Happy Half-Off-Candy Day!
We celebrate the best holiday in February with cheap, love-themed candies of questionable quality. This can bring up a lot of uncomfortable thoughts about dieting, “cheat days” — whatever you want to call it — that are prevalent in diet culture and disordered eating. As such, I felt it would be good to talk about the myths that diet culture spouts and how it relates to eating disorders.
I would first like to talk about why developing an anti-diet mindset is so important to eating disorder recovery. When I first started treatment, I had many food rules that I made myself follow. I demonized certain foods because they contained fats, carbohydrates, preservatives, and anything else I could use as an excuse to avoid that food. It got to the point that I would feel guilty eating just about anything that I had somehow deemed “unhealthy” in one way or another. I feared that any foods that weren’t safe foods would ruin me somehow. Many of these beliefs stemmed from diet culture, and most specifically how it labels food as good or bad. In order to begin my recovery process, I had to start developing a food neutrality mindset. That’s when I did my best not to label food as good or bad, but rather as fuel for my brain and my body.
Diet culture had planted the idea in my mind that the lower my BMI, the better a person I would be. Of course this wasn’t my exact thought process, but it was a subconscious motivator to change myself. I wasn’t happy with the way that I was presenting to the world, despite being a high-achieving individual. I felt like nothing I did was ever good enough because of perfectionist standards I set for myself. Nothing was enough.
I began slowly by deciding to go on a small diet just to get rid of the “little extra” fat. I was a perfectly healthy individual who had no reason to diet, even before I developed my anti-diet knowledge. However, I thought I might start to feel better about myself if I lost the little bit of weight I had recently gained. I began to skip meals and ignore my hunger cues. Immediately, I started having headaches and trouble focusing, but I attributed those symptoms to lack of sleep because I’m an insomniac. (I later learned that restricting food exacerbates insomnia.) The real cause was that I was depriving my body of critical nutrients it needed to function properly. My body didn’t perform as well as it had before, and I began to restrict food as punishment for not meeting my expectations. It wasn’t about my weight anymore, though I still obsessed about it in my mind. It was about feeling in control. This type of dieting falls into the category of self harm. One of my therapists called it a slow suicide.
Pretty soon, I was constantly dizzy and had a hard time doing my everyday tasks. I lost huge chunks of my memory over several years. The only things I can really remember from that time are constant food and weight obsession, feeling like complete garbage, being cold all the time, hating myself, and feeling completely alone even when I was with other people. This is not living. There is so much more to life than slowly killing yourself.
In recovery, the only way to combat restriction is to let yourself have food unconditionally. This means that no matter what is happening in your life, you have to follow your recovery plan. For me, this means that no matter what, I am following my meal plan to the best of my ability and I am making sure to reach out to my support system when I need it. Some days it feels impossible. At first it feels completely out of the question of possibilities. But over time, it becomes possible, even if it’s still really hard.
I also channeled my initial food obsession into learning about macro and micro nutrients, and how they work in the body to help us function. Some of the basics: carbs are for energy, protein is for muscle function (and is for some reason the only macronutrient diet culture likes), fat is for nerve and brain function, etc. In fact, one reason I became really motivated to recover after starting treatment — and why some of the people I met in treatment pursued recovery — is that restriction of fat intake can result in significant deterioration of nerves and the brain. Diet culture demonizes the very things that give us energy and keep us alive.
Today is the one year anniversary of starting my recovery journey. A year ago today I started with a treatment center and began to nourish my body again. Today, I was able to eat a variety of food and enjoy buying schmaltzy, love-themed candies with my friends just because they’re on sale. I was able to pick up a giant armful of boxes and not care what people thought. I will be eating them for the next couple of weeks with my friends and family and truly enjoy the experience. It’s a simple pleasure, but being able to enjoy and remember the little experiences I’ve had since starting recovery is the reason I will never diet again. I’m officially one year in recovery and the happiest I’ve ever been.
In part 2 of my anti-diet posts, I’m going to be talking about the information that convinced me to develop an anti-diet mentality. If you live with disordered eating, I hope you will consider an anti-diet mindset as well.
