First semester of freshman year I weighed 107 lbs and I still thought I was fat.
I would count my ribs in the mirror then turn around and call myself fat. I would run my finger along the knobs of my spine and then decide I should skip dinner.
And when I saw my parents or grandparents after a while, and they noticed and commented on how skinny I looked, I felt crazy. I felt like everyone was in on a joke except me and they were all trying to gaslight me, like it was some universal pity party thrown in my honor. And I always felt bad saying that I looked fat because I didn’t want to sound like a pick-me who was looking for people to say, “no, you’re so skinny”, I genuinely thought I was fat.
How did I get this way? I didn’t grow up with parents who commented on how much I ate. They are the opposite of almond parents; they encouraged me to eat whatever I wanted. My brother never called me fat, nor did my grandparents, my cousins, my friends. So, I started to wonder why those thoughts so harshly plagued my mind when I couldn’t decipher just who infected me with them.
Maybe it started in dance where I spent hours a week staring at my body in a mirror-covered wall, being told to straighten up, suck in, and smile. When we got measured for costumes the seamstress would read our measurements out loud so everyone in the room could hear. Then if your costume was a little snug a few weeks later when we first tried them on, you were met with a look of shame and disappointment.
Maybe it started when I saw Nutrisystem branded water bottles around my house or an Atkins book in the bathroom or heard my parents’ various comments about their issues with their own bodies. The cabinet underneath the TV was full of Jillian Michaels intense workout DVDs that showed off her perfect body.
Or maybe it was the culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s where shows like “The Biggest Loser” made fun of fat people by sending them home if they didn’t lose enough weight and praised others for intense weight loss. Or a show like “Say Yes to the Dress” where stylists made snide comments about the weight of a bride to be.
Every Disney princess with a thin waist, every model with a flat stomach, Shake Weights, SlimFast, Disney channel shows where the fat best friend was for comedic relief and never had a boyfriend, 5,2,1,0 be a healthy hero, Keto, juice cleanses, low rise jeans, “heroin chic”, the Kardashians, the Hadids, size 4 considered plus size …
We were steeped in the overtly toxic culture of the 2010s and the impression it made on us has had lasting, detrimental impacts.
And parts of that culture remain today. We’ve made some strides in the right direction but not nearly enough.
Now we have Pilates and Ozempic and intermittent fasting. And you can be fat, but you have to be the right kind of fat. Make sure you eat a lot of protein and spend at least an hour a day on the Stairmaster and you can talk about how you’re happy to be fat, but don’t you dare say you’re happy to be skinny because that’s insensitive, but it’s all about body positivity!
It’s impossible to figure out what you can and can’t say and what you can and can’t eat and what you should and shouldn’t do with all of these conflicting narratives.
Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from eating disorders and 20% more likely to suffer from body dysmorphic disorder. Is it because of all the media we consume that constantly picks apart women’s bodies?
How do we fix this problem? Can we even fix the problem? Sure, we’ve made progress since the 2010s but we’ve also replaced old trends with new ones and though our beauty standard is changing the old one still remains firm in many aspects.
One solution may be communication. The more people who share their stories and talk about the dangers of toxic diet and workout cultures, the more people may realize the problem.
But we love to suffer in silence, and our society promotes. You can’t talk too much about yourself because that’s rude. You can’t share too many graphic details about an eating disorder because that might trigger someone. But the graphic details are what grab our attention and force us to see the problem.
Did you know there used to be a website that would offer tips and tricks on how to be a “good” anorexic or bulimic and gave tips on how to hide your eating disorder from others?
Did you know someone dies every 52 minutes due to an eating disorder related complication?
If these facts don’t make you feel sick … you either are the problem or you have a problem.
I’ve known these things for a while. And I didn’t used to see a problem with it. The website, well people are just being kind and sharing weight loss tips. The deaths, well those people must have been doing something wrong because that could never happen to me.
When you’re mentally sick, you are the first person to know and the last person to realize it. You know there is something wrong because you’re hiding it from everyone else, but you don’t really realize what’s wrong.
Of course, I learned about eating disorders and body dysmorphia in eighth grade health class but that’s not what I had. Of course, I didn’t have an eating disorder. And I know exactly what my body looks like when I look in the mirror, it’s everyone else that is crazy and sees something different.
I didn’t realize I had a problem because nobody talked about their own problems. And so, I thought no one else felt the way I did, and I felt alone forever. It wasn’t until I heard other people sharing their own stories that I could relate to that I thought it wasn’t just me.
Honesty and transparency are some of the hardest things to come by in person and on social media. We need more people who are willing to use their platform to share important issues and speak from personal experience to let others know they aren’t alone.