Allow me to paint you a picture of what has happened since I opened up about my eating disorder. It's been like a slow motion movie run, middle fingers raised at attention, ripping off layers of oppression, shame, restriction, and self-harm. What I am finding underneath decades of a self-abused woman is a fighter, a woman determined to rise. A woman who is truly done with being made to feel inadequate and physically wrong. I am still a student of the recovery and healing process and have much more to learn. I have, however, accumulated a few life changing lessons thus far and, in an ongoing effort to help someone who may also be struggling with an eating disorder and/or has had enough of diet culture, I offer my lessons to help encourage freedom.
Lesson One: Speak Your Truth
Recovering from diet culture and an eating disorder required me to acknowledge where I found myself. My first step was finding the courage to say the words out loud - to finally stop pretending and face my truth. I had to reach out to those I trusted and begin to confess. I had to open up without restrictions or fears. Letting go of the shame is pivotal in the recovery process. My strength would help another woman find her strength and that helped me face my fear and acknowledge my reality.
Lesson Two: Identify Triggers
Once the words were out in the universe I had to become responsible for them. I had to be proactive about putting an end to self-harming actions. My next step became identifying my triggers. Why was I so immersed in diet culture and terrified of food? These messages where coming from somewhere and I actively hunted them down. The following are key triggers I found that kept me deep in self-abuse and diet culture:
1. Number Triggers: Good-bye scale, measuring tape, pedometer, calorie counter, heart rate monitor, and constant logging of everything I did. Good-bye to the need to be validated by numbers. They overtook my life and robbed me of a carefree mentality to my health and wellness.
2. Social Media Triggers: I followed a ton of dieters on social media and I belonged to weight loss and fitness groups. What started as a way to stay motivated gradually fed my obsession with dieting and being skinny. I was, daily, comparing myself to others and feeling the competition and comparison pressure. My health and wellness took a backseat to my need to get skinny and be a better dieter than someone else. Once I was able to see the toxic online environment I had created for myself it was time to clean house! I left groups and I unfollowed accounts that focused on diet culture. No more pictures of someone else's scale or food. No more before and after picture. No more comparison.
3. Food Triggers: Food and I have a messy history. At a very early age I turned to food for emotional support. Add on PCOS, plus the body chemistry challenges this brings with it... it was a recipe for disaster. I had to look at food from the perspective of a drug addict. Would a recovering drug addict allow pictures of their drug of choice to infiltrate their social media feeds? Not the self-aware ones. So adios pictures of food, videos of two hands making recipes, junk food videos, and the constant reminder that I struggle with food. I stopped all accounts that kept images of food in my feed (that included some friends and family). I stopped taking pictures of my own food. This was a huge relief! The removal of food approval set me free to eat without the fear of judgement or guilt for eating something that didn't fit into my projected eating habits.
4. Environmental Triggers: Reflecting on when binge eating urges typically could appear in my day. Once I could recognize a specific person, place, or thing, I was able to create alternative reactions and, over time, rewire my subconscious to no longer reach for food as a coping mechanism. For example, I discovered my teenage son could often times be a trigger. I found myself mindlessly eating around the time he was expected to come home. With the help of my wellness coach, Ren Jones of Fitness Jones Training, we concluded that the transitional period from one time of my day into the next has often proven to raise my stress, which in turn caused me to binge eat. At the acknowledgment of the self-destructive behavior, I decided to try quick 10-20 minute yoga sessions instead. Gifting myself a small chunk of time to make a peaceful mental transition has greatly decreased my afternoon binges and helped me have more patience as a mother.
Lesson Three: Stopping All Routines
Stopping routines caused anxiety in the beginning because dropping diet culture and ending my eating disorder potentially meant weight gain...and this terrified me. This is where my wellness coach stepped in and reminded me that we have to break down in order to rebuild. Ren gave me permission to just stop. Stop eating plans and fitness routines. He gave me permission to rebel. All the rules I had been following, the restrictions, and self-harm tactics that had consumed most of my life needed to be cut off. I had to be OK with being uncomfortable, for a little bit.
This step was the most pivotal of my recovery process. I had become so ingrained in diet culture that I lost sight of what habits I had integrated into my life to encourage health and wellness. I rediscovered these reasons after I saw a decline in my health because I allowed myself to act like an unsupervised child in a candy store (NO REGRETS!). I missed my period (an issue that can have detrimental effects on my body (PCOS)), saw an increase in body aches and pains, and felt depression hovering close. I had bottomed out and it was the best thing to happen to me. Bottoming out helped me understand what was health choices and what was diet culture choices. An example being my spin class; Initially it started as a great way to develop a strong cardiovascular system, enjoy a good sweat session, and help keep depression at bay. Overtime it evolved into a four day a week obsession that I refused to interrupt causing me lost time with friends and family. A healthy habit that turned self-destructive.
Lesson Four: Listening to My Soul
I owed myself the freedom to be whoever I had been shutting away in the name of skinny. The biggest hurdle was shutting off the diet voice that overtook the majority of my daily thoughts. I look back and see an almost zombie like version of myself. She looked like me, she sounded like me, but she was consumed by diet culture. Self-reflection inspired me to dive back into forgotten passions to see if they felt right for my new chapter of inner peace and wellness. This has lead me in a journey of self-discovery that is showing me someone I really like. I really like myself. Finally.
The past three months have been an evolution of self that has been both exhausting and liberating. It has not been without its bumps and road blocks. I am happy to report I have not purged since coming out, however, I am still working on my binge eating habits. This is a journey, not a race. My life is worth whatever time it takes for me to find my peace. Your life is worth your time - to help you heal and find your peace. It looks so easy, written out in a nice list. This list doesn't show the tears, the anger, the moments of weakness followed by bouts of guilt, the mental fight that consumed me, and the constant desire to quit. It has felt overwhelming at times and some days felt like a success to have just survived. I am surviving, in fact, I am even beginning to thrive.
Patience. Self-reflection. Willingness to change. Refusal to give up. I am officially a diet industry dropout and my life gets better everyday because of it! Fight for your happy!
