Unlearning Fatphobia is Your Responsibility, Full Stop

Around two years ago, I was still in graduate school, still in semi-early recovery (again), and still trying to navigate support groups and fat acceptance all at once.

As a recovery practice, I began getting comfortable with using the word ‘fat’ as a self-descriptor around in my shares at group and in conversations–until I was called out and told not to come back until I could figure out my language and how to stop saying ‘fat’ because it was triggering to others.

I understood that. I understand that for so many people, fatness is a fear, and that fear can coexist with a mental illness (like anorexia, bulimia, or body dysmorphic disorder).

But I was also grappling with the fact that societally, fat is set up to be an insult, and I was tired of that dynamic, especially in ‘recovery’ spaces. I wanted to reclaim the word and remove its pejorative use from my consciousness. So I did, in my speech, shares, and writing.

Fatphobia is insidious in virtually every corner of our culture, because it prioritizes the politics of desirability over health. This happens even in spaces that are meant for people in recovery.

Fear of fat or becoming fat is not a diagnostically supported symptom of body dysmorphia; it is a socially constructed symptom of diet culture that has trained people to value aesthetic desirability over health. Fatphobia still comes in so many forms, even in spaces that claim recovery. It sends the message that recovery from an eating disorder is possible, but only if it’s done while in a specific body.

There are still so many recovery spaces that support the sentiment that it is okay and valid to not want to look like me. These same spaces are the kinds that have historically validated the notion that “fat” is an emotion, as if it can be removed from one’s consciousness embodiment the same way that sadness or contentment pass. My body type isn’t an emotion, and I can’t just get rid of it; in fact, I spent over half my life trying to do just that…and it was called an eating disorder. 

yourfatfriend is the best ok

Nobody wanted to call it that, though, because for most of my active illness I was in a body deemed aesthetically acceptable. How I got that desirable body wasn’t investigated, it was just assumed that I must be doing something right because my body was “right.”

The endless calorie deficit spreadsheets and the six to ten times a day I would weigh myself suggest otherwise. 

I have learned and come to the conclusion that I am under no obligation to assuage thin peoples’ insecurity about the possibility of looking like me. I certainly have compassion for where they are and the ways that diet culture has manipulated them, but at the end of the day, my fat body will not be used as an example, will not shrink itself to make space for bias, and I do not and will not ever be responsible for the ways that someone’s triggers are justified at my expense.

It’s not anyone’s fault that they learned that fatness was evil, bad, immoral, lazy, or undesirable. At the exact same time, it’s not my job to soothe the deep-seated hate for my body and others like it. It’s that person’s job to unlearn, question, shift and not project what they were told about fat bodies, and theirs alone.

Fatphobia comes in the form of silencing, health concern trolling, food policing, making spaces inaccessible (and much much more), and ignoring that Health at Every Size is more than a movement; it is and has always been a well-documented and valuable scientific approach. Do not mistake Health at Every Size for HealTHY at Every Size (Thanks M for that one), because not every single body is healthy.

Thin bodies can be diabetic, have heart problems, or high blood pressure. Fat bodies can be anorexic, have osteoporosis, or be poorly nourished. No disease is exclusive to a body type. My weight alone does not guarantee that I will get sick, just like thinness alone does not guarantee health. My body has a GI disorder that is entirely genetic, and correlated to my mental illness (anxiety), also genetic.

What’s more, I don’t owe anyone in the world receipts for my health in order to claim recovery. I had to unlearn fatphobia completely on my own, just like I learned it from the beginning both blatantly and subliminally. The ways that it is STILL pushed upon me are an unnecessary burden, and inevitably do harm, but it is solely my responsibility to make sure that I don’t project that harm or that burden onto other bodies.

Same goes for fatphobic conditioning, comments and advice you may think is rooted in health. Unless that person is paying you for advice, save it. And even then (because some doctors literally get paid to fat shame people)–THINK–is this thoughtful? Helpful? Important? Necessary? Kind? The ways that fatphobia is expressed onto bodies, often (almost always) without their consent. What people fail to understand is that fatphobia and weight stigma itself is health-compromising, “good intentions” be damned. 

If my body or the words I use to describe it are triggering to you, that has little to do with me or with disordered eating, and a whole lot to do with the potential work needed to dismantle anti-fat bias. Look within and examine unconscious stigma. What’s so terrible, scary and disgusting about being in my body? All I see when I watch this play out among fatphobic people, unconsciously or not, is that what they’re truly afraid of is losing is 1) their perception of thin as superior, 2) the indignant self-righteousness of “health and wellness”, and 3) their ability to feel power when they make anyone over a size 16 feel shame. 

It can be really hard and terrifying for someone to come along and burst what’s familiar to you, but get used to it. It’s not my body or the fact that I say FAT that makes them uncomfortable, it’s the fact that the same science that privileged thin existence for all of the 20th century is just now concluding that I am capable of health and deserving of recovery.

Regardless of your fear, my body is still here and I still love it for what it is; in fact, I have done more health-promoting behavior holistically (mental, spiritual, physical, etc.) in this body than I have in my entire life. If that’s a threat to your joy or your pursuit of desirability; that baggage ain’t mine. Stay mad. 

xoxo

 

A Shout-Out to My Gastroenterologist

I recently went to my gastroenterologist for a consulting visit before my scheduled procedure in April and I was so honestly happy with the outcomes.

When I began the process of seeking out treatment for my stomach issues (which are related directly to my anxiety, have been persisting for years, and likely were made more difficult due to my ED behaviors), I was really nervous and didn’t know what to expect. A family history of GI-related illnesses (Crohn’s, celiac disease) runs in my family, and I had been experiencing symptoms for the past few months that were indicative of something needing to be done.

At my first appointment, the standard thing went on–conversation about symptoms, family history with the help of my mom who came with me to the appointment, but a minimal discussion of my mental health conditions and my history of an eating disorder. I got a few tests spread out over those next few months–an MRI that came back normal, despite not feeling normal and often having nausea and other issues.

So I scheduled an appointment to meet with my doctor during a week off and I went alone to discuss the unaddressed issues of my eating disordered behavior in a more complete way.

She didn’t take my weight at all, validated my mental health symptoms as a likely cause of my gastrointestinal issues, and gave me a recommendation for medical food that would help.

We discussed Overeaters Anonymous and the fact that it’s unnecessary and unhelpful for me (something that doctors, in my experience, never feel, especially when fat patients are sitting in front of them), discussed my family’s relationship with my disordered behavior and my lack of ED treatment (due to weight stigma and denial that what I had was an eating disorder at all in the first place), and she reviewed my previous tests and came to the conclusion that my ED has had no long-term adverse affects on my body.

It is likely that I do have IBS, and she noted that I may benefit from biofeedback so that I can get better at aligning my hunger and fullness signals with my executive functioning.

Because after a few years of binge-purge cycles, I learned how to recover, but my anxiety is a persistent issue. I still struggle with executive functioning, and sometimes will get so busy or bad at time management or just be too anxious to eat, and my hunger signals will go ignored and eventually shut off until they are no longer in my awareness.

It sometimes would result in me skipping meals for hours, and bingeing once I can no longer ignore the ghrelin entering my stomach and telling me to eat, causing me to double or triple up on food, as a way of answering for my missed meals.

I left this appointment having articulated all of this to my doctor, and feeling heard and validated in that understanding of my behavior as it relates to my GI function. And none of it was attributed to my fatness, I was not asked to answer for my weight or reduce it, and I am so grateful for that.

This comprehensive understanding and being able to talk to a doctor about my eating disorder history and be understood and not stigmatized for my weight all at once was probably the best experience I’ve ever had with a medical professional since realizing that I needed to recover from BED/OSFED.

It is difficult enough to be a fat patient in any medical office, but when that doctor visit has to do directly with your eating behavior and the potential for weight stigma is higher than normal, bracing yourself for both subtle and not-so-subtle fatphobia is stressful and traumatic.

I didn’t think finding a doctor who was understanding of my history of eating disorders across the spectrum WHILE also actively not being fatphobic would happen for me. These small things add up for us folks who deal with weight bias from virtually all other corners of life in this world. Thank you so much, Dr. S!

A Discussion About Rule 62

An open letter to men in recovery: stop using “Rule 62” to dismiss women, comorbidity and intersectionality.

To ring in 2020, I spent New Year’s Eve with my friends who are sober–most if not all of whom are qualifying members of Alcoholics Anonymous (I am not; however, I understand the fellowship and framework quite well).

I was discussing sobriety with a man I had just met upon walking in the door to my good friends’ house on the water on the south shore of Long Island–the designated gathering place for 50+ sober people at any given time on a holiday such as July 4th, MDW, and this year, NYE.

I mentioned the unfortunate lack of consideration for folks with eating disorders like myself in the program of AA–especially considering that so many women (approximately 50%) experience comorbid symptoms of eating disorders and substance abuse including alcoholism.

The man in question simply said, “Rule 62,” and looked at me blankly.

Rule 62. 

Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. 

Rule 62, for those unfamiliar, is a rule that has found its way into recovery circles as unspoken tradition.

The backstory, from what I understand, has to do with tradition four (“Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A./E.D.A/whateverA as a whole.”) in anonymous programs, which discusses the  idea that individual meeting groups can operate on their own volition without involving or compromising the integrity of the fellowship as a whole.

When AA was expanding, a group attempted to be “all things to all people”–they resolved to take care of meetings, residential treatment, and other facets of recovery life all under one roof–and realized that their goal was way bigger than they could manage in the context of the AA program.

This group came up with 61 rules and sent them to AA as a manifesto or proclamation for beginning their ambitious program. Then, they realized just how daunting a task it would be to take care of every single person’s needs in the realm of addiction treatment–and before scrapping the idea, they came up with rule 62. 

So, what about it? 

Last week, I read a really powerful and thought-provoking opinion piece in the New York Times about the patriarchal foundations and history of AA as an organization. We all know the names Bill W. and Dr. Bob, two men who were alive during the first world war and became alcoholics due to a perceived spiritual malady that they believed had to do with an inflated ego and sense of self, as well as a lack of presence of a higher power in their lives. They were their own higher power for the duration of their relationship with alcohol and drinking–which, as the NYT article suggests, is the essence of white male privilege. 

They sought to recover from this sense of ego, but did it also heal their harmfully separatist sense of rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity?

Alcoholics Anonymous itself has, seemingly ironically tried to be all things to all people; opening itself to women, people of color, people with doctorates, average folks, and everyone in-between, but how can it do that if it still holds itself in the principles, practices and ideas of a world that was designed by and for white men? How can a fellowship with such a marginal number of women attending compared to men even say that “anyone can do it” if they have the capacity to be honest? 

The problem is, this claim is dishonest in and of itself.

Rule 62 was meant to be an ego-check on a group of alcoholics who thought (mistakenly) that their individual group’s program could be a one-stop shop for recovery. When they failed, they wrote this rule as a way of softening the ways that their ambitious and admirable mission had not gone to plan. Well intentioned? Maybe.

In this conversation in my friend’s kitchen, Rule 62 was used to dismiss my very real concern about the harm still being done to people like me in the rooms who are not having their eating disorders addressed–a problem backed by statistics, as I shared before.

I know, I know. If AA were to take on eating disorders too, they wouldn’t really be AA anymore. But this is 2020; and we really need to start accounting for the more than half of the fellowship that needs access to a safe place to express the comorbidity of their alcoholism with other issues like disordered eating and, in the case of my region, opioid abuse. By not being sensitive to issues that clearly and empirically intersect with the problem of alcoholism, there is an imminent danger of making full recovery inaccessible to so many members and potential members.

“At least you’re not drinking” (I hear this one a lot, too!) isn’t good enough anymore. Eating disorders have an unbelievably high mortality rate, especially anorexia nervosa. And I’d venture to say that MOST eating disordered alcoholics can relate to the feeling that alcohol sets off their ED, and vice versa. This is serious.

Food is available at tons of AA meetings without supporting the people for whom food might be a trigger. With over 50 percent of addicts and alcoholics also having an ED–it seems a little insensitive not to address this, and to tell those who are authentically worried about it “not to take themselves so damn seriously.” 

It’s not really a coincidence or an accident that this “rule” is probably most often bestowed upon women, as it was done unto me.

Having an ego and unwarrantedly flaunting your ability to quote a book that is, dare I say, just as fallible and subjective as we all are is…confusing, and honestly, a form of gaslighting imo.

Women don’t need to be powerless, and we don’t need to be told not to take ourselves so seriously. The world outside of those church basements and sober gatherings already does that to and for us. 

Now, I know that this individual’s use and interpretation of Rule 62–like the fallible interpretations of a lot of things in AA and other anonymous groups–speak to the person, not to the fellowship as a whole, hence, the fourth tradition. Hell, Rule 62 was created so that a bunch of people who created a plan and failed, like any human might do, could laugh at themselves and not be bummed that they hadn’t succeeded. We all need a little of that in our lives, certainly.

But I wonder how many times this rule has also been used to drive women into silence about the things that bother them about the world that they live in; things happening inside and outside the rooms. Because the fact is, we absolutely need more power in the world at large and in the daily context of our lives, not less.

And that’s not going to come to us when we are told that the realities of the things we face–pay gaps, the motherhood tax, harassment, assault, violence, dismissal, diet culture, body shame, objectification, legislation made against and about our bodies, repeated interpersonal abuse and marginalization–aren’t serious, problematic or important enough for the men who claim to be united in recovery with us (while, might I add, segregating themselves OFTEN) to take seriously.

I’m a member of a recovery fellowship that isn’t AA, but since AA laid that foundation, I’m addressing it directly, I guess. Any if not all of my closest friends are members of AA. Some of them may cheer me on for saying this, and some might not. That’s okay. However, if anonymous recovery groups, and recovery as a whole, isn’t the same boys club that it says it “used” to be, I’m going to need some of the recovering men I see, know, and love, to start proving that. In fact, I demand it, because (gasp!) I take myself seriously. Out of nothing more than self-respect.

 

‘Callout culture’ isn’t necessarily ‘toxic,’ it just asks us to be uncomfortable

Have you ever messed up?

Let’s begin with a story. A few months ago, I was part of a HAES group on Facebook that centered fat bodies. I was SUPER excited about my new yoga wheel, which would make doing a bunch of different poses more accessible to me and my size 18-20 self.

I posted a picture of me in shoulder stand on my wheel with the caption of “my fat a** doing yoga” and honestly, I realize it was–not my finest moment as an ally.

There was a mixture of messages; people equally glad for me to be able to do yoga accessibly, something that is not often seen because yoga has been co-opted by thin white bodies that make an effort to push out and not represent fat folks.

But more quickly and more frequently, I got messages and comments from people larger than me, giving me critical feedback about why yoga wheels aren’t always accessible for people who live with butts even bigger than mine; or why seeing the word “fat a**” (which I now fully recognize as a slur that sometimes reminds people of being bullied) triggered them. It wasn’t necessarily mine to reclaim from the beginning. And in my post, and in all my excitement, I managed to center myself while marginalizing other folks.

 

Your missteps and mistakes aren’t about you

No one was saying my body was not or is not important–but I failed to note that my body, despite its not-thinness, queerness, and not fully-ableness, is the most represented one in the “body positive” and even in the fat positive community. I failed to see that even if and when you are a fat person, you can still benefit from thin privilege without being thin. You can still be affirmed as a “good fat” by the society we live in; the very same one that preaches that thin is healthy, thin is virtuous and good, thin is best. Because smaller fat people are closer to being thin than people who are, say, “infinifat”; and they are given more social currency because they “fit.” And I don’t mean to say “they,” like I’m not one of them. I am.

Neglecting to put a TW or a CW (trigger or content warning) stirred up a lot of feelings for a lot of people–put me in contact with the moderators–and left me feeling defensive. I did not want to have to mark and label my own body as “triggering”, especially after fighting with it for almost two decades through binge eating, restricting, dieting and exercise abuse. 

I fought and fought and fought with people for my own worth and validity–had over 400 comments directed at me, my message, and some even at my body. These were hurtful and painful and did a really, REALLY huge number on my mental health for a few weeks. I had to grapple with the fact that I had hurt people, no matter how unintentionally, and not try to level the playing field with hurting them again even if they were hurting me back.

Comments like “someone the size of one of my legs pretending they have the same experiences as me is laughable” — objectifying me and sticking into my head over and over again, awakening my eating disorder for the first time in what would have been months.

Then came the supporters, who I didn’t ask for–less nuanced in the social justice aspect of fat politics–who would post and then dip out of the group in ‘solidarity’ with me; and I began to feel like these people were giving me a representation that wasn’t true to who I am. They were supportive, and well-meaning; but misguided in some areas of this language and this work. This is where it got even more stressful.

The “all lives matter” rhetoric coming from those who share equal marginalization with me as a 2X/3X sized person was really disappointing–I didn’t and do not stand by it and it was uncomfortable that it even went to that space.

I had to shut it off for a while after so many conversations with the moderators about reparations, my errors, and my own feelings of being disrespected. I was SO uncomfortable and scared and wounded — and sitting in my own place of reference waiting for someone to patch me up and dust me off and tell me I was 100% right and demanding emotional labor from others — something I have learned better than to do, honestly.

It would have been so easy to frame this in the narrative that ‘callout culture is toxic,’ but that waives my accountability and my need to center and repair my relationships with those who experience a lot more difficulty in their life from a psychosocial space than I do.

I am a tremendous believer in the idea that impact ALWAYS outweighs the intention of our actions. We can mean well, but if we harm people, we are ultimately responsible for that. I drafted an accountability post a few weeks after this happened, in an effort to repair the emotional viscerality of the situation, but my mental health and consulting with the admins kept me from posting it to the group.

 

This doesn’t necessarily accurately represent ALL bodies, but it is helpful in understanding where to put yourself–especially when understanding that there are bodies that experience varying degrees of size discrimination in accessibility, fashion, social situations, etc.

“Small fat” privilege definitely makes up a lot of the voiced experience in many of the movements that body positive or body neutral people have access to, and this itself is not ideal. I want to do my best to be a better ally and simultaneously voice my experiences as an “in-between fat” person (because the current “measure” doesn’t really describe me well), and hopefully somewhere along the way, others can identify with holding space for their in-betweenness–at the same time, I want to stand out of the way so that bodies that don’t look like mine can speak, move and do the work that they need to do to free themselves without sizeism, healthism, or fatphobia. Centering less normative voices is an action–one of many–that can counter the “white and slim thick is normal, nothing else” that goes on on the internet. Nobody is free until we all are. Education on how to do this is not owed to me, but I am absolutely willing and ready and eager to be told where to position myself in this process.

The amount of gratitude there is to express for dialogue; past, present, and future, is boundless. My deepest apologies for harm done and for all that I have neglected to do in this learning process.

That being said…

One thing that I refuse to do is to drown out the voices that hold me accountable with toxic positivity. In the past, I’ve justified and made excuses, but toxic positivity is something that seems to be replacing ‘callout culture’ and it isn’t for the better. I see this mostly among able-bodied, small fat, white, cis/heteronormative writers and influencers–and it’s far more toxic than ‘callout culture’ itself.

Toxic positivity is a term that comes from the mental health realm, in addressing stigma associated with mental illness. It looks like those well-meaning messages and words of good intention that come from people who don’t share your experience or have no idea what they’re talking about. They offer suggestions like “have you tried going outside”, tell you about how kale or pilates saved them from depression or start a lot of sentences with “should.” Know the type? The friends and family who are just trying to make you feel better about being anxious or depressed, but are really just adding to the stigma, incompetence, self-doubt, frustration or stress you feel if you experience symptoms of a mental illness.

Toxic Positivity in Accountability Culture is Similar

What I mean by “toxic positivity” when it comes to responding to your audience is responding to accurate, valid or critical thought and criticism/feedback with “you’re being negative,” or “positive vibes only!” and other such language. What this does is ultimately silence and dismiss the person who might be trying to help us learn and grow as an influencer and an ally. Toxic positivity demands only affirming or validating responses from those in its circle, and sometimes literally blocks out the rest and dismisses them as “haters.”

But our ‘haters’ can often teach us about what we need to do to be better, and they don’t owe it to us to be kind or gentle about it–especially if our actions are harmful to them. You might come out of a mistake a little (ego) bruised. But. you grow through what you go through. 

 

 

Being called out, confronted, or asked to pass the mic is uncomfortable and immediately launches people into the defensive–I know that from my own experiences of screwing up, and not just in the time I mentioned; it has often been uncomfortable for me. At the same time, it has also shaped me. This goes for my interactions about race (because I have a blind spot as a white person), gender identity (because I have a blind spot as a cis person), and disability (because I have a blind spot as an able-bodied person. It’s no one’s job to hold my hand and educate me, but it is my job once I have been told how a certain view, voice or amount of space I am taking up on other peoples’ behalf or at their expense is harmful to them–to educate myself and not demand anything from anybody until I know how to act right.

I have no reason to apologize for my body, but I do have to apologize and make right on it if I force people to hear what I think, see what triggers them, or listen to words that are harmful to them without their consent. I don’t just get to tell people to “stop following me” if something I do or say triggers them–because it’s my responsibility as a justice-oriented person, activist and feminist not to perpetuate the same messages that do harm to marginalized people whether they follow me or not. 

It is, first and foremost, a privilege to be able to say any of the above toxic positivity responses–because it means likely not having had to think about the person who’s experience one is responding to. That is the essence of privilege–not having to think about it. And calling folks out isn’t necessarily toxic–individuals who call out can become toxic when they start attacking others’ humanity and forgetting that there’s a person on the other end of the listening session, but the act of calling someone out for being less than mindful is, imo, perfectly acceptable in a world or in a learning community that prioritizes justice and representation. The only thing that will make that justice restorative is time, and a whole lot of listening. And that’s what these ‘conversations’ (which can sometimes look and sound and feel confrontational or tense) should look like–listening sessions, where the privileged listen and the marginalized speak about harm done and reparations to be made.

 

 

 

Are you Addicted Enough?

Most people would look at this post and go, what? But as always, just wait to see what I mean.

Most people (maybe not most, but a lot) of people I’ve ever heard talk about addiction talk about having the disease of “more.”

On a walk this afternoon, 65 hours after my last binge, I realized that I have the disease of enough. 

I used to ask myself,

Am I good/worth enough?

Do I belong enough?

Is there enough food for me? 

How can I become small enough? 

Did I burn off enough? 

My family used to comment that I would “eat like I was going to the electric chair” and tell me to “take human bites.” These comments didn’t help me, in fact, they probably made me internalize a lot of the mentality that I was “broken.”

Realistically, now I know that there is a glitch in my brain that falsely tells me that there is not enough food and that I better eat as much as I possibly can so that I get enough. This comes from dieting and starving beginning at age twelve; I built myself a deprivation mechanism that fossilized itself into my brain so hard, that when large quantities of food are present, my brain thinks its the last time I’ll ever eat again.

The reasons why I binged on thanksgiving this year are many. For one thing, I disassociated pretty bad when I got to the table, as if it were just me and the plate. I took a three hour nap after my meal and still felt sick. I wasn’t proud at all.

To my surprise, I woke up the next morning and felt SUPER charged with the energy to recover and do better. I don’t know where it came from; I think maybe I just knew that I didn’t want to feel the way I felt the night before…disgusted, alone, defeated and depressed. 

I went to a meeting with my cousin, and another one later that evening, and another one last night where I shared in front of a room full of 50+ people that I needed support. I asked myself two questions on paper last night, “How do I get better at asking for help?” and “How do I make g-d everything?” and I think that meetings and support systems will reveal the answers to those questions as I go forward.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that staying sober is pretty easy on me but, if I’m in active eating disordered behavior, that becomes a thousand percent false.

I never drank problematically until about a year ago, when I spent a month drinking at the same bar. During that time, I learned how connected my eating disorder and my problem of drinking were. My body image issues were the primary problem, but I learned quickly that if I drank, I no longer was conscious of what I looked like and I couldn’t really coherently think about what other people thought of me–or what I thought of myself. 

Even after I stopped drinking alcohol, I was so judgmental (one of my go-to defects). Today, I realized that this was how I behaved because I saw people the same way that I assumed they saw me, which was how I also saw myself–worthless, inferior, undeserving. And I kept blaming the internalized voices of my abusers for these projections, when realistically, it was a way of keeping up self will. Those voices that emotionally manipulated me down to nothing started as the voices of other people, and then started to sound a lot like me.

I blamed my higher power for that for so long, even though it wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t trust a higher power because what had g-d ever done for me, anyway? I had to control my life. I had to protect myself. I had to find ways to survive abusive people. I had to successfully hide my identity from my family. I had to save the world and still make it home in time for dinner. All the stability in my life has always depended on ME. How was staying sober or free of self harm or away from disordered eating any different?

Those messages I received as a kid that I was small or unimportant came from people who chose their own form of self-will over unconditional love. And it gave me a model for allowing my own forms of self-will to run my life into the ground, on and off for the past (almost) 12 years.

And to think I kept this up until it attacked me head on this past week. 

I binged because my higher power wasn’t invited to the table with me where I sat and ate for almost 10 minutes in virtual silence. I didn’t give a power greater than myself a chance to protect me, and that’s on me. I was busy making sure I had enough, belonged enough, felt like enough–when in reality, I was born enough.

 

---

 

48 hours

Stare at your plate

eat, take more

eat, take more

until you can’t 

take anymore

you remember 

this time last year

you were well 

because you invited god

to your table

where is your god now

and why did you make her small?

because it’s all you know 

how to do

shrink yourself,

to feel like your life 

is your own 

except god didn’t have to

get smaller with you 

it’s not god’s fault 

the same way it wasn’t 

your fault

when they chose self will

over unconditional love

so you sit here 

and stare at the plate 

taking more,

promising you’ll make up for it tomorrow,

hollow yourself out 

until your body is screaming,

you’ll keep choosing self-will 

over unconditional love

and you can’t hear your body

screaming

“We are both so much more

than enough.”

Body Dysmorphia is Bigger than Your Brain

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is considered a subsymptom of most eating disorders. It involves “a disabling preoccupation with perceived defects in appearance which makes sufferers excessively self- conscious.”

In both active ED and in recovery, I’ve experienced body dysmorphia (also often called dysmorphophobia, to emphasize its positioning in the realm of cognitive distortion rather than reality); and the feelings that come with it–anxiety, shame, dissociation, guilt, worthlessness. These emotional parts of the disorder itself are visceral and real experiences.

But in a few arenas of this recovery community, I’ve also heard expressions of dysmorphia linked to “feeling fat” and “being fat”, even (and especially) from the most thin-passing of people.

I shouldn’t even have to say why this is inherently problematic in that it alienates actually fat bodies, dismisses fat peoples’ corporeal reality to a fleeting emotion (which it most definitely is not) and reinforces fatphobia by centering thinness as the ideal to achieve even in the face of deadly illnesses like eating disorders very much are.

It recycles in the already disordered brain the idea that fat is a bad word. 

As an activist, I’ve often been thrust into the conversation regarding the use of “fat” when a person just really is trying to express that they are deep in dysmorphic thinking as the person who had the responsibility of educating thinner people about the ways that their language instigates healthism, size discrimination and weight stigma.

While I didn’t mind at the time, I had to step back and really ask people to do their own work and their own research to understand why this kind of speech is dehumanizing to bodies like mine. Further, it is even harmful to people who are thinner than me because it positions them in a cognitive distortion that suggests that they “better be careful” or they’ll “end up like (fat person)”. This is the recipe for body dysmorphia perpetuated by our own culture. 

What it mostly comes down to is a gross misunderstanding of thin privilege. 

Thin privilege CAN and actually does often exist in the eating disorder recovery community. The most represented “recovering/recovered” body is the thin, white, cisgender female, and despite being two of the three, I’ve experienced a lot of frustration with this paradigm of privilege in what is supposed to be the “body positive” movement.

How can we claim to be positive and inclusive of ALL bodies if only certain bodies are being represented? It sure does make it look a lot like the white thin-passing people are the only ones working hard at recovery, while people of color and trans people who may be experiencing dual dysmorphia/dysphoria are working really hard not only to recover but to be seen.

Centering thin bodies in this movement also purports a hugely missed opportunity for fat people with eating disorders to speak on their stories. Fat people can experience restriction, and thanks to our diet culture, they do–often.

Fat people in the recovery community don’t only struggle with binge eating disorder and other disorders that are characterized by weight gain, though for some, that is our story. I’ve said it so many times on this blog…when I was in the throes of binge eating disorder, I was in a “healthy” or “normal” weight range…whatever that means.

Only after eating intuitively and settling into my body’s needs did I begin to gain weight in recovery…and not because I was necessarily eating more, but because my body was trying to readjust to all the years of dieting, restricting, excessive exercise and bingeing cycles that I used to abuse and numb myself through trauma and my severe anxiety.

“So thin people should just stay silent about their experiences, even if they ARE uncomfortable in their bodies?”

When mindfulness of one’s language is called for, sentences like this are often a response. People, especially those with privilege, really hate to feel like they are being silenced. Silence isn’t what’s demanded of those with eating disorders, no matter where they fall on the spectrum.

And even still, sometimes silence isn’t so bad. Because the less we talk, the more we can listen to what those experiences look like, sound like, act like and are like for other people.

Those of us with ED experience know that silence is what makes that eating disordered voice grow larger and louder. However, when being asked to consider how you use “fat” or express your dysmorphia, you’re simply being asked to consider the reality of others in the context of your own.

When I ask people who are in anti-diet circuits or even in recovery forums and settings to question why they “feel fat” and when I am quick to label their jargon as disguised or internalized fatphobia, I am met often with a lot of resistance.

Speaking in terms of social justice, this is a lot of the same thing that happens when white people are asked to question their implicitly racist behaviors and how those behaviors may signal that there are pieces of their identity that they benefit from that others don’t have the same privilege of doing on a daily basis.

I can’t take my fat off my body at will. It’s not a costume. It’s not an emotion. I can’t package it up into a feeling. I’ve tried that before, and it put me in a place where my body was at war with itself constantly from the time I was 12 years old until I was 23. 

“But what about when I DO feel larger than I might actually be?” 

Words you can use instead of “I feel fat” to describe your brain’s distorted relationship with your body:

“I’m feeling really bloated right now…it’s only temporary.”

“Wow! What I just ate maybe doesn’t feel so good all at once. Next time I try this meal, I’ll eat a little slower so I don’t feel so overcrowded, overwhelmed or sick.”

                             “My body feels different than it usually does.”

“I’m feeling a little out of sorts; how can I distract myself?”

                              “I can only compare myself to myself, and even then, comparison doesn’t help me live in the now.”

These are all statements that ask us to get curious about what’s really going on in our brain and to connect that to our actual, tangible reality.

And it does that while also not contributing anymore to the deepening our culturally constructed bias against fat bodies.

These thought patterns encourage me to step away from comparison traps, to view bodies in a more socially conscious way, and remove normative ideas about bodies from the center of my own individual consciousness, and maybe eventually, from the ideas we all have about what it means to be “in recovery.”

Feeling weird in your body is, and I hate this word–normal. But the harder we work at smoothing out that weirdness and becoming comfortable and curious about how different it can feel and look within us day to day, the softer and more gentle that strangeness gets.

Our bodies are not static, and feeling different in them every day is how we are supposed to live this life. I know that as long as I feel at home in this body, I’m free to feel as experimentally weird and different as my range of sensory and emotional experience allows. Dysmorphia is a big part of my story, but it doesn’t have to be escaped through fatphobic rhetoric that ultimately widens the gap between my empirically fat self and the worth and value I have as a person. 

Sober and In love in Buffalo

Love shows up in the most unlikely places.

Seriously, who would have thought a city that is so famous for its crazy, double-digit inches winter snowstorms could be so full of magic?

One thing I never knew about the beautiful city of Buffalo was that it is an absolutely incredible place in the summer. 

My girlfriend and I went for her sorority sister’s wedding last week, and we made a little vacation out of it. I fell in love with the city, I learned so many new things about my relationship and myself, and I fell in love–with her. 

We spent the first night wandering around the canal side of town, and came across some really cool stuff–a shark girl art piece, boardwalk trivia night, and a few characters from around the city. 

Also–THE FOOD! Beef on weck, pretty good pizza (coming from a native metro-New Yorker), Buffalo wings, stuffed banana peppers, HUGE burgers, and every ten feet, a bar with their own brewery or a brewery close by that makes all their own beer. Of course, I did not partake in the drinking for obvious reasons (sobriety).

The day after we arrived, we hiked the Buffalo River through all the old grain silos and down past the canal side where we were on our first night in the city. It was easily one of the most calming, beautiful, and spiritually energizing things I’ve ever done. If you’re ever in Buffalo, go see Silo City–it’s unreal, and perfectly legal to tour–unlike almost all other abandoned sites you’ll find anywhere.

We came back to Silo City, this time for a vertical tour–yep, that’s right. My fat ass went up 11 floors of 110 year old spiral staircase, down more metal staircases, up a ladder, across an air bridge, and through three different grain silos that were built during or before 1930. I’ve urban explored since I was 15, but never with a group of strangers and most certainly never that high up.

And even though my fear of heights is like, OVERWHELMING, I still wasn’t as afraid of falling more than 14 stories as I was of maintaining my recovery while on this trip.

I realized that my fear wasn’t because I was angry at my girlfriend, or angry at anyone else–it was because I was in a physical and emotional space where it became really, really hard to keep my sobriety while being surrounded by so much celebration and so much actual alcohol and food all at once. And for me, staying sober is necessary to keep my ED recovery, too. I was in sensory overload, for sure.

So how did I do it?

Connection.

We had spent the day walking around, we toured the Martin House, originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and went to see the Hotel Henry, on the former site of the Buffalo State Psych Center.

I started getting really restless, irritable and discontent--which is what happens when you’re in your ego, far from prayer, and thinking only of yourself and your small problems.

My friend from home (shout out to Ryan) urged me with GIFs to go to this LGBTQ AA meeting ten minutes from our hotel room. I was able to ask my girlfriend to drop me off and get me there, and I’m so grateful I did.

 

An aside–Buffalo has an INCREDIBLEEEEEEE LGBTQ+ community.

The speaker spoke so much truth into my story. The perfectionism, the comparison, the feeling out of place. More and more people told my story and I realized that it was my higher power speaking through the people in this meeting, whom I would likely not see again.

I got their numbers anyway, and one of them was the reason I figured out why I was being such a brat–because I was so scared of losing everything I’ve been working for in recovery from my eating disorder and beyond.

They got me through the rehearsal dinner, where I wanted to cry because we sat three feet from the open bar. 

They got me through the rest of the night following the rehearsal dinner, when I finally opened up to my girlfriend about why I was being so mean and that I felt so scared. We compromised and and she thanked me for my realness. Relief.

Communication

…is something I’m notoriously terrible at. But Cait (yes, she and I have the same name…it’s….a thing) makes me so good at it. It’s easy to articulate things when someone wants to listen and grow with you and understand, even if they know they might not ever understand. 

The more we communicated, the more we were able to draw solutions out of the next twenty four hours.

She stayed for the wedding after party and I went back to our hotel room alone. I asked for what I needed, and it began with that meeting at the end of our trip. I set boundaries like I never have with another person before.

My fellows and my girlfriend weren’t the only ones I was in frequent communication with. My higher power was there this whole time, and I think that kayaking trip was when I felt it most. I was in my own head every second of that trip before the miracle of a meeting I went to, except when I was out on the water paddling through the wind like a champ.

Commitment

Maybe the feeling of “so in love” was a symptom of wedding fever; maybe not…who knows. Seeing all the dancing and the staring into each other’s eyes intently and the speeches and the love and the crying was enough to make me look at my own love and see nothing but perfectness.

Even in the face of imperfection. 

My girlfriend thought the ceremony was a half hour later than it actually was, so of course, we missed it. IMMEDIATELY she started to cry once she realized. I tried to preach acceptance as best as I could, and let her have a good time, dance a little, talk a little, reassure a little, get grounded a little.

Typically, I am a dancing MACHINE at weddings. But as I said, this wedding had me particularly anxious and vulnerable. So I didn’t leave my seat much, except for (obviously) the Cha Cha Slide. 

Then, our song came on. (“Perfect” by Ed Sheeran).

 

 

We were the only slow dancing queer couple on the floor, and the self-consciousness set in REAL hard. But I looked at her and sang the words and stopped caring. And I loved every second of it.

For three minutes, I was committed to being myself. I was committed to love and to not caring what other people thought. 

And that instance made me realize that I’m committed to loving this person as much as they love me.

And that means being honest with them, even if I have to lay out that honesty while being an angsty, frustrated and resentful mf. 

I loved Buffalo. I love being in love. I love my recovery. And I wouldn’t trade any of my life for anything (except maybe I’d move to Buffalo).

 

 

xo

 

What is Happening to Body Positivity?

I can promise y’all this post is going to be part rant, part analysis, part grieving process, all realness, and a lot of emotional work.

Today after a lot of sad reflection I’ve started to wonder what the absolute heck is happening to the body positivity movement.

Or maybe I’m just now realizing that it has never truly, wholeheartedly meant to include specific bodies over a certain size all along.

Once I have examined all the privilege I have being in a body with a voice in eating disorder recovery, body pos, and fat acceptance all at once, I realize it’s probably the latter. 

I’ve started to realize that body positivity as it stands, really hasn’t told us anything new for a long time. I say this because it’s rooted and it survives and thrives in a big hearty pot of western (white) feminism. It’s worth acknowledging that as a white cis person, there are more than a few ways I benefit from this. But as a fat person, I don’t, and neither does anyone bigger or more brown or differently abled than I am.

Being body positive and fat positive aren’t the same thing.

…In much of the same way that saying you’re not a racist and rejecting white supremacy aren’t the same thing. Just like tolerance and acceptance aren’t the same thing (though in a lot of settings they are problematically and incorrectly conflated). Taking one of these actions does not automatically signify doing the other.

Loving your body and giving people space to love their bodies too does not altogether erase attitudes and inherent policies that are fatphobic. It does not erase or remove thin privilege or the fact that people do indeed benefit from being smaller on an economic, social, and systemic basis.

And if you’re a body positive influencer who is in an “acceptably fat” body, standing next to a fat person for a picture and hoping that your privilege and success will somehow rub off on them and make them be seen isn’t fat positive.

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I love this. #Repost @pnwfattitude ・・・ 📣♥️ "Because without a full reckoning of what it means to honor all bodies unconditionally, “body positivity” becomes just another thing to fail at, just another impossible gendered expectation. " – @thelindywest – (From her @selfmagazine article "The Way We Talk About Bodies Has Changed. What We Do About It Comes Next."💋)

A post shared by Chubby Cartwheels (@chubbycartwheels) on Aug 10, 2018 at 1:04pm PDT

Thinness is a western ideal.

So it makes almost perfect sense that even in “body positivity”, that thin, cis white bodies are at the top of the pyramid.

And maybe they don’t mean to be, but it’s hard to unlearn old habits. Western attitudes colonized, stole and claimed the rest of the world as we know it, and I think that despite the best efforts of western ideals to shift and to (even if only cosmetically) pass themselves off as inclusive, western ideals are failing to hear and respond to the demands for accountability from all the other cultures that differ from us. 

Thinness is one of the west’s old habits that continues to die hard.

In some eastern and many African cultures, the larger a body you were in, the more status you received. In western cultures, the converse of the above statement is true. You are assigned more personal value, more social currency, for the less space you take up in the world. Thin is not merely a vain statement of fashion, but a distinction of class,  moral character and righteousness. And to pretend that this has not carried itself into body positivity is, for lack of a better word, dense.

Thin members of the body positive community need to start doing better than taking pictures next to or with other fat women and hoping that somehow their thinternet success will rub off on us fat girls and make us worthy of being heard, too. If you want to actually share our space, move away from your privilege, hand over the mic to people with further marginalization than you, and let them speak.

This sort of non-specific callout post includes me, for race/class/ability/gender performance reasons.

 

I have learned and grown the most from the women of color who claim their bodies as their own and reject notions of body colonization. I have done so, often from the internet sidelines. I don’t deserve awards or accolades for not demanding emotional labor from people who don’t need to give it to me. But I think something can be learned from the very act of not making demands of people who are already deep in the struggle for representation, power, and a slice of this self-love that seemingly does in fact have a size limit. 

First and foremost, I listen.

I tell people about the wonderful work being done by people like Sonya Renee Taylor and Dianne Bondy (@diannebondyyoga) and  Jessamyn Stanley (@mynameisjessamyn) and Rachel McKibbens (@vulturekiss) and J. Aprileo (@comfyfattravels) and Jes Baker (@themilitantbaker) and Ericka Hart (@ihartericka) and Your Fat Queer Friend (@yrfatfriend and Jude (@merqueenjude) and actresses Joy Nash and Jen Ponton and more and more and more.

I am so grateful to them for my own voice and for love of my body and for taking my body out of a harmful context and putting it back into a context that recognizes its place in a world where there is so much struggle for people who are like me and in some cases even more struggle for people who don’t.

Freedom from restriction is still the dominating recovery narrative.

Though there are a full spectrum of eating disorders that we know about, somehow a lot of the bodies represented in the ED community and those who stake a claim in the body positive movement are ones who have struggled primarily with restriction.

While I am not aiming to detract from these particular stories, I think that again, thin privilege is at play here. Binge eating disorder wasn’t, after all, seen as even being a real eating disorder until only five years ago, despite being the most common one that Americans are faced with symptomatically. There is a lot that comes with unpacking the particulars of this. Let me try:

We as a society value being thin, but only thin enough to keep oneself alive. And for every body, this looks different. Let’s not forget that fat bodies can too be acting out restrictive behavior, despite preconceived notions about how their body became a fat one in the first place.

There is a threshold of “too sick” for our social context just like there’s a threshold for “too fat”.

 

And those of us with binge eating disorder are often seen as just having no willpower, and are often congratulated for the very same behaviors that doctors and loved ones worry about when they are displayed in anorexia/ARFID patients. This stigmatizing and incorrect assumption is made clear by the fact that it wasn’t even listed in the DSM until 2013. This stigma and the idea that as a fat person, if I restrict and overexercise that I’m just being “conscious” is the exact reason why I was never deemed “worthy” of treatment, despite my absolutely disordered behavior.

In similar scenarios, doctors get to blame binge eaters (whom society also doubly denotes as being virtually all fat people) for an eating disorder for all of medical history until this century.

 

 

And because of medical perceptions and the misinterpretation of correlation and causality between weight and health, weight restoration for anorexia patients is often seen as a function of this lack of willpower in people with BED. The same behaviors that anorexia patients are asked to perform to “get well” are those that are vilified and discouraged among fat people and people with binge eating disorder (which, I will repeat, are not mutually exclusive). This in itself is a direct result of fatphobia, on both a social and medical scale.

This brings into play the idea that fat bodies can’t be participants in body positivity without being trolled by the health police.

The comments I have seen online about fat bodies, direct and indirect, expressing false “concern” for a person’s health, which when called out by the victim often reveals itself in its true form; nothing more than fat hate and deeply internalized weight stigma.

For people like me, weight loss or restriction is encouraged; and only bodies that are in danger of dying due to their smallness to begin with are allowed to show signs of weight gain and be applauded for it. Fat bodies are often locked out of body positivity in the name of health, which is why fat acceptance takes a radical extra step to ensure that fat bodies are actively being seen, tolerated, and accepted.

And even still, entertainment and mainstream media often make attempts that fall significantly short of humanizing fat bodies. Take this new show Insatiable for example–one that aims to address binge eating disorder and weight-based bullying by caricaturing it, only to actually play into and further normalize narratives rooted in fat hate.

I wrote a position statement on just the trailer alone, but I’ve heard enough about the first few episodes from a few blogs to know that it does far more harm than good. This show, as I’ve said before, does nothing but allow the dehumanization of fat people to sink further into the western psyche by neutralizing the oppression of larger bodies (not to mention not even having any actual large bodies on the set in the first place).

Before anyone asks, I won’t be giving the show “a chance” because I think it does a lot of damage to girls like me by making us re-live the trauma of growing up with the assumption that we were just fat, lazy, and, well, insatiable. 

I’m all about growing through distress tolerance as a way of recovering, but I don’t need yet another media reminder that “just stop eating” is the recovery cure-all I’ve been waiting for for almost 13 years. If I wanted this kind of advice, I would still be interested in diet culture. Not to mention the classism, bad modeling of emotional regulation, and further stereotyping of addiction all in just the first episode. Big yikes. 

 

And somehow none of it manages to create a fat girl who stays that way and claims victory because of, not in spite of, what size she is. There is no body acceptance narrative to even be found. And without the presence of body acceptance, you can forget fat positivity altogether too. Patty is only allowed to claim body positivity once she is thin. And even then, she has so much internalized fatphobia to work through that I’m just like girl, get a sponsor and some steps going to deal with all this fatphobic rage puuuuuuhlease. 

Body positivity cannot exist without fat positivity.

I mean, so far, a lot of the time, it has existed without fat positivity across the board. But body positivity without fat positivity, fat acceptance, rejection of white supremacy, rejection of cissexism and heteronormativity and the intentional visibility of differently abled bodies is CRITICAL to creating a body positivity that is truly inclusive and intersectional. Body positivity doesn’t lock out anyone from the experience of personal, community body love through representation, peace, and when it calls for it, recovery.

So we need to do away with all the healthism, the pushing and shoving to get to the top of the pyramid, and dismantle the pyramid altogether.

We also need to agree to stop giving air time to shows, platforms, people, places and things that undercut people’s reality or their emotional health in pursuit of ratings or recognition. Evaluate the message, the message underneath the message, and lean into the impact that certain work has on you. Use that impact to hold creators and spaces and even law makers accountable for the ways that their actions may miss the mark on addressing and challenging weight stigma, or worse, ways that their work may contribute to it.

As a community we also need to note that none of this work exists without body diversity, and no voice deserves more air time than another. But without a doubt, there are certain voices that are getting most of the air time anyway.

Follow accounts, bodies and lives different from your own. Stand alongside people who have different experiences than you and ask them what they need. And when you ask, don’t just wait to respond–listen.

Ask. Listen. Act. Stand back.

Demi Lovato’s Invisible Illness

So I know I just wrote a really important post like…four days ago. But churning out stuff on this blog has become my default coping mechanism lately.

I have seen and taken in a lot of information today. This past weekend, I watched a documentary on the life of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, who died of a heroin-induced heart attack at age 27. 

This morning, I was listening to his posthumously released spoken-word album An American Prayer, to the track “Curses, Invocations” — he ends the poem with the verse, “I will always be a word man…it’s better than a bird man.”

Words are healers for so many of us.

But I digress. This is all somewhat connected, I promise. I was walking through NYC this morning and afternoon, listening to people on the train, finding myself in resentments toward people I didn’t know, and frustrated at how rude people can be, especially on mass transit. Sweating, trying to get to an interview on time, and noticing people struggling and thinking about all the assumptions we make about others dawned on me a lot as I walked through Manhattan trying to find where I needed to be.

When I got home, my brother called me and told me to Google Demi Lovato’s name, and that she had been hospitalized for a heroin overdose just hours ago.

Like I said, I know it’s only hours-old news, and I was already in your feeds just days ago. But writing about this, news that shook me really hard, is the way I’m going to process it all right now. Bare with me, please. 

The first thing I did when I read the article about Demi’s overdose was text my friend Lexie to ask if she’d heard. A conversation ensued.

A while ago, we’d both shared our frustrations over a Twitter storm she was involved in about pulling a ‘prank’ on her bodyguard that involved being touched nonconsensually. 

I pretty much at that moment decided that Demi, in my eyes, was cancelled. I was really upset that a person who was such a fundamental part of my recovery would do something like that and shrug it off so thoughtlessly.

I didn’t take the time to think about the invisible struggles that people are often going through when they lack self-awareness the most. I judged a person who, in all honesty, I didn’t know and couldn’t have known was making errs in judgment like she did, probably because of shame.

And worse, I wanted her to feel shame because I’d like to think, that as someone who is deeply invested in justice and love and compassion, that anyone I chose as a role model would do better. But I realize as I am shaken by what is happening in her life, that she is human. A human who is sick and suffering, just like so many of us.

Most people know somewhat about Demi’s eating disorder relapse last year after breaking up with Wilmer Valderrama, and the recent release of her song “Sober”, in which she bravely admits to relapsing in the area of substance abuse, had a lot of people in her corner encouraging her to find recovery again.

Even in the recording of this song, it sounds nothing like Demi’s voice. I gave it a first listen today and the first thing I thought to myself was, she sounds so scared, so ashamed, and so broken. 

During this conversation with my friend, a fellow person in recovery from ED and other mental health issues, we both shared the possibility that maybe Demi hasn’t been truly okay for a long time. 

And that’s more than okay.

I don’t know Demi Lovato personally, but I would be kidding myself if I failed to admit that she has been an integral part of my recovery and my own resilience. Her strangely appropriative relationship with the LGBTQ+ community hasn’t always sat well with me, but she has also done something that a lot of people can’t or won’t–shown up for herself and for millions of others in the face of the darkest struggles a person can go through.

Demi Lovato embodies vulnerability and courage.

She has successfully been the representative of “its okay not to be okay” for a really long time. Even after her relapse was reported last year, that was the message that I think we all got–that it’s okay to falter and keep working on ourselves. There is so much power in being honest, but it’s imperative to always be following up on that with the people who need it. Because these attitudes and behaviors aren’t always visible to the entire world at all hours of the day. 

Some of us may not think the person doing best needs check-ups; but I can assure you, connection is the very thing that keeps recovery alive. 

Like Demi herself has said in the past: “Recovery doesn’t get a day off.”

None of us, despite whether we are one of the 65 million people who follow her on Twitter, knows Demi’s life day in and out. Since she has shown up as the face of recovery for this generation–a person who has seemingly overcome self harm, self hate, drug abuse, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and an eating disorder–so many people have looked to her for inspiration and found it; myself included.

 

 

I remember seeing her at IZOD Center in 2014 and sobbing uncontrollably as she sat at the piano and sang “Warrior”. I cry every time I do a cover of the song myself, because so much of it is my truth. 

I, too, have had to recover from depression, crippling anxiety, abuse, codependency and an eating disorder simultaneously. I know that it often doesn’t happen all at once, and that the parts of your behaviors that aren’t “as severe” can seem like an okay thing to cling to because that’s the trade off your brain makes.

Once you are in recovery from one thing, your brain tries to sort the rest out, prioritizing your vices by which one will kill you last until they’re all no longer useful.

I liken it to playing something I call “symptomatic wack-a-mole,” because it can seem like just as you’ve got one symptom of your mental illness cared for and patched up, another one rears its ugly head.

And it’s not always as easy as “I’ve got this.” In fact, most people who can confidently say “I’ve got this” all by themselves, don’t really “got this.” Macklemore is a really good example–and one of my favorite recovery advocates to produce raw, unfiltered art on the realness of recovery.

 

At that concert four years ago, I had no way of knowing whether or not, at that exact moment, Demi was okay. Even Nick Jonas, who performed right beside her, has told media sources that sometimes he glances at her wrists when they see each other just to make sure she’s “okay.” Even then, that’s only a snapshot, a relative piece of wellbeing that makes up a recovering person’s ‘okay.’ Just like most of my family or friends and especially not strangers on the internet or even sitting around me at the concert that night had no way of knowing whether or not I was truly okay.

The best way to find out if someone is okay is to ask them. When you’re finished asking, listen. 

When you are held up and expected to represent an entire community of struggling, sometimes even broken people, self-care can be so hard. And the shame of falling from that image is even more tough to cope with. And when people depend on your success, your voice, and your triumphs to make a living, the burden only gets larger. And pretending, inauthenticity, and half-truthful recovery can only propel a person so far until those old vices start to get in line and fight for first. 

 

The one thing I was really floored by is that Demi is now (at least according to the reports) using opioids/heroin. A lot of people believe that heroin use is a dark, scary, last resort, unheard of ‘point of no return’ type of drug problem. But it’s way more common than we try to convince ourselves it is. I live on a literal island where the opioid epidemic is at its worst in our entire country. And it is grueling and scary and heartbreaking all the time.

As someone who shares a lot of struggles with Demi Lovato, I said to myself when I read this that she probably feels so powerless right now. Lexie pointed out that she felt that Demi still, to this day, despite recovery, probably feels this unstoppable desire to be perfect.

Being given the assignment of poster child for mental wellbeing is emotionally exhausting a lot of the time, and sometimes–I know from experience–this work can be counterproductive to our wellness in a lot of ways. Perfection was and likely still is the first thing I was addicted to. So many of us with eating disorders live this truth to its fullest extent.

 

I hope that with this instance of relapse, despite how public it is becoming, we can have conversations with each other about the invisibility of illnesses like addiction and mental health (which undoubtedly go hand in hand). Awareness is great, but often not enough. We must move from awareness into action.

We cannot treat brokenness, addiction, or shame without compassion and vulnerability. I have seen some really, really awful things in the comments of the articles I’ve surveyed about Demi’s overdose in the past few hours (Looking at you, TMZ). 

This may be an opportunity for Demi to get real and even more raw with her art. Thus far, her sobriety has been a public event, so much a part of her label-created image as an ex-Disney starlet. Her powerlessness as a celebrity, and as a celebrity in recovery, is so much bigger than herself, and the stakes are high. I think the pedestal on which she has been placed is holding her back more than anything, and I hope that she can find peace and freedom on her own terms as soon as possible.

Until then, it’s on us to let her heal, check in with ourselves and our loved ones as we cope with the realities of things like addiction and disease of the mind. Demi Lovato’s words, her image, her humility and her courage have all taught me first and foremost that no matter what we believe in, we must first believe in our own worthiness. 

Get better soon, Demi. Cheering for you. xoxox

-inbetweenqueen ❤

Reintegration, Recovery & More

Being patient with my body size in recovery has been super frustrating recently–something that I haven’t entirely mastered yet. Especially lately, when the summer clothes are coming out of the closet, it’s been extra difficult to feel “at home” in my body (pride pun intended).

As I’ve said before in previous posts, I’ve definitely gained weight in recovery. I don’t know how much, but since starting my first phase of recovery, the OA diet, in 2016, and leaving it behind four months later, there’s an absolute possibility that I weight more than I did then. I haven’t gotten on a scale since last summer, but I can feel and see the tangible change in my Clothes sizes. (which are all over the place–M, L, XL, 0X, 1X, 2X depending on the brand!)

This all being said, I am a living example of diet failure. Those of us in the post-diet world know that relative statistic that 95% of diets fail. What this actually means is that the diet fails people, people don’t fail the diet. They are buying a product that came damaged, and are blamed when the damaged product doesn’t work. What the “95 percent” thing actually means is that 95 percent of the time, restriction based weight loss isn’t ever sustainable.

Further, it has been shown in studies that people who diet restrictively go back to the weight they were before the initial diet, and then gain 40 percent more. This isn’t meant to scare anyone, because I think the idea that “dieting will make you gain all your weight back and then some” is an anxiety provoking thought that has inherently fat phobic implications on its own.

Instead, I reframe this thought in such a way that reminds me that if I’m really anxious about my body size now, participating in the futile act of dieting to make myself smaller than I currently am will land me right back here and potentially produce more anxiety until I unlearn all the fat hate rhetoric that society has so fiercely bestowed upon me.

What I’m learning in recovery is to be happy and healthy at any size.

I’ve spent a lot of time since learning all these numbers and nutrition stats trying to find my own way to recover and re-integrate my body back to its own conception of “normal”. And what I’m developing is this process I have named and coined as re-childing. 

Shifting Recovery

When I started “recovery”, recovery looked a lot liked a diet–because it was a diet. Binge eaters are often prescribed weight loss as recovery, especially if they are subjectively “overweight” or “obese”.

Patients with anorexia (I say patients in this sentence strategically, because I was never a “patient” to treatment for an eating disorder since I was always a “normal” weight) are often prescribed weight restoration as their form of treatment. Their body weights put them in the hospital; but their disorder is seen by many medical professionals as my recovery solution.

I spent four months losing 26 pounds, and being under a lot of stress and anxiety over when (what time), I ate, how much, and who with. I weighed myself compulsively, and created a lot of anxiety about eating “on time” rather than listening to my body’s cues of hunger and fullness.

After four months, the OA lifestyle and all that came with it wasn’t sustainable. I had more people paying attention to what I ate at post-meeting diner gatherings than helping me work the actual program and all its principles.

I’ve met some WONDERFUL beautiful people in OA, who have encouraged me in and beyond my journey with that phase of what I considered to be recovering at the time. These same people respect that my disease is bigger than overeating. I come from emotional eating, bingeing, restricting, dieting, exercise purging and back again.

After this shift, I stopped exercising for a long while–a few months short of one year–and gained weight doing it. I kind of sat with this weight gain, however, because I was adamant to not exercise until I could do it without compulsively counting the calories, doing the math in my head that verified I had “gotten rid of” my lunch or worked out until I had “permission” to eat more for the day.

These processes were internal, and my relationship to exercise probably just looked really dedicated and motivated to the outside world, but I was doing so much damage to myself and my already tricky knees and back joints (I was a runner who loved to run until 10th grade when I discovered I had hip dysplasia that impacted my knees).

I re-integrated an exercise plan into my routine and my life over the past few months. I have discovered what I enjoy (hiking, walking and yoga!) and learned to put movement that doesn’t suck into my daily life. And I’m doing only those things, with a touch of dance and everyday moving.

My favorite suggestion comes from Linda Bacon’s Body Respect: I park at the far end of the lot at my job and enjoy a few extra minutes of walking to the office to sign in each morning. I also have located several different spots nearby to walk, and my partner and I have visited them a lot throughout the spring!

Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating has done so much for me–it is insurmountable exactly how much. It has become about more than just eating when hungry and stopping when full–I have learned through the Intuitive Eating principles how to choose foods that help my brain function better, what food actually does for me, and how to re-process things about my body image that weren’t fully healed. It has taught me how to shut out the external food policing messages that come from family and social messaging, which have throughout my life solidified into concrete messages that have come to sound a lot like my own voice, even when they’re not.

The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating!

These principles are so important to me, and have made me really interested in the nutrition components of food and what it can do for me. With intuitive eating, I’ve learned that carbs are in fact brain food and we need them if we want to keep functioning, even as we rest.

I have a serotonin imbalance, so I focus a lot on serotonin-producing foods and omega-3 fatty acids for mood boosting. I also hydrate a lot more often and have rediscovered my childhood love for raw veggies as snacks!

My Re-Childing Theory

Most of us have no memories of being newborns or infants–but scientifically speaking, our bodies were designed to eat when they were hungry and stop after we weren’t. Despite the fact that whoever raised us got no sleep when we cried out of hunger at 3 in the morning, we were listening to our bodies when they released ghrelin–the “hunger rumble” hormone in our stomach that told us to feed it.

As we grew, our parents or caregivers were the ones who created our eating schedule in an effort to structure our day as well as their own. But how much of that eating schedule was actually in tune with our own hunger cues?
How often as children were our bodies still hungry even an hour after dinner? It’s got less to do with the “growing boy/girl” nuances we push on children as they develop, and more about their hunger and fullness signals trying to fight against a somewhat arbitrary and self-imposed food routine.

The idea that “you can’t possibly be hungry” an hour after dinner is a myth, and as children, whether we are granted permission to be hungry and eat shortly after a meal affects our development and relationship with food and eating. I know personally that it did exactly that for me.

Lots of healthy foods were available in my life for most of my childhood, and lots of unhealthy ones were, too. I had a good balance of “play food”, quickly prepped food, and nutrient dense food–but was always told either when or how much to eat (my dad’s side of the family were their own Clean Plate Police).

While I understand that parenting is SO time-consuming and that dinner gets made when and however the person cooking often sees fit, more dialogue about family food preferences and hunger schedules should be taken into account.

In our society, its considered rude to eat before everyone at the table has been served. But what if I’m not hungry and everyone else is eating? There shouldn’t be judgment if I have to make a plate for myself and heat it up later.

I can still sit with my loved ones and socialize while they enjoy their meal. Food is so often a really important sociocultural bonding tool, but participation in the food, for me, doesn’t always have to be required. In the case of restrictive disordered folks, challenge yourself to participate in the conversations and the food. There is still opportunity to be present while honoring yourself.

Just the same, parents shouldn’t push kids who are done with their dinner. If anything, teach them that whatever they don’t finish can and should be saved for later, as an effort to not be wasteful.

In households who are privileged enough to have food security, training eaters from a young age to not take more than they need could be useful in creating intuitive eaters who are mindful of the presence of socioeconomically imposed food insecurity and wastefulness.

I am re-integrating my body to its natural state; by listening really closely and carefully and not eating after my body says it’s finished. I’ve done this sometimes by overeating by accident and noticing my threshold without judgment. It’s all about fine-tuning and sometimes, that means willing to be a little physically uncomfortable.

Another form of re-childing my body’s relationship with food and body image is reframing the way I experience and think about movement. Instead of saying “I wasted today and didn’t exercise; I’m so lazy”; I think about it in terms of my relationship with nature. I don’t want to waste my “outside time” or my opportunity for that day to interact with the beauty in my neighborhood and beyond.

When we were kids, there was NOTHING worse than not getting to play outside. I go back to this thought often. When I was a preschool teacher, we would often say to the children, “Clean up your toys fast so you don’t lose outside time!” and they would get right to cleaning up and have more than enough time to play and laugh and run around with their friends.

There are only so many daylight hours, and certain tasks can be done at anytime. Being able to do this social movement activity was so important to them, and not out of a compulsion to move. I don’t like losing my “outside time” as a grown-up, either!

We all are learning and growing in this recovery process, and it is up to us to find out who our inner child is and to feed, nourish and love that child back to life using everything we have learned as adults. I know for me, it has been the most gratifying, healing, sometimes frustrating but always altogether meaningful process thus far. Get to know who you were before the self-imposed rules, structures and external messaging.

How are you implementing reintegration into your life?