“There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn’t matter anymore” Laurie Halse Anderson – Wintergirls
The topic of this blog has been one which I have spent a lot of time debating about whether I should write about. This is down to several reasons: firsty, I am not an expert or professional in matters of nutrition, diets of disordered eating, I am mindful that this is still a current area that I am ‘doing battle’ with and it is intertwined with many other areas of my life that I find challenging.
This blog isn’t intended to be advice or tips or diets that work, it is just simply my history of what would probably be classed as ‘disordered eating’, one that I feel ready to share, and my aim by sharing is to reach out to others and to create help create honest conversations as starting points to help change negative behaviours.
My mum, for as long as I could remember, had a very negative body image and her weight yo-yoed from being bigger when we were younger to her dropping a significant amount of weight when she left my dad and took us to Brighton. My mum always attributed weight to life experiences, nothing to do with diet and nutrition and she never did any exercise – she didn’t believe in ‘diets’ only that weight was due to outside forces over which you have no control. I don’t know whether this has any relation to my eating habits and attitudes – but I do remember ‘weight’ being something that has always been present in my life, as is true for many.
I do have an odd memory of a summer when I was about twelve. I went to stay with my aunty, apple picking in the Kent orchards. My aunty we always joked had the best cupboards, full of treats. I remember everyone going out and my going into those cupboards and I suppose having what would be described as a ‘binge’. I literally ate so much I thought I could burst and after the rush, I felt an enormous sense of shame and guilt, like I just couldn’t believe what I had done. I then went and put on my aunties ‘lizzie’ exercise video and did it three times. I didn’t really think about this again.
During my teenage years who was a late developer, no boyfriends and a huge does of low self confidence – mostly tied up with how I looked, if I was prettier then things would be better, if I remember a boy I liked saying to me one, ‘it’s a shame you aren’t prettier, then you could be my girlfriend’ This wasn’t necessarily a food or weight issue but it was all about the external vessel and how that side of me was always something that needed to be compensated for, be useful to people, be funny, be kind and then the fact that you are ugly can be overlooked. Whenever I felt like this – food was used as a comfort, and that behaviour that I had first demonstrated when I was twelve would come to rear its ugly head time and time again.
This continued through university where my alcohol consumption also increased dramatically. I have always struggled to eat healthy and have a huge sweet tooth, this combined with no knowledge of how to look after myself or nutritional knowledge , meant that my weight ballooned as did my lack of self-esteem. I then returned home and this carried on, I worked at a pub and carried on a very unhealthy lifestyle, late nights, bad food and drinking. I hated my body and hated the way I looked but couldn’t find a way to change – again a bit like mum, I felt that my weight was all to do with outside circumstances and so surrendered myself to assuming that this was normal.
I moved to Norwich a year or two afterwards to make a new start but what came with me was the same old bad habits. It was about a year later when I met my (future) husband that things began to show some improvement. I lost a huge amount of weight – due to the shock of actually allowing someone in and accepting love and being in my first and only relationship. I also learnt to cook and for the first time managed to find a balance of controlling my eating and eating (fairly well), looking back it may have been papering over the cracks but I do remember feeling a certain peace with how I looked and how I felt about food.
Pregnancy would be the next trigger, again this is unsurprising and common. With all three children I gained huge amounts of weight and more so in the postnatal months, eating to survive, no sleep, PND meant that I stopped caring about myself, again – blamed outside forces on how it was.
It was after the birth of my third child that my obsession with dieting and calories began. I started tracking calories just as a way to see what I was consuming. Someone had taken a photo of me with Henry when he was about eight months old and I looked and my arm looked like a thigh, – I didn’t recognize myself and it was then that I decided to do something about it, stop blaming outside forces. I downloaded the app myfitness pal and decided to cut out alcohol and treats. When this wasn’t enough I moved on to shakes and lost a significant amount of weight, I felt great and was able to wear nice clothes, people complimented me or made comments on how much weight I lost – I became hooked.
I know that my personality -as I am sure many can relate too – is highly addictive and obsessive – I display little self -control -its either all or nothing, binge or fast, and this is a cycle of behaviour that I know I need to change. The weight I had lost and the feeling I gained became an obsession. My lowest point was when I was about seven and a half stone and eating about 800 calories a day – I was tired but I had convinced myself – this is brilliant – ‘I am finally thin and I am finally attractive and in control’. Except that I wasn’t, I mean yes I was thin, but I wasn’t attractive, I wasn’t in control – food was incontrol, my warped self image was incontrol.
My obsession with weight loss has been a roller coaster – the binging followed by guilt and shame and then obsessing about starting again the next day, making lists and mental promises to myself to change, and embarking on excessive exercise. I have used slim fast and other shakes, kidney bean extract as a carb blocker, the grapefruit diet, intermittent fasting, fasting, no carbs, skinny sprinkles (don’t ask), green tea extract, the list goes on -I am a makerters dream!
How did things change? What has helped me to regain control of this area of my life is through fitness and exercise. I believe that through running, weights and all forms of exercise – for me made me view my body in a totally different way. Once you can lift a certain weight or run a certain distance that you couldn’t before or believe you ever could you begin to see your body as funcional – see – look what it can do? Once you see your body as functional and not a source of shame or to be viewed you understand that it needs to be nourished to function. The better the nurishment the better the function – you can run faster, lift more and with that comes a sense of pride – your body did that.
The power of exercise has helped me on the path towards gaining control over my obsession with weight and poor body image – it has not gone away and I still use myfitness pal and track calories, I do panic when I eat what I consider too much, I worry when I gain, I still have a inability to control myself and binge, I still feel ashamed, but the gaps between these feelings are getting longer and I know the tools I need to mend. Fitness is not the complete answer but its a step in the right direction, its helping me try and become a positive role model to my children
I would be really interested to hear any stories you have about this – its a common issue and I know my experiences are far from unique – it just helps me to write it down and have others say ‘yes I felt like that’ so that you are not just a voice inside your own head,
Thank you for reading
Love always
Ruby
theshamehealth 