I Just Couldn’t See It
TW: eating disorder/self harm
I came across these photos yesterday while I was cleaning out some drawers in my office - and I audibly gasped. Not out of sadness that I no longer look like this - but rather, out of fear for what I had let myself become back then. I didn’t SEE it then - and it’s disorienting when you realize you had no idea what you looked like in your life. Do I even know what I look like now???
Eating disorders are hard to see when you are in them - orthorexia, in particular. You aren’t starving yourself enough for it to look like anorexia and it’s not throwing up, so it’s easy to see that it’s not bulimia. It looks like advocating for your “health” by going to the gym daily and consuming “clean” foods. It’s having willpower and the boldness to stand up against the “obesity epidemic” (insert eye roll). But the over exercising and strict control over what is being eaten is enough to cause your body to waste away, to look sick - but worst of all, to FEEL sick. Looking at this photo above, I’m so sad for her.
This photo was taken towards the end of my stay in Busan, South Korea - where, over the course of 2 years, I lost over 120lbs. If anyone gained 120lbs in 2 years, you can bet there’d be an outcry, but lose it and suddenly you are #bodygoals, inspirational, and aspirational. Being in my young twenties, I loved the accolades and praise I received - but now, at 38 looking at this girl, she looks sick, gaunt, tired. The fact that I was away from the people who knew me at my heaviest, there was no one there to say “Teri, enough!” I remember my parents came to visit me at the beginning of my second year and they didn’t even recognize me in the airport and when they went to hug me, I remember my mom saying I was only half of what left Canada. I thought this was a compliment.
This is the issue with diet culture - it literally perpetuates and celebrates eating disorders and disordered eating. It encourages you to forgo living for the sake of appearances and it thrives on the compliments and praise, making the person behind the eating disorder conflicted: they know their body is shutting down and hurting, but the ego is so pumped up it insulates the physical discomfort.
One of the worst things about orthorexia, for me, is that it ruined my relationship with athleticism and strength. Despite being in a larger body, I was a high performance athlete in high school and enjoyed going to the gym to build strength - even though my body was still squishier (I assume) than the others I saw at the gym. But when I got to Korea, I first started losing weight by accident, simply because the food was different and I had to walk everywhere. Once I got into martial arts and 3 months in, stopped drinking because I didn’t like who I had become - I decided to focus on being a high performance athlete once again. This time I did it by following websites about bodybuilding. This is where it went south. I took advice from other people who were either in competition mode for bodybuilding OR were involved in their own disordered eating and exercising. I made myself go to the gym 2 times every day and take martial arts, I became obsessed and the gym became less of a home and more of a prison. When I started dating Hyung Gyung, he was a competitive bodybuilder who also loved achieving and striving for peak performance, so he helped me with the science behind macros and all that bullshit. He was in the same world I was. I remember, though, when I asked him about fat burners (pills you take to help you lose even more weight) - he got concerned about just how obsessed I was. But I was persistent and strategic and he told me what I needed to know. It was taking those diet pills that actually caused me to wake the fuck up and hear my inner voice tell me if I keep going I was going to die. After about a week of taking these stupid pills, at 20, my heart would palpitate and my eyelids would flutter in the middle of the night. They made me so nauseous that I couldn’t eat (which I think was what contributed more to their “success” than whatever bullshit science they perpetuated). I lost my period. Thankfully, that self awareness I developed as a kid kicked in and told me to get my shit together. It was the same voice that told me to stop drinking and partying. That’s the benefit of being lonely - you have no one to cloud your inner voice. You hear it VERY loudly - or at least I did. That being said, just because I stopped taking the pills, doesn’t mean I stopped the other disordered behavior.
It wasn’t until about 5 years later that, after my Dad passed away I started to unravel my body image insecurities and my orthorexia. I stopped going to the gym cold turkey. It had made me into physically someone I didn’t recognize as well as emotionally. If I wasn’t going to the gym to be in pain and push myself to lose weight, what was the point?
My body has gone through so many iterations - like everyone. And while I am sad that I couldn’t see just how hard I pushed myself back then - I am able to look back with kind eyes and also tell her that she did what she had to do to make it through the overwhelming sadness and loneliness she felt being in a foreign country at the ripe age of 19 and 20. If I dissect my behavior over the 2 years I was there, I first tried dealing with the loneliness and homesickness through drinking and partying, like the other English teachers - but because I never really did that in my teens, I quickly realized that it was not for me. I say I realized who I was, by finding out who I wasn’t. But, I only stopped a coping mechanism and didn’t have the tools to look at why I was drinking and partying in the first place. So, I just found something that was more acceptable to someone who prided themselves on being a “good girl” and threw myself into that instead. I was getting compliments about how good I looked and good I was for taking care of my body - this definitely supported my desire to be applauded for being GOOD. Over the last 3 years, I’ve worked hard to start incorporating movement back into my life - but I still can’t go to the gym, despite having a membership that keeps going. I’ve recognized a few things about that - but I will save that for another blog post.
Just because you are participating in habits that are deemed “healthy” by society - doesn’t mean they are healthy at all. I realized that it’s imperative to look at the actual motivating factors behind any behavior and ask: Is this actually for me or is this for my ego? When it comes to eating, exercise, and taking care of oneself - it is so important to silence the societal messaging to get clear on what is right for you and you only. If you shame yourself for eating anything outside of your regime or get down because you haven’t been to the gym once or you get pissed off because the scale isn’t moving - all of it is for the wrong reason. If it truly is for your health, the numbers won’t matter - the joyful doing is what matters. That you enjoy the process. That you enjoy your food. That you enjoy the movement. That you are consistent in the joyful doing and the end result will be what it will be - if you are like me, your body has a lot of healing to do.
