History of Eating Disorder and Journey to Body Positivity and Diet Neutrality
I hate the social construct that women need to have a flat stomach, big boobs, a perky butt, be slim but have curves, and oh you also need to have abs along with that flat stomach. It’s a losing game.
I tried for so long to reach this ideal body and until I learned to love my body I was never satisfied or at peace, and I still struggle some days, but going through the process to heal my gut and hormones forced me to love my body as it is, as it changes, not equating how it looks with my worth.
From the ages of 13-16 I struggled with an eating disorder. It was borderline anorexia, although doctors didn’t diagnose me because my BMI was still “healthy”: 5′ 4″ and around 105 pounds. I didn’t look sick, but I did look very skinny. At age 13 my mother was concerned so she took me to an adolescent specialist who asked me lots of questions and had me keep a food diary which I wasn’t truthful in. This doctor also put me on birth control for heavy periods.
I was an overweight child and once I started to go through puberty I decided I was tired of getting made fun of and went on a diet and started exercising. Although they didn’t mean to be hurtful, I remember certain family members commenting on how “it’s not attractive for a young, pretty girl to have a belly”. I flipped a switch and decided to gain control of how I looked, and therefore how others saw me. This soon turned into obsessive behaviors such as counting calories, exercising to “earn” those calories, and avoiding situations where I couldn’t control the food. I also binged and restricted. I remember eating a box of raisins and some baby carrots all day at school then coming home and eating half the jar of peanut butter and whatever else I could get my hands on because I was so starving. Or I would starve myself all day and then bake cookies and eat the whole batch. I tried to make myself purge, but I was never able to. I felt incredible when I was able to eat hardly anything and a failure when I binged.
Once I lost a bunch of weight I became popular and this only validated what I had thought: in order to be paid attention to and in order to be loved, I must be thin, and in order to be beautiful, I must look a certain way. I started to come out of my shell (I had always been a terribly shy child), and my peers took notice of my newfound confidence, however false it may have been. I remember feeling so alone during this time and a slave to food. On the other hand, my mother always took me to fancy restaurants in Manhattan to expose me to culture, and I do remember enjoying these times and not worrying much about what I was eating, strangely enough. But any other times it was a cycle of binge and restrict, mostly restrict. I’m not sure if I hid it well, but I felt like I did, because nothing else was done by my family to change my behavior, no intervention staged. I must have eaten enough in public to prevent suspicion, and controlled whatever I could on my own.
Sophomore year of college I started getting into fitness and noticed that in order to perform well I needed to fuel my body and could no longer continue the behaviors I held so dear the past 6 years. I was introduced to a Paleo style diet and started eating that way, and it aligned with the Crossfit and running I did. Although I was eating significantly more, I still used “clean eating” as a mask for continuing to binge and restrict, but in a different way. During the week I ate “clean”, monitored (larger) portions, and wouldn’t eaten many food groups, but on the weekend it was a free for all. I would down a half gallon of ice cream, 10 cookies, and a few cupcakes. Of course, that made me feel awful not just physically but mentally. I felt out of control. All I wanted to do was be in control and I felt like I could never keep it for long enough. Although well intentioned, I had just added on other obsessive behaviors: athletic performance and a healthier diet, but through the lens of orthorexia.
This continued until age 22. Then I eased off the bingeing a bit, but I still restricted and obsessed about everything I ate. For my stomach to be super flat I needed to be really thin and I now know my body doesn’t want to be that thin and healthy at the same time. I naturally hold excess fat in my abdomen and hips as do many women, and I restricted myself in order to not gain weight in those areas to maintain a trim tummy. I wanted the curves but I wanted the abs more, and I dieted and restricted and exercised to make sure I kept them. During this time I was 5’5″ and fluctuated between 110-118 pounds. It was also around this time when I stopped taking birth control and my hormones went crazy, my mood was all over the place, and I started experiencing horrendous gut symptoms. I was constantly bloated and gassy, and so many things I ate upset my stomach. I didn’t think too much of it, but I restricted even more so that I wouldn’t get bloated. I was desperate for my stomach to be flat and the bloating did not go along with that. All I cared about was looking “shredded”. I wasn’t concerned with the signs my body was telling me that something was wrong with my health.
When I started eating Paleo I didn’t track what I ate, but I was very aware of what I ate and how much. At age 25 I started to track my macros using MyFitnessPal. Of course this was just another behavior to control my eating and therefore, hopefully, my life. I meticulously kept track of everything I put in my mouth, day in and day out, hardly ever allowed myself “bad” foods, and avoided social situations where I couldn’t control my macros. While I appeared to be healthy because I was now “fit” from lifting weights and eating better quality foods, I was still in the same mindset and doing the same behaviors as 13 year old me. I felt trapped in my head and was so unhappy but didn’t know how to stop.
When I was 27 I moved to Seoul, South Korea to teach English. Up until this time I had explored the food editing and writing world, but had decided it wasn’t for me and wanted to try something new and exciting. I find it interesting that food had always been a big part go my life, in negative ways, but also in positive and joyful ways. I mentioned my mother exposing me to different types of upscale cuisine, I loved baking, I enjoyed my family’s cooking, and then I became interested in food writing during college and even considered it as a career. When I would try out different restaurants for my jobs and internships, I would genuinely enjoy everything, but then make up for it by restricting otherwise. It was still all unhealthy behaviors.
In Seoul I was excited to eat all of the things, and I did, but still exercised to “earn” it. I ended up having a lot of alone time to think and research topics such as gut health, metabolism, hormone health, and so on. Certain videos I watched made something major click for me: I was stuck in a chronic restrictive eating pattern and diet mentality. It sounds crazy, but up until one moment sitting in my tiny Korean apartment, I hadn’t fully realized or accepted that I had a problem. All at once I realized I had been slowly damaging my hormones, gut and metabolism by restricting calories, carbs, fat, or whatever thing I was doing at any given time during the past 14 years. Of course the birth control I had been on for a decade and countless rounds of antibiotics had done the most harm, but depriving my body of nutrients and keeping it in a binge-restrict cycle was so damaging to my health. Once I realized this I vowed to coach myself to move towards healthier habits surrounding diet and body image, in addition to getting to the root cause of my gut and hormone issues. I knew everything was connected, I just wasn’t sure how.
When I got back to New York, I linked up with a functional medical practitioner who had me start working on healing my gut and balancing my hormones naturally. During this process, which I am still going through a year and a half later, I put on 20 pounds. Deep down I knew that in order to heal my body and be truly healthy on the inside and not just seem like it on the outside I had to gain weight. My body didn’t want to have a period having such a low body fat percentage and being restricted from nutrients. It thought it was in starvation mode and wouldn’t dream of reproducing. Relatively quickly I got my period back regularly, but after that continued to gain weight. It was a daily mental struggle to accept and LOVE the change my body was going through. I tried so hard to tell myself that this needed to happen, that my body was happier and healthier this way, and thought of positive affirmations.
Now I sit at 135 pounds. When I start in on myself about how I miss my super lean stomach I have to remember how sick my body was when it did have a “perfect” stomach. I had amenorrhea (absence of a monthly menstrual cycle), my hormones were a wreck, my gut was a wreck, and my life was run by what I could and wouldn’t eat and how much. I went to therapy and worked on my control and perfection issues that I believe were at the root of why I felt the need to restrict my eating for so long.
Today I have a different relationship with food that I believe is a healthy one. I eat the food that makes me feel good, and avoid the foods that don’t, although sometimes I make a conscious choice to eat certain things just because I feel like it. And guess what? I have no guilt about it. I exercise how and when I feel like it, and don’t fret over missing a workout or eating “too much”. The only way I am concerned now is if I eat too much sugar that I know isn’t good for my health anyway (I have a major sweet tooth!) It took a couple years of mental work to get to this point, and I still have some moments, in fact I think I may always struggle, but I can honestly say I love myself more 20 pounds heavier than I did when I looked “perfect”.
I started going through my true healing journey around the time when the body positivity and diet neutrality movement started gaining popularity. My opinion of the body positivity and diet neutrality movement is this: it is perfectly okay and healthy to have a body goal, as long as it comes from a place of wanting to better yourself for the right reasons, not to satisfy an idea of perfection. When it becomes about control, unrealistic goals, and shame that’s when it is unhealthy in my eyes. I am all for embracing a larger figure. I honestly believe many people can be healthy and bigger. But when it becomes normalized to overeat sugar and fast food because of body positivity, I do not think that it truly the meaning of the phrase. It is perfectly okay to love and accept having a larger body, but not when you have an unhealthy lifestyle and shame others that pay any attention to their diet and also claim to be “diet neutral”.
I do identify as body positive and consider my lifestyle to be diet neutral, but I still focus on nutrition and fitness because I am passionate about it as a method of healing, and because I love feeling strong and capable. I choose to fuel my body with as much as it takes to feel satiated, and eat ice cream or cake when the craving hits. Overall, I am conscious of eating too much sugar or processed food because, as someone who values the health of her body, I make choices that align with being the healthiest I can be.
I still absolutely love cooking, baking, and developing healthy recipes. My new obsession is making healthier versions of desserts like brownies and muffins using alternative sweeteners and flours, like swapping all purpose flour for almond flour and white sugar for maple syrup or honey. I love being able to bring the same passion I do to food that I have always had but without the guilt, shame and obsession. As I build my holistic health coaching business, I hope to work with other women who have struggled with the same things as I have.
Here are some resources I found helpful along my journey to body neutrality.
Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth
Shawn Mynar’s Keto for Women podcast has some great episodes about intuitive eating and the diet mindset
@jessicaleechristin regularly discusses the body pos movement. I have connected with her and she is so passionate about helping to normalize body image issues and aid other women with getting to a place where they listen to their body and love it as is.
Natacha Oceane’s YouTube channel talks about unhealthy mindset surrounding diet, how she overcame an eating disorder and how she intuitively eats now.
Cassie Aurora talks about her struggle with anorexia on her blog and podcast
