Hello friends. In my sporadic contributions to this blog I do not think I have talked about my relationship with weight, food and body image. I did scroll back through entries but they really aren’t about that. If you follow me on other social media you may have seen oblique references to health management, but dang, it’s hard to put that information out there, to be vulnerable and let it all hang out. I’m going to share a bit today. Maybe again in the future. We’ll see.
I have felt fat pretty much all of my life. It took my therapist probing me repeatedly with the question, “When did you begin gaining the weight?”, to realize that what I felt and what is real have not been the same.
I wasn’t a fat child. I wasn’t a fat pre-teen. Not when I look back on pictures. Looking at old me I don’t see a fat kid. But I was one. I was on the inside. I felt it. Society sends all sorts of messages to kids about what is good, what is bad, what is attractive or desirable… but the real messages are nailed in at home.
Parents teach us how to approach food. I grew up in a family that encouraged you to clean your plate. That vegetables are “good” and cookies are “junk”. That grownups eat different things than kids (how often do you remember your parents begging for mac and cheese in the blue box?) My mom’s relationship with food was complicated, my grandma’s relationship with food was complicated. And now mine is. But I’m the first one who’d gotten help for it.
Years of dieting, family messaging, praise for weight loss and discouragement for bared bellies armed me with a lot of tools. Not great tools. Just a lot of them. Eventually, every food seemed to fall in the “bad” category. Every exercise took on the pall of doom. There didn’t seem to be any good decisions to make and I was miserable in my body. (Truth: still not happy in my body, but coming up, getting better.) I went to my doctor to ask about medical weight loss management.
There was a giant packet with lots of questionnaires, charts, food diaries to fill in and pages on which to pour my heart out. One night, after finishing the, “Tell us why you think medically managed weight loss is right for you” essay I said to M, “I feel like I’ve just written an essay on why I’m fat…” it was sobering.
I was hopeful but also full of anxiety. I was afraid of being judged. Feeling like a failure. I was so desperate to make a change and make it stick and make it happen NOW. The first several doctor appointments felt like dating, getting to know my history and who I am and what might be right for me. One of the people I needed to meet with in this time period was a food psychologist. I squawked at the suggestion. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with how I ate (other than everything) and I didn’t think a therapist was going to drop any knowledge on me about my body (who’s the pro on that one?) I’ve been seeing my therapist for over 2 years now. I haven’t seen the other doctors since the first six months.
It’s been slow and awkward getting to know my therapist and building those therapy muscles. Going through my whole diet history, my family relationships, my family medical history, my life changes… it’s a LOT! In 1-hour chunks. Every two weeks. It was a couple of months before Laura (my therapist) told me directly, “Yes, I diagnosed you as having an unspecified eating disorder.” I cried. People with eating disorders aren’t fat (said my society-influenced brain). Everyone thinks this way about what they eat (wrong, nope, incorrect). What the hell and I supposed to think? Nothing so cut and dry, young grasshopper.
Why tell you all this? Well, I sat down to write about some healthy changes I’ve been working on in the past couple of months. I started using Noom, for instance, and wanted to put something out there to talk about my experience with that program so far. But telling you about the last two and a half months feels empty without also letting you know about the last couple of years. There is nothing fast, easy or magical about making these changes. What there IS though… there is pleasure. There is enjoyment. There is progress and hope and energy. There is a change in focus.
Next time I’ll talk about the actual program. But here, here it was important to me to share the beginning. Not the beginning of a diet or some app or something that’s guaranteed to blah blah blah. The beginning is messy and hard and slow. And worth going through.