TW: Eating disorders, body image issues.
For my friends with eating disorders, disordered eating, or a lack of love for their beautiful bodies.
With the start of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (February 22nd-28th, 2021), I’ve been reflecting on my journey with self-image, self-love, and especially my relationship with food. It’s no secret that our society has a specific image of what a beautiful body looks like, an ever-changing target that has little basis in what modern medicine has found to be healthy.
This weaponizing of bodies, especially of women and even more so women of color, has had devastating effects on the way we look, think, and talk about ourselves and others. This seemingly small internal insecurity has translated into even larger problems in society, like toxicity in the fitness community and diet culture overall.
When it comes to sharing my personal journey with body image and my relationship with food, it’s important to note that this is ongoing, that I am by no means an expert, and didn’t come to the forefront of my life until last year.
I learned, to what shouldn’t have been a surprise, that eating disorders don’t always look like anorexia and bulimia that we witness through secondary school or in entertainment.
It looks like skipping lunch even though you’re hungry because you’re “going to have x,y,z for dinner”. It looks like making sure you’re always at a calorie deficit even if it means staying up until 11:59 pm working out. It looks like feeling guilty for eating two Double Stuf Oreos and making yourself go on the treadmill to burn off that exact amount of calories.
I didn’t know that’s what eating disorders looked like. Even though I had done every. single. one.
I can’t really describe to you what it feels like to discover you have an eating disorder. It truly flipped my world upside down, and as cheesy as it sounds, I wouldn’t have discovered it without one of my favorite morning radio show hosts.
In high school, I always listened to the radio host Amy on the Bobby Bones Show. She was funny, talkative, interesting, and was never afraid to interject herself in her group of extroverted male co-hosts. On top of that, she’s from Austin, Texas, and is an Aggie just like me. When I started listening to her solo podcast (Four Things with Amy Brown) and sequential eating disorder recovery podcast (Outweigh) I learned that she had majorly struggled with her own disordered eating.
Although this was hard for me to hear as an empath and a major fan of hers, it forced me to recognize that I shared many of the habits she listed as taking away from her life. The lens through which I formerly looked at food was destroyed, and I didn’t want to go back.
While I still struggle with what I choose to eat, whether it’s after feeling guilty for having two extra scoops of ice cream, or wondering if I should “be good” and order a salad, I won’t ever be able to return to the level of unkindness that I showed myself and my body.
I share all of this only to encourage you to reflect on your own eating habits, how they’ve changed, and how you think about food. Realizing I had an eating disorder took me 19 years, but
“a life without disordered eating outweighs everything”
– Amy Brown
If you or someone close to you is in need of assistance in eating disorder recovery, the following resources are free and publicly available:
National Eating Disorders Association
National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI)