume.

Some of my biggest takeaways from the Brain Over Binge Recovery Guide were:

• losing weight isn’t the only way to be healthy
• most binge behaviors are born out of habit, not out of some underlying emotional issue
• not all calories are created equal
• factors affecting weight are not only limited to food: our body type is a result of a perfect storm of genetics, social influence, environment, stress, proper sleep, and movement.
• diet culture is gross and like, a huge liar (2400 calories, not 2000!)

I personalized my recovery plan based on two really simple components. It was a nice break from all the sometimes overcomplicating jargon of recovery that can sometimes even get in the way of our recovery. I know that that’s been true for me; the more I overthink it, the more it has persisted.

Yesterday after a walk in the woods, I went food shopping at two different stores with one mission: look for foods that are dense in nutrients and that I know taste good. I was afraid because I was going grocery shopping hungry, which is something that can be dangerous especially for bingers.

Luckily, I walked in and there was a free sample lady (bless her heart) who offered me three different types of chia granola bars, and I ended up buying six and she “namaste’d” me on my way to the peanut butter aisle.

I continued my journey and realized that my opportunities for wholesome and good nutrition were endless! This was especially true because I was in Whole Foods. I got a few packets of Justin’s, and I now swear by their version of Nutella.

I picked up some zucchini noodles, spinach, pesto sauce, sweet potato chips, and decided to even treat myself to some almond soap. I’m so excited to prep this week!

The result: today, I made myself some spaghetti and pesto, and finished off my lunch with a spinach-grapefruit-apple juice that I blended in my kitchen. This food experimentation is such a huge thing for me; another piece of my freedom being expressed.

My mom, though I think she was just trying to keep me from making a mess of her kitchen, actually helped me press some garlic and sauté the veggies I had for lunch.

She was teaching me little things about how to cook, and I enjoyed learning from her and having her throw suggestions at me while I made my food (I added more olive oil, some extra garlic, and even some cherry tomatoes and it came out DELISH!)

I’ve become really interested in mood-food pairing, (Check out the Self-Healing cookbook!) or cooking/eating to produce a result or respond to the emotions or sensations my brain and body call for. Because sometimes chocolate and other foods we assign “bad” moral value to are called for, necessary, and we just want to eat them!

I’ve been eating bananas close to bed time, as they aid in melatonin production; and as a way of rewiring my habit for refined sugar foods before bed, which often impedes my sleep (as if my brain doesn’t already do that on its own!) Helping my body do its job by feeding it the right materials to do well.

Wherever you go, there you are

When I was in ninth grade, I found my dream school.

It was a medium-sized state school two and a half hours from home. They had the major I had always wanted to study (education), it was far-enough-but-close-enough to my parents in case of an emergency, it was beautiful, and oriented in everything I believed and knew to be true about the world. 

Four months before I graduated from high school, I reached something that could be called a threshold in my mental health journey, in which I was finally diagnosed and treated for depression, anxiety and (kind of) my eating disorder.

I say (kind of) because my BED was acknowledged and labeled for the first time in my life, and the stuff I was given to treat all the other things I had going on was “supposed to curb the appetite” from my binge eating episodes. 

But appetite was only a fraction of the problem. I just didn’t know it then, and neither did my parents, psychiatrist, or any other professionals helping me at the time.

My anxiety followed me to college, and my depression often followed my anxiety. I kept steady on the medication–a combination that I still take to this day–but I found myself often alone, crying, helpless, a mess. Not just in my freshman year, but my sophomore and part of junior year, too. 

My years in undergrad were, without a doubt, where I found myself and my interests, goals, dreams and inherent beliefs in the most profound of ways. The friends I went through, lessons I learned, professors I had, and all my experiences culminated into who I have become. I am proud of that person. 

The most vivid memories of my eating disorder took place in college, as well. A two hour drive from my family of origin. A three hour drive from my father and stepmother’s house. A 1.5 hour drive from the room I was assaulted in.

Seven jars of Nutella in a week; more than 2000 calories burned at the gym, sometimes several times a day; a burger and fries at 2 o’clock in the morning; six or more plates of food in one meal at the dining hall…all of it pushing me further and further away from what was really bothering me, and thus, further and further away from ever truly healing.

The point of these multidirectional reflections of the beginning of my journey through the continuum of mental health is that no matter how much I tried to distance myself from what brought me here, no matter how much I ate to get out of myself, everything was still right next to me. Forget right next to me. It was within me. 

 

I’m in my second semester of graduate school, 15 minutes from where I grew up and lived all my life until I turned 18 and went to school upstate. The change in geography, environment, the end of a relationship, some intermittent periods of isolation, and steering my way through a lot of people who differ from me politically and ideologically (particularly in my own family) prove difficult for me sometimes.

 

I often think fondly of the Mid-Hudson Valley and how much I miss it, how much I miss my friends, the area, the mountains, and the love that surrounded me always–even when it was really f—ing dark in the spaces in my head. I think about how much I want to be there.

Right now, I have a Master’s to finish. When I become a teacher in the near future, I will likely choose a job in the region where I live now, or the place I love and miss so much. But no matter where I go or where I will be, I will still have my eating disorder. I will still have depression. I will still experience anxiety. I will still be healing from all the things that have made me believe that I’m not good enough. I will still have to confront that incorrect belief and challenge it every day. Mountains or an ocean won’t change that. They won’t fix me.

Only I can fix me. 

In Yumi Sakugawa’s book Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe, she illustrates a series of lessons for living in the now. One of the most powerful ones for me was the fifth one: exploring your inner cosmos. 

Personally, I don’t think I have ever truly believed in any sort of afterlife. I believe all of us have a spirit, and that spirit exists here and now to deliver kindness and goodness to everyone we possibly can. My Higher Power, if you will, is genuine and universal kindness.

But when I did this exercise in this book a few years ago, I took the time to draw my own “inner cosmos.” Geography and maps have always interested me so much, and as you know from reading this blog, I use the term navigating a lot–especially when describing dealing with emotions. Because I really do see all of this as an ongoing journey through time and space and consciousness.

But what does the geography of my spirit look like? It reflects everything I love. It is the map I traverse through when I am meditating, interacting with the universe, trying to channel the energy I have to deliver goodness to others.

In the head, I drew a maze with buzzing cicadas on the ends. The buzzing is my anxiety, and cicadas, who change their bodies and molt often, represent change. On either end of my arms is the sun and moon, representing both darkness and light; the two extremes of living in a mood disorder.

My feet have roots, which is something I visualize often when I am reflecting. I picture literally being grounded in all that surrounds me, and all that I know to be true. Paper mountains are my expression–writing.

My stomach and thighs (the two most unloved parts of my body, in my disordered mind) are overgrown flowers, being watered and nurtured every day with my recovery. And of course, I had to include horseshoe crabs—the most gentle, unchanged, resilient, beautiful and favorite of all animals, in my opinion.

There is a saying–wherever you go, there you are. You are always with yourself, you are always with your limitations, fears, anxieties, disordered thinking, just as you are always with your memories, triumphs, and emotions.

There is no running away from home, because our bodies are home. Our souls and spirits are home. In my healing, I remind myself that it takes a lot more courage to turn around and face the things that scare the heck out of me, and that keeps me where I am. My ancestors were warriors, not worriers–I have fight in me. The geography of healing and love and light is within us, not across countries or states or continents.

I am okay how I am, and where I am. 

—

Staying connected is how we stay in recovery!

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