Every Monday, I sit in a group therapy session with 9 other women with a history of eating disorders and broken body image. Sometimes these sessions leave me in tears; other times laughing, in awe, grateful, or all of the above. But recently, I left one of those sessions with a new emotion—anger.
That week, we did an activity. Each of us took a turn standing behind our chair and introducing ourselves from the perspective of our bodies. To give you a visual, mine started out something like this:
“I’m Christine’s body, and this is Christine. Christine and I had a good relationship for most of her childhood and youth, until she was about 15…”
As we went around the circle, each of our bodies told its story.
I sat there shocked at the themes that were unanimously experienced and felt by all 10 of us:
- Feeling cripplingly insecure about our bodies from a young, young age.
- Believing we were flawed.
- Determination to change the way we looked.
- Believing we would never achieve x, y, or z until we looked a certain way.
- Irreparable damage caused by specific comments of body praise or body shaming.
- Inability to focus on school, activities, and the people we love.
- Hiding. Hiding our bodies. Hiding food. Hiding our pain.
As I heard these stories it was like hearing my own. How could every story be so similar? Each of our bodies are so different. A few girls in the group are small and petite, one is pregnant, one is over 6 feet tall, one is polynesian, and a few are what you might call "average". How could bodies so vastly different be telling the same story?
And then I realized—it had nothing to do with our bodies and everything to do with the toxic culture we grew up in.
And I was angry.
I’ve been angry for different reasons since age 15. Angry at my body for changing. Frustrated at myself for binge eating. Resentful of my friends in smaller bodies. Distraught that I could never lose weight.
But now, I'm angry at diet culture.
As Jennifer Rollin put it: “Instead of getting angry at your body- get angry at the systems of oppression which told you that your body is wrong."
That’s what we’re living in and that's what diet culture is—a system of oppression.
Christy Harrison explains it better than I ever could:
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"Diet culture is a system of beliefs that:
- Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue
- Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body.
- Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
- Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms people in larger bodies, damaging both their mental and physical health."
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The girl in my group who’s pregnant gets emotional almost every Monday because she’s having a girl and has no idea how to raise that baby and protect her from the oppressive system that got her into an eating disorder.
Christy Harrison explains it better than I ever could:
------------------------------------------------------------
"Diet culture is a system of beliefs that:
- Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue
- Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body.
- Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
- Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms people in larger bodies, damaging both their mental and physical health."
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The girl in my group who’s pregnant gets emotional almost every Monday because she’s having a girl and has no idea how to raise that baby and protect her from the oppressive system that got her into an eating disorder.
I’m defensive of that unborn baby. I’m defensive of every girl and young woman swimming in this toxic water, and I'm especially defensive of 15 year old Christine who thought her body was the problem.
I don’t know that there’s a fix-all solution for this. But I do know of one thing that was incredibly healing through that activity a few weeks ago in group therapy:
Giving my body a voice.
Giving my body a voice.
During that activity, my body and myself were two separate entities. As my body told its story, it talked about the turbulent period in my life when it was mistreated and hated. It talked about being denied not only physical nourishment but also connection and love. And then it spoke with gratitude of the miraculous change in our relationship; how I now feed it enough every day, I check in with it, I consistently move it in joyful ways, give it Chick fil A when that’s what sounds good, take it up beautiful mountains, let it rest when it needs to, appreciate its function and abilities and, (miraculously) even its form.
We need to give our bodies a voice.
We need to pay attention to our relationship with our bodies.
We need to defend and protect that relationship from the systems of oppression that try to destroy it.
It’s worth it.
And to me, it’s worth getting angry.
For more background on my journey with an eating disorder:
http://christineparks.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-eating-disorder-that-no-one-talks.html
