Disordered Eating, Self-Love and Yoga (Part One in a Three Part Series)
(TW: weight loss, disordered eating, mental illness)
I won't share too many details of exactly how I got to the point of hating myself, because unfortunately, my experience is pretty common. Like most in modern society, I've been raised to compare myself and my body to what's idealized in the media. Between Photoshop, face-tuning apps, and the increasing normalization of surgical cosmetic procedures, most of us are set up to feel gross by default, like we inherently need to be fixed...even back in the ancient old 1990s when I was a kid, the phrase "heroin chic," Victoria's Secret models, airbrushing tricks in magazines, and eating disorders were all very much a thing. So by the time I was probably ten years old, I felt both fat and hideous. I was straight up disgusted by every inch of my own body. I still clearly remember sitting at my fourth-grade lunch table surrounded by girls (most of them half my weight, mind you--I knew this for a fact because they weighed us in gym class that year and announced our numbers out loud. Totally not traumatic at all!) who sat around pinching their stomachs, comparing their nonexistent fat rolls as I squirmed around to hide my actual fat rolls beneath my t-shirt. Early on, it was a sealed deal...I. Hated. My. Self.
It wasn't until college, though, that I decided to do anything about my perceived flaws. While there were many, my weight always bugged me the most. At 20, I'd recently moved home from college, my on-campus experience dominated-slash-ruined by crippling anxiety and depression. In addition to wasting away on the internet, my primary coping skill on campus was lots of emotional eating. The dorms themselves were a fast food mecca--the cost of food entirely covered by my student access card--so I was eating Wendy's, Sbarro's, Subway, Taco Bell, and KFC at all hours, not to mention whatever the cafeteria decided to deep fry that day and all the convenience store candy and ice cream. My freshman fifteen easily doubled itself in a matter of months and only continued to rise until I moved back home and decided to do something about it.
Things started out pretty reasonably. I learned that fruits, veggies, nuts and grains were best; to swap from fried to baked foods and white processed versions of things like bread and pasta to their whole grain counterparts; the basics of calories in versus calories out. I started bringing packed lunches with me to class rather than eating fast food on the train between work and school. I took stairs instead of elevators and parked further away from buildings. I lived at home and my mom was taking the same steps as me to drop a few pounds, so eating healthier at home was pretty easy and I had a partner-in-crime. We started going on walks together, my first true experience with staying consistently active, and something that really stuck. To this day, I still love and use walking to relax and find my center. Outside of yoga, it's my favorite way to move.
I could have continued on this path and been good to go, but very quickly I spotted a glitch: losing weight reasonably kinda sucked. It took forever! And by "forever," I mean that after a month I hadn't lost 20 lbs so I was very perturbed. Like, how rude. I wanted to be skinny and the clock was ticking!!!
Because I knew about the whole "calories in, calories out" thing, I figured I'd just eat a little bit less and drop weight a little bit faster. Nothing drastic. At least at first. Then there were a couple of days where I only ate around 1000 calories solely by circumstance and I felt fine. It was then that I decided heck with it! I can totally do this more often...I don't just feel fine, I feel great on 1000 calories and aren't I just so lucky!?
INSERT HUGE RED FLAG! THIS WAS NOT OKAY! THIS WAS THE FIRST SIGN OF DISORDERED EATING THAT I COMPLETELY IGNORED! DO NOT FOLLOW MY EXAMPLE!!! AGAIN--MAJOR RED FLAG ALERT!!!
Shortly after the whole 1000-calories-a-day garbage started, I grew more obsessed with counting those calories, and along with that came a fixation on the scale as I began to lose weight more rapidly. I'd wake up, weigh myself. Pee, weigh myself. Eat breakfast, weigh myself. Work out, weigh myself. Wait a few hours, weigh myself. I kept this up until my mother caught on to me and hid our scale, warning me I was getting a little cray cray but also not really saying or noticing much about all the other obsessive behaviors that were beginning to creep in around this time.
I started designating foods as "good" or "bad," or more importantly, "allowed" or "not allowed." As in, I was only "allowed" to eat "good" foods during the week.. The weekends were my cheat days where I "allowed bad foods." I guess maybe for some people this general idea works, but for me things progressed so rapidly that eventually I was eating five or six very specific food items during the week and binge eating everything in sight on weekends.
Eating a "bad" food on a weekday would trigger some form of emotional meltdown, varying from crying in public to full-blown panic attacks, so I avoided that as often as humanly possible. Those closest to me told me to chill out on occasion, but just like the scale incident and because I was still eating, nobody ever expressed any type of true concern. And trust me, this was my own primary justification for continuing this cycle, why for years I couldn't admit that there was a problem...I never went entire days without eating (and I never purged what I binged), so it never dawned on me that anything was wrong. At the time, I honestly just thought that dieting was hard and I was bad at it.
Like the restricting, my "cheat days" started off somewhat tame and then escalated quickly. They went from what they are in theory--permission to indulge in a special treat or meal--to a weekly pre-planned 48 hours of eating as much as I possibly could. On my cheat weekends, I ate as frequently as I weighed myself during the week. I ate nothing but junk food until I was sick, and then I'd stop for a couple of hours--not until I was hungry again, only until I was no longer in physical pain. And then I'd keep eating.
See, once I started to really restrict what I was eating, I felt so hungry and deprived of food by the time weekends rolled around that I felt obligated to eat as much as I could while I was "allowed" to do so. My body was begging for more food and I couldn't eat enough fast enough. Not to mention, let's recall again my college dorm days and the reason I gained weight in the first place, which was all sorts of emotional eating. I hadn't yet gotten to the root of my anxiety or depression, so even though I was now in size 4 jeans, I still hated myself. I still felt worthless. I still ate to fill holes. I still ate to dig new ones.
By the following winter, I couldn't sustain the binge/restrict cycle so I gave up on it, chalking it up to "dieting's just not for me, man," not really grasping how dangerous my behaviors had become. Over time, I gained all the weight back and then some, because again, lifetime emotional eater and junk food lover over here! And again, I. Still. Hated. Myself.
So this became the theme of my twenties. Gain weight, lose it via binge/restrict, "give up," repeat the entire cycle. Sometimes I'd stay heavier for longer, sometimes I'd jump back into dieting a little sooner. Sometimes the binge/restrict cycle wasn't as intense. Sometimes I'd go months and only binge eat, other times I'd only restrict. No matter what, it was a nightmare.
It was the same monster wearing different faces.
All of that changed when I was about 28, discovered Instagram, hashtags, and the online world of body positivity, and my world was rocked. We'll explore all things BOPO in Part Two of this series next month, so stay tuned!
Then we'll wrap up in January for Part Three, where I'll share how my yoga practice finally taught me the true meaning of self-love, compassion, and body positivity and helped me heal from years of disordered eating.
It wasn't until college, though, that I decided to do anything about my perceived flaws. While there were many, my weight always bugged me the most. At 20, I'd recently moved home from college, my on-campus experience dominated-slash-ruined by crippling anxiety and depression. In addition to wasting away on the internet, my primary coping skill on campus was lots of emotional eating. The dorms themselves were a fast food mecca--the cost of food entirely covered by my student access card--so I was eating Wendy's, Sbarro's, Subway, Taco Bell, and KFC at all hours, not to mention whatever the cafeteria decided to deep fry that day and all the convenience store candy and ice cream. My freshman fifteen easily doubled itself in a matter of months and only continued to rise until I moved back home and decided to do something about it.
Things started out pretty reasonably. I learned that fruits, veggies, nuts and grains were best; to swap from fried to baked foods and white processed versions of things like bread and pasta to their whole grain counterparts; the basics of calories in versus calories out. I started bringing packed lunches with me to class rather than eating fast food on the train between work and school. I took stairs instead of elevators and parked further away from buildings. I lived at home and my mom was taking the same steps as me to drop a few pounds, so eating healthier at home was pretty easy and I had a partner-in-crime. We started going on walks together, my first true experience with staying consistently active, and something that really stuck. To this day, I still love and use walking to relax and find my center. Outside of yoga, it's my favorite way to move.
I could have continued on this path and been good to go, but very quickly I spotted a glitch: losing weight reasonably kinda sucked. It took forever! And by "forever," I mean that after a month I hadn't lost 20 lbs so I was very perturbed. Like, how rude. I wanted to be skinny and the clock was ticking!!!
Because I knew about the whole "calories in, calories out" thing, I figured I'd just eat a little bit less and drop weight a little bit faster. Nothing drastic. At least at first. Then there were a couple of days where I only ate around 1000 calories solely by circumstance and I felt fine. It was then that I decided heck with it! I can totally do this more often...I don't just feel fine, I feel great on 1000 calories and aren't I just so lucky!?
INSERT HUGE RED FLAG! THIS WAS NOT OKAY! THIS WAS THE FIRST SIGN OF DISORDERED EATING THAT I COMPLETELY IGNORED! DO NOT FOLLOW MY EXAMPLE!!! AGAIN--MAJOR RED FLAG ALERT!!!
Shortly after the whole 1000-calories-a-day garbage started, I grew more obsessed with counting those calories, and along with that came a fixation on the scale as I began to lose weight more rapidly. I'd wake up, weigh myself. Pee, weigh myself. Eat breakfast, weigh myself. Work out, weigh myself. Wait a few hours, weigh myself. I kept this up until my mother caught on to me and hid our scale, warning me I was getting a little cray cray but also not really saying or noticing much about all the other obsessive behaviors that were beginning to creep in around this time.
I started designating foods as "good" or "bad," or more importantly, "allowed" or "not allowed." As in, I was only "allowed" to eat "good" foods during the week.. The weekends were my cheat days where I "allowed bad foods." I guess maybe for some people this general idea works, but for me things progressed so rapidly that eventually I was eating five or six very specific food items during the week and binge eating everything in sight on weekends.
Eating a "bad" food on a weekday would trigger some form of emotional meltdown, varying from crying in public to full-blown panic attacks, so I avoided that as often as humanly possible. Those closest to me told me to chill out on occasion, but just like the scale incident and because I was still eating, nobody ever expressed any type of true concern. And trust me, this was my own primary justification for continuing this cycle, why for years I couldn't admit that there was a problem...I never went entire days without eating (and I never purged what I binged), so it never dawned on me that anything was wrong. At the time, I honestly just thought that dieting was hard and I was bad at it.
Like the restricting, my "cheat days" started off somewhat tame and then escalated quickly. They went from what they are in theory--permission to indulge in a special treat or meal--to a weekly pre-planned 48 hours of eating as much as I possibly could. On my cheat weekends, I ate as frequently as I weighed myself during the week. I ate nothing but junk food until I was sick, and then I'd stop for a couple of hours--not until I was hungry again, only until I was no longer in physical pain. And then I'd keep eating.
See, once I started to really restrict what I was eating, I felt so hungry and deprived of food by the time weekends rolled around that I felt obligated to eat as much as I could while I was "allowed" to do so. My body was begging for more food and I couldn't eat enough fast enough. Not to mention, let's recall again my college dorm days and the reason I gained weight in the first place, which was all sorts of emotional eating. I hadn't yet gotten to the root of my anxiety or depression, so even though I was now in size 4 jeans, I still hated myself. I still felt worthless. I still ate to fill holes. I still ate to dig new ones.
By the following winter, I couldn't sustain the binge/restrict cycle so I gave up on it, chalking it up to "dieting's just not for me, man," not really grasping how dangerous my behaviors had become. Over time, I gained all the weight back and then some, because again, lifetime emotional eater and junk food lover over here! And again, I. Still. Hated. Myself.
So this became the theme of my twenties. Gain weight, lose it via binge/restrict, "give up," repeat the entire cycle. Sometimes I'd stay heavier for longer, sometimes I'd jump back into dieting a little sooner. Sometimes the binge/restrict cycle wasn't as intense. Sometimes I'd go months and only binge eat, other times I'd only restrict. No matter what, it was a nightmare.
It was the same monster wearing different faces.
❤
All of that changed when I was about 28, discovered Instagram, hashtags, and the online world of body positivity, and my world was rocked. We'll explore all things BOPO in Part Two of this series next month, so stay tuned!
Then we'll wrap up in January for Part Three, where I'll share how my yoga practice finally taught me the true meaning of self-love, compassion, and body positivity and helped me heal from years of disordered eating.
❤
I know topics like this aren't what I usually bring to this blog, but this is something I've wanted to write about for a really long time. It's something that's taken me years to wrap my own head around and understand, and it's obviously personal, so thank you to anyone who's taken the time to read this. It's not the easiest thing to discuss, but I do think it's important. My hope is that if anyone reading this has dealt with ED or disordered eating patterns, they won't feel so alone or afraid to talk about it like I was for so many years. Maybe this post is the exact definition of TMI, but it also may speak to someone in a dark place, and for that reason alone, sharing is worth it to me.
XO
Jess
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