During the worst of my ED, my relationship with food was:
chaotic
stressful
driven by shame
& all-consuming
When I say all-consuming, I mean it. Here’s a story to illustrate.
In the summer of 2013 I had just finished my junior year of high school and was performing in my studio’s contemporary ballet production. Being a dancer didn’t help my internalized fatphobia and fatphobia was the root of my disordered eating. One night after a long rehearsal, all I could think about was food. (Spoiler alert: when your body goes through deprivation, it goes into survival mode and triggers a primal drive to eat— so naturally, that’s all you can think about) I remember the panicky feeling that I had deciding to stop by McDonald’s on the way home. My worst fear wasn’t even the food, it was someone seeing me there— in the drive-thru. It may sound irrational, but at the time the anxiety was so crippling that you would’ve thought I was on my way to commit a heinous crime. I got a milkshake, downed it on the way home, and threw away the cup where no one would find it. Then I got a text. It was from the boy I liked at the time. He said he had been driving with his parents and saw me— at the McDonald’s drive-thru.
To say I was mortified is an understatement. I wanted to curl up in a ball and die. I felt sick to my stomach and buried a thousand feet deep in shame. It was a full-blown trauma experience that took me years to articulate to anyone.
Did the boy actually care that I was at McDonald’s? Nope.
Did that matter to my ED brain? Nope.
Food had become a MORAL ISSUE in my life.
The type of food I ate was either bad or good. The amount of food I ate was either right or wrong. The time of day I ate was either allowed or out of bounds.
Food determined my worth and at age 17 I felt more unworthy than I ever had in my life. Every time I tried to control my food intake and subscribe to the perfectionistic regimen I had laid out for myself, I would end up bingeing. And then darkness and guilt would consume me.
Binge eating thrives on shame and the shame thrives on secrecy.
But let me tell you—there is
SO
MUCH
HOPE.
My relationship with food now can be described as:
flexible
joyful
compassionate
& driven by the desire to take care of myself
This transition did NOT happen overnight. I really wish it did. That’s what I was pleading and hoping for when I started therapy 2 years ago— like just HELP ME. Tell me what I need to do to fix this as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, recovery doesn’t work like that.
What I quickly realized is that it’s not about the food. There was SO much more going on psychologically that I had never taken the time to notice. The cycle of restriction and binge eating was simply a coping mechanism to deal with deeper struggles— perfectionism, insecurity, shame, & trauma.
So I started to dig deep— I sat on that couch with my therapist and she helped me unravel painful experiences from my past and challenge the ED voice that had been sabotaging my brain.
I sat on another couch with my dietitian as we discussed coping strategies that I could incorporate into my life other than food to deal with those strong emotions.
It didn’t take me long to realize that healing was going to take about a thousand times longer than I idealized. And that was okay.
What ultimately changed everything for me was intuitive eating.
When I was first introduced to intuitive eating, I didn’t believe it would work. I was confident that I had permanently ruined my ability to be even remotely “intuitive” with eating. I had NO IDEA what it was like to “honor my hunger”. I didn’t even remember what normal hunger felt like before the restrict/binge cycle consumed my life. I didn’t know how to discern when I was full and much less “what sounded good” when choosing what to eat.
I was confident that I had burned the bridge of trust between my body and I long ago and there was no going back.
But intuitive eating
PROVED
ME
WRONG.
First off, a definition from the woman who started it all, Evelyn Tribole:
“Intuitive Eating is an evidenced-based, mind-body health approach… it’s a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to the direct messages of the body in order to meet your physical and psychological needs.”
Here are the 10 principles of intuitive eating and what it looked like for me to put them into practice:
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Diet culture is a liar. Period. I had to let go of the pursuit of weight loss and any program or fad or regimen that promised me weight loss via disordered eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Like I said— honor what hunger? I had no idea how to put this into practice. So I stuck to the basics — 3 meals a day and snacks in between. And over time my body started to trust me. I wasn’t skipping meals. I wasn’t bingeing in the middle of the night. My body no longer felt deprived and abused. Slowly but surely, trust was rebuilt and I started to recognize my hunger and honor it.
3. Make Peace with Food
Unconditional permission to eat. This is my ANTHEM now. I give myself unconditional permission to eat. For years, I didn’t have permission. In my mind it was morally wrong to eat certain foods in certain amounts at certain times. But TO H*LL with restriction. Once I gave myself unconditional permission to eat, I felt free around food. It no longer controlled me.
4. Challenge the Food Police
I call my food police the “ED voice”. I started to challenge it. I still challenge it, every day. And it’s finally starting to shut up.
5. Respect Your Fullness
As I rebuilt trust with my body, I started to recognize what “full” felt like to me. This meant a lot of curiosity, a lot of patient exploration, mindfulness, and compassion.
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Diet culture demonizes any kind of “emotional eating” so no freakin’ wonder 17 year old Christine felt like a failure when she “emotionally ate”. Here’s the thing— food will ALWAYS serve an emotional purpose. That’s literally one of the reasons we HAVE food. It can bring joy, comfort, and connection... once we drop the shame, that is.
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food
From Evelyn: “Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food.” Food used to be my one and only coping mechanism but thanks to therapy and time and a lot of work, I have a whole toolbox of coping strategies to deal with what’s really going on in my life.
8. Respect Your Body
Instead of hating, rejecting, demeaning, and punishing my body, I decided to be its friend. And guess what? Our friendship is not perfect. It’s rocky most of the time. But we’re working on it and getting better at it every day.
9. Exercise—Feel the Difference
For years, my sole intention and motivation behind exercise was to lose weight. Now, it’s to get strong. To have energy. To take care of myself. To feel good mentally, emotionally, and physically.
10. Honor Your Health
My vocabulary surrounding health has gone from a word bank of punishment and willpower to words like: gentle. flexible. consistent. mindful. compassionate. joyful.
Intuitive eating has
CHANGED
MY
LIFE.
It was never about the food.
It was about a 17 year old girl who felt like a failure; who thought she had to change her body to be accepted; who felt irreparably broken as she suffered in silence.
I wish I could go back and love on that 17 year old girl.
I wish I could tell her that she’s not alone.
And that it gets better.
But since I can’t do that, I’ll love her now.
And I’ll show her how far she’s come.
