What an eating disorder taught me about social justice

“It is through our own transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies on our planet.”

—Sonya Renee-Taylor

I was a ballerina in high school. My coaches were my second parents and their studio was my second home. At Studio Roxander, I learned some of the most important lessons of my youth and starting in 2012, some of the most painful ones, too. It was the year I started my period and my body started changing. When you’re fifteen years old and spend 3-4 hours a day in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, you notice. You notice the extra tightness of your leotard, your chest that is suddenly fuller, curves around your thighs and hips that weren’t there before.

My idea of success as a dancer and by extension as a young woman was inextricably tied to the thin aesthetic promoted in ballet. When I pictured athleticism, grace, and discipline, I pictured thinness. When I pictured health, beauty, and respect, I pictured thinness. To me, it was all one and the same. That idea in my head wasn’t influenced by ballet singlehandedly; there were other factors but we’ll just call this thinness-promoting system: “diet culture.” At the time, 15 year old Christine didn’t know diet culture was to blame. When she saw changes in the studio mirror, she saw personal failure and she was determined to turn things around.

I was out to singlehandedly—by sheer grit and determination—lose weight and stop my period from coming back. There were a lot of sprints around my neighborhood at 1am, sit-ups on my bedroom floor and skipped breakfasts. There were a lot of days going to ballet hungry after eating only yogurt and vegetables for lunch and drives home planning how to avoid eating what my mom had made for dinner. Ironically but expectedly, as I fought to regain control, I started to lose it. A chaotic cycle of restricting and binging became my new normal.

In September of my senior year, the Nutcracker audition results came in. The star role of Sugar Plum Fairy had been decided between me and one of my friends I’d danced with for years. They chose her. My immediate thought was:

  If you were thinner, they would have chosen you. 

That Nutcracker season was spent trying to repair the physical damage I believed I had brought upon myself. If I had understood the cost I would pay in my pursuit of weight loss—the social anxiety it would ignite, the isolation and depression I would experience and the psychological and spiritual wounds it would inflict—I would have never embarked on the journey. But there was only one unshakeable thought on my mind:

If you were thinner, they would have chosen you. 

That December, one of my coaches pulled me aside and said “it’s like a light has gone out of you.” 

He was absolutely right.

A light had gone out and I had no idea how to get it back. My eating disorder and my own identity started to blur and I was losing myself in the process. I graduated high school and a few months later I was auditioning for the BYU ballet department. I made it onto the BYU Ballet Showcase Company and attributed it to the grace of God and the weight I had lost just prior to the audition (a week of salad, grapes, and rice cakes will do that for you). The next semester was psychological warfare for me. There was no reprieve from the exhausting, discriminatory dialogue in my head.

If you were thinner, 

you would get more attention.

If you looked like her,

you would be happier.

If you could just control yourself around food,

you wouldn't be such a failure.

You can’t see those disordered thoughts in this picture or the crippling shame and anxiety I felt on that photoshoot day. That's the isolating part about eating disorders and mental illness - oftentimes they're both invisible.

Here’s where I get to the awakening realization I had recently:

It was a narrative of discrimination and injustice.

The culture in ballet and the world at large that valued thinner bodies over larger ones was discriminating against those who fit in the latter group or (thanks to body dysmorphia) those who believed they fit into the latter group. That cultural reality coupled with her innate perfectionism led 15 year old Christine to try anything & everything to change the body she had in favor of one that she perceived as better, more acceptable, and more worthy.

Discrimination. 

I didn’t see it as discrimination then. It took me 4 years after that Nutcracker season in high school to confront this injustice that no one seemed to talk about.

In 2018, I was sitting in group therapy with nine other women my age listening to their stories when I noticed this common pattern:

a growing girl’s body —>

comparison —>

external and internal discrimination —>

shame —>

disordered efforts to meet an ideal —>

falling into the clutches of an eating disorder —>

rock bottom.

I realized that I wasn’t the only one. The injustice was shared. The discrimination was rampant. Something had to be done.

I started to find the courage to talk about it through other people. In November 2018, my dear friend Kyle came out as gay in a beautiful blog post entitled “God doesn’t make mistakes.” His story began with feeling out of place and ashamed in a culture that struggled to understand and accept LGBTQ+ people. When I read it, I cried. I felt so deeply his shame. I felt so keenly his sense of isolation and never being enough. In a way, our stories were the same; we had both experienced discrimination, whether directly or perceived, against the bodies we had and tried to change them into versions society would deem more acceptable and worthy. When I read Kyle's story, I longed to one day have the courage to do what he did: to speak up about my struggle and advocate for other bodies.

Over time, I learned that this desire to advocate for other bodies had a name: 

Social Justice.

“Many of the ills of the world can actually be solved through radical self-love. Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.”

—Sonya Renee-Taylor

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This moment sparked what some say is the biggest civil rights movement in history. I found out about George Floyd on social media. I saw several of the eating disorder therapists and activists I follow expressing their concern, anger, and grief, pausing posting their own content for weeks to come. Then I noticed some of my LGBTQ+ and vocal ally friends marching in protests... then minority friends speaking out, including Latino and Asian friends. This isn’t to say that my white friends were silent but my ED, LGBTQ+, and minority friends seemed to be some of the first and some of the most vocal.

Why?

As I've pondered it, the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

Because for them, Black Lives Matter was a social justice issue. And they know all too well what that’s like.

Each of them had been personally affected by an “algorithm created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body.” Whether it was racism, homophobia, or fatphobia, they had all personally known discrimination. They were not born into the kind of privilege that would have spared them the personal experience of social injustice.

They lived it.

And they weren’t about to sit back and watch it happen to someone else. 

I have so much to learn and I am so imperfect. My story of discrimination is a subtle, privileged one in a vast sea of stories of people who have been marginalized because of their body size, color, ethnicity, age, sex, or ability. In his recent conference talk, the prophet of my Church, Russell M. Nelson, pleaded: “I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.” 

Lead out. 

What a beautiful call to action.

God loves all of His children—that’s one thing I know for sure.

What if we lived in a world that sees people through His perfectly compassionate and omnipotent eyes?

What if we lived in a world that celebrates the diversity He so beautifully and intentionally designed?

What if we lived in a world that actively acknowledges and seeks to root out the harmful, implicit bias we all experience because we aren't God and we have limited life backgrounds and experiences?

What if all of God's children enjoyed the same, basic human rights regardless of the body they exist in? 

What if we lived in a world "free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies”?

I don’t have one single answer but I do have a few ideas:

Black Lives Matter

LGBTQ+ lives matter

Women and minorities matter

Diet culture and fatphobia can go to hell

& the core message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

Love one another as Jesus loves you.

Since fifteen year old Christine wasn’t able to be a champion for her own body, I’m going to try my very best to be a champion for other bodies on this planet.

At the end of the day, it’s not just a social justice issue—it’s a human issue.

It’s a loving your neighbor issue.

And that’s worth the fight.

ps. #VOTE2020

Body image & dating: some raw thoughts

A couple weeks ago I was interviewed by a family friend for his podcast. After I shared my eating disorder story, he asked if I could talk about what it’s been like navigating the dating scene in college while going through an ED. I took a deep breath, preparing myself to lean deeper into vulnerability than I normally feel comfortable. This is the experience I shared:

I was laying in bed on a Saturday morning. I had a date in 2 hours. I was ready to write out affirmations like I do before dates (or exams) when I’m nervous. Sometimes nervous means a loose butterflies, excited, anticipating kind of nervous. Other times, like this one, it was a I think I'm actually going to throw up kind of nervous. Writing out affirmations has a way of calming me down and grounding me during moments like that. My list usually includes things like:

You can do this
Take deep breaths
Focus on being present
Be yourself
Everything will work out how it’s meant to
etc.

I usually write and write until I take up the whole page. But not that morning. As I lay there in bed, I realized something. At the end of the day, all of my pre-date stresses and worries could be boiled down to one. single. affirmation.

If he doesn’t like me because of my body, I don’t want to be with him anyways.

That was it.

Here’s some context leading up to this groundbreaking moment for me:
When I was in the trenches of my eating disorder, even sicker than my physical health was my mental health. Any ED behavior I engaged in was fueled by this one belief that my brain simply could not shake: You will never be good enough until you change your body. That was it. From age 16, that one belief sabotaged my relationship with food and my body and subtly bled into every aspect of my life, at its worst convincing me that any chance I had at finding love would be hopeless until I lost weight.

Let me illustrate with a few stories.

A month or two after getting back from my mission I was going on dates with a guy I really liked. On Valentine's Day he surprised me with roses and told me he wanted to date me but in that exact moment, reality set in. I could fake it on dates but on the inside I was miserable. I was “failing” at the pursuit of weight loss and feeling completely out of control with food, my body, and my life. I knew I wasn't capable of being in a relationship and even if I were capable, I figured it was just a matter of time until he realized our bodies didn’t “go together.” So instead of telling him what was really going on, I pulled an easier excuse: I’m just not feeling it. And we broke up.

You will never be ready for a relationship until you fix your body.

One summer, a year and a half later, my roommate planned an outing to go tubing down the Provo River. What I thought was going to be a big group ended up just being 5 of us, including a cute guy from our ward. That night after tubing my friend decided she couldn’t keep the secret any longer: the real story was that cute-guy-in-the-ward had asked my roommate about me and if I was single so my roommate had orchestrated the whole tubing trip to indirectly set us up. I instantly felt sick to my stomach. I buried myself in the couch and moaned “no, no, no, no, no,” spiraling into an anxious mess.

It will absolutely never work. You’re too big for him and he’ll never like you.

Six months later, I matched with a guy on mutual before Christmas break and we ended up FaceTiming for hours over the course of a couple weeks. He seemed like exactly the person I had been looking for and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. But as the break drew to a close, the excitement of meeting up in person was quickly overtaken by an intense sense of dread. I lost my appetite for days. I remember breaking down in tears on the futon bed of our home office, trying not to wake up my family as I mourned the loss of something I was sure wouldn't last once he met me in-person.

Your body still isn’t good enough yet.

A few months later, for the first time ever, I had overcome all the mental hurdles my ED threw at me in the early dating phase enough to commit to a relationship. A month into dating we were at a wedding reception when a slow dance came on. I went to put my left hand on his shoulder and my right hand in his, but he put both of his hands on my waist. I tried to stay calm but everything in me wanted to run out the door and never come back. I don’t remember anything about our conversation or what song was playing or how the bride and groom looked or the decorations at the venue, nothing. All I remember is that feeling of crippling anxiety; not because of him... because of my waist.

You will never be good enough until you change your body.

Year after year, no matter how much progress I made in recovery, my brain kept defaulting to the same relentless, defeating rhetoric yet it made perfect, logical sense to me. How could it not be true? The evidence was all around me. Thin girls got more attention and more dates. In every relationship I observed, the girl was smaller than the guy. Thin was beautiful, worthy, happy, enough. Society preached it, social media preached it, and every couple in Utah County seemed to be a living, breathing example. The pattern was just too undeviatingly consistent to my ill, eating disorder-stricken mind. Clearly there was only one way out: change my body and then I’ll be good enough.

It was a long road fighting to eradicate that belief system that had consumed me since I was 16. A really long road. But it gets better.

Fast forward to that earth-shattering Saturday morning conversation with myself just recently: “Christine, at the end of the day, all of your pre-date stresses and worries can be boiled down to one. single. affirmation: If he doesn’t like me because of my body, I don’t want to be with him anyways.”

Earth-shattering, let me tell you. For the first time in my life, I was standing up for myself. Instead of worrying about what he was going to think of me and my body, I realized that if my body is the reason he walks away, then I don’t want to be with him. I can say that (now) and stand up for myself (now) because I’ve finally rebuilt the relationship that should’ve come first the whole time: the one between my body & I.

One of the quotes my therapist shared with me that changed my life was this:
"And I said to my body softly: I want to be your friend. It took a long breath and replied: I’ve been waiting my whole life for this."

Three years ago, my body and I were not friends, We were so far from friends. But I wanted to be its friend. And eventually I started to believe that we could get there.

Here’s a look into how that process went:

It started with respect.
Hey body, I don’t like you and you’ve caused unimaginable heartache in my life, but I think I can respect you.

Then focusing on its function over its form.
*On a hike* Hey body, this is uncomfortable and I really wish I had [insert thin friend]’s body right now, but thank you for helping me up this mountain. I appreciate the miracle of my legs lifting one after the other.

Then honoring it and its basic needs.
Hey body, I still would give pretty much anything to change you. But I also know you deserve food today and you need it as fuel. So I’m going to feed you.

Then observing the slew of critical thoughts that would come in every day and just observing.
Ahhh, here we go again with the comparison and the belittling and the criticism. We’ve been here before. It’s okay, let’s just take a moment and sit with this.

Then, over time, upgrading from observing the thoughts to challenging them.
Ok so you believe no one will ever love you until you lose weight. Wait... who says? Where did that belief come from?

Then from observing and challenging to exercising gentleness and compassion.
Hey, it is okay to feel this. You are worthy and you are enough. You are so much more than a body.

Then from gentleness and compassion to considering the possibility that maybe, just maybe, my body is enough exactly the way it is. And starting to feel at home...

And then to the level I reached only recently on that Saturday morning, when the familiar wave of pre-date crippling body image came crashing down and I said:
Hold up. I did not come this far, put in this much work, show up to therapy for that many months, shed that many tears on my bedroom floor, take leaps of faith dating [ex-boyfriends], heal my relationship with food, and stand up for myself a thousand times against my ED voice-- I did not do all of that just to make it to this moment, about to go on a date, and recoil into my all-too-familiar fetal position of body shame. Nope. Not gonna do it. Not gonna happen. I am going to fight for myself and I am going to defend this body.

And that, my friends, is a summary of months and years of tough, painful body image work.

It was awkward, it was unfamiliar, it was messy and at times so unbelievably hard (and still is), but it has also become the most empowering and healing work of my life.

I went from believing that my body would hold me back from everything I wanted in life, including love, to fighting for and defending this miracle that enables me to do everything I want in life, including to love.

Dating is a rollercoaster. It’s all over the place. Guys may come and go and relationships may begin and end but at the end of the day there is one, constant, forever relationship that is depending on me. Breaking up is not an option. We’re in this for the long haul.

My body & I.