I'm angry

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. 

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. 

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

It's not about the food

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.