What I Wake Up and Don’t Do Any Morning

I used to weigh myself religiously every morning. Then it became every morning and every evening. Then sometimes, in the afternoon.

The first time I threw up, I stood over the bathroom toilet, wondering if I was really going to do it. People only throw up when they have eating disorders, and I wasn’t ready to put myself in that category, even though I was running out of reasons to justify my “healthy” behavior. I wrinkled my nose as I leaned over, and the odd smell from the toilet basin met my face. I turned on the fan so no one would hear.

I left the bathroom, careful to hide any traces of what I had done, telling myself that it was the only time I was going to do that, and it was completely “necessary” so I didn’t do something worse. It was okay; I ignored any other voice that told me otherwise.

For roughly four years, food and calories and weight had slowly become the sole of my existence. I may have not admitted it in such express terms, but becoming fat essentially meant I would be a failure and life wasn’t worth living. I had an irrational need to be thin. Each time I reached my goal weight, it wasn’t enough. I had to be thinner; I had to be “safer.” Occasional thoughts of worry would cross my mind—I remember writing in my journal, “I think I may be a little obsessed, but it’s just so I don’t become fat and unhealthy…”

“A little obsessed” was the understatement of the year. For about the first two years of my eating disorder, I was eating around 400- 800 calories and often running somewhere between 3-6 miles a day. I don’t know how my body met everything I demanded from it.

When something inside me finally broke, I began a vicious binge-restrict-purge cycle. As I became less and less able to meet my weight-loss goals, I began having really dark thoughts about the value of my life, as I gained weight.

Honestly, even just briefly recounting this part of the story is hard. My life was a literal living hell.

Finally, about two weeks before I started university, I couldn’t take my destructive lifestyle anymore. I did a really brave thing, because something inside me was desperate enough, and took myself to a therapist.

And no, things didn’t get better immediately. I’m not going to lie: It was pretty rough. My first goal to simply eat three meals a day was a daily battle. I was still throwing up during freshman year, still gaining weight and feeling out of control. I was still lonely and depressed, and most days I felt like I had hardly made any progress.

But then, somewhere, things did start getting better. Gradually. Slowly.

One day I realized I had eaten three meals and not felt guilty.
Another day I realized an entire day had passed and I hadn’t tried to count calories.
A week passed and I hadn’t had the urge to throw up.
A month passed and I didn’t have to force myself to eat three meals a day.
***

These days, I couldn’t tell you what I ate yesterday, when before I could recount, in precise amounts, what I had eaten for the entire week.

This summer I wore a bikini, even though I didn’t have anything close to that ideal “flat stomach.” And hey, I didn’t die. Instead of only having memories of what I had eaten and how much I had weighed and what I had wanted to eat and how exactly I looked that day, I remember relaxing in the sun, laughing with friends, swimming, and watching a beautiful sunset.

These days, I don’t work out to punish myself. I go outside because it’s beautiful, because it makes me feel more connected to myself, because it gives me energy, because it makes me happy.

Maybe to some people, I don’t look like a “success.” I may look like I have actually gone backwards, because yeah, I’m heavier than I used to be. And to most of society, that’s the opposite definition of “success.”

Sometimes I wish I was “thin again,” occasionally falling into “magical thinking” that “being thin” will solve all of my problems. There’s a remaining glimmer of the former “ideal me” that might make me happy—but, while I don’t hate her, there’s nothing inside me that wants to go back to that. She was really only a shell of a person; she may have been alive, but she wasn’t living.

I am not a size 2. I am not even a size 4 or a size 8. But the really amazing thing is, saying this doesn’t bother me like it used to. So I’m not a size 2, so what. It’s just a size, it really is. It doesn’t represent anything about me. Just what is it anyways that “thin me” can do that “now me” can’t? (Answer: nothing).

When I look at pictures of myself now, I see someone who looks really happy. I see someone who smiles a lot more. I see someone who is really strong and really brave, because recovering from an eating disorder is a tiring, day-after-day battle. I see someone who has made a lot of good memories because she wasn’t always thinking about how she looked or what she had eaten. I see myself and rather than hating how I look, I see my body with compassion; it’s still healing from the years I abused it. I look at myself and see someone who has the courage to love herself at whatever size or shape she is. I see someone who has made mountains of progress.

You know, a scale and a size can’t tell you that.

I didn’t write this to convince people that I’m perfect and all is fine now. I didn’t write this to convince anyone that recovering from an eating disorder is easy or a straight-path. That’s untrue and unrealistic. Nope, guess what! Life still sucks sometimes. But it’s a lot less sucky now.

I don’t know what recovery looks like for everyone, but as I fine tune the practice of intuitive eating, my body weight still fluctuates, and it can be discouraging to go up a pant size. I still have “fat” days; I still have days where I can’t seem to see an accurate picture of myself. And maybe the scariest part is accepting that my natural body weight may never be as thin as I might want it to be. There are still lingering voices and beliefs that want me to be a certain size, that want me to lose weight. That tell me somehow my life will be so much better if I just lose 5 or 30 lbs.

But I am fighting against this; I rage against this false reality that says I am only my size and only one size is “success.” I reject anything that tells me my life is somehow less right now for such a capricious and fickle thing as weight.

I am still learning how to talk about the way I see these things, in a way that is compassionate and understanding of everyone’s own journey. The scale and I broke up a long ago, and so it frustrates me when I see other women using one—like hey, aren’t we all past this already? (Get with it, world!)

So I haven’t talked about it. I have simply refused to participate in the systems that perpetuate a shallow and superficial reality. I don’t weigh myself. I don’t talk about my weight. And I really don’t care about yours.

So if you talk to me, don’t tell me about your weight. Tell what you did today that made you feel alive. Tell me what you did today that made you feel strong, in any sense of the word. Tell me what you did today that made you feel more connected to yourself and someone else. Tell me how you practiced self-love.

My focus in life has changed completely. I never thought that I wouldn’t care about what I weighed; I never thought I could leave my house when I still felt fat. I never thought that I could just eat something without knowing how many calories it had. I never thought I wouldn’t have to weigh myself religiously every morning.

Because of my own experience, topics like eating disorders, body image, and beauty are issues I think a lot about. And I’m finally at a point where I feel comfortable talking about them from my own perspective that has been deeply impacted by my own struggle with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia.

I could analyze why I think I developed an eating disorder, I could tell you more about my story. I could tell you my thoughts about what it means to be beautiful, I could give you a lot of reasons why I wonder why “being beautiful” is often equated with “being thin” or why these are seemingly such important qualities to be. But honestly, I don’t feel compelled to right now.

But I do feel compelled to rage against this system that says you are your eating disorder, or that you can’t ever recover, or that, your weight matters. Rage against whatever seeming reality makes you unhappy. Rage against the lies. Rage against insincerity. But don’t complain about your weight. Don’t complain about how you look. Complain about something that you wanted to do, but didn’t because it was a “fat” day. Complain about letting the false reality win. “Rage against the dying of the light” and go tell someone what you did today that made you feel alive.