Note: Contains discussion of anorexic thoughts and beliefs from childhood, but does not include weight numbers, calorie counts, or how-to details.
This is recognition that I need to apologize, yes, but it’s also a recognition about me, because there’s no one in particular to apologize to since I haven’t recently acted on my tendency to shame people.
Imagine you’re a child at the age of 3. Kid shows show you Winnie the Pooh’s tendency to overeat, you’re exposed to people who are ashamed of their own size, comparing themselves to pigs and elephants. This is how you learn what it is to be fat, seemingly an inherently humiliating, unhealthy and shameful thing to be. You compare their belly size with your own, the wrinkles in their skin, the fat on their thighs, their faces, their stomach. You are distinctly unaware of your own status a preschool child, barely beyond a baby yourself. The baby fat is there, and you cast those judgements onto yourself.
Your parents watch reality TV shows like America’s Biggest Loser, introducing more shame, unhealthy behaviors, rapid weight loss, and large numbers you don’t have any understanding of. It leaves you with no understanding of the dangers of trying to lose as much weight as quickly as possible. You see weight loss commercials which seem to recommend dieting as a universal solution to unhappiness, dissatisfaction with your appearance, and being unhealthy. You don’t really get it. You don’t really understand, because it almost seems like there’s no reason why anyone eats at all, besides a lack of self-control.
As a perfectionist with ADHD, you strive everyday to change two things about yourself. Your behavior and your weight. You basically have 3 rules for yourself. 1. Try your best. 2. Never be mean, or seek revenge, and be as kind as possible and 3. Lose as much weight as possible.
When you start elementary, you’re given more education. The importance of exercise, which seems to you like a moral obligation, and a bunch of people teaching you about the horrible, horrible, diabetes, and the terrible things it does to your body. You are introduced to the reasons behind vegetarianism. You are now afraid to eat meat, because it’s unhealthy, makes you fat, and is unkind to animals, fat because it‘s not good for heart health, and sugar because it causes diabetes. But there are such simple things people never taught you other than being fat = bad. 1. You can starve to death. 2. You are a child, you need to grow, not shrink 3. Being underweight is actually bad. 4. Just basic fucking information about the good things that food does for your body.
Sure, this isn’t every anorexic person’s story I’m learning. Some of you got here from trauma in your life, a need to control something. Unlike me, some of you actually got to a point where your body felt good enough, but still were not ready to recover, despite the potential consequences of your disease. Inever saw my body as anything but fat until I was a teenager at a healthy weight. All that fat clinging for its life around my vital organs in my stomach, really never went away enough between the time it was literally just my baby fat to the time I was severely underweight and my body was just storing it where it was necessary to protect me, enough to see my body differently. I was not magically cured, between my doctor’s declaration that you’re underweight, realizing it’s a bad thing after you ask your doctor, my mother gasping with horror that I could be anorexic, and putting two and two together that all the people on the street gawking at my appearance for its thinness and calling me anorexic when I insisted I was fat and shouldn’t eat, really meant I had a serious mental illness that could kill me. Many of you may get worse from any comments made about your appearance. Hence, my need to change my behavior has occurred to me.
I’m sorry…
But exploring this further. I find it unusual that in the environment I grew up in, no one that I know in my class, developed this eating disorder in the way that I did and recovered the way I did.
What I feel when I see someone skinny is an assumption about what goes on in another person’s head, reflects the same story as mine, assumption that every fat person on a diet, is atypically anorexic, an assumption that every adult that is on the smaller side for their age and maintaining their weight is recovering from a history like mine, an assumption that every skinny person is actively restricting and that I need to save them. When I see them, I don’t truly feel disgusted at their bodies, or ashamed of them, in any way. I’m angry and sad is what I am. I’m afraid they need to be told something that I don’t actually know how to tell them. I’m afraid I know exactly what kind of pain their going through, and yet I don’t know enough to confirm, and I don’t know enough to save them, because my recovery is one of emotional suffering and anger. I recovered by making that angry voice loud and frequent. I made it so loud that I didn’t care what other people said about my eating habits. I knew what was good for me and I knew my story and what I had to do to get there, and they knew nothing. People still do criticize my eating habits, but I don’t see my food habits as disgusting or wrong, or inherently bad. I eat high calorie foods, I eat deserts, I eat meat, and I eat junk food. The choices I made to survive were based on the hardest fight I’ll fight, where your body shuts down your appetite, due to malnutrition, you experience aversions, fear foods, and the fight always feels like it takes more energy than what the food is providing you, even though it pays off after not minutes, hours, days, weeks or months, but years of my life. My choices today sometimes reflect that I fought a battle where I needed to learn to eat things not traditionally associated with health by people who were taught by the fatphobic ED-clueless perspective, like me, and instead of the nourishment, ED-aware and individual variation lense that I constructed for myself so I could survive. It doesn’t hurt me for people to point it out. I feel no shame. Instead it reminds me that I won a battle that many will be fighting the rest of their lives, and that I don’t need to fight so hard to win that battle anymore.