Note: the following touches on disordered eating.
I knew I was fat when I was around seven years old. A well-meaning child in my grade approached me one morning and went through my lunchbox. I was packing my own lunch at that age, so it was kind of a hodgepodge of things: a sandwich, cheese sticks, pretzels, whatever was easy for me to grab and put in a bag. She picked things up one by one and said things like, “you need to stop eating these so you’ll lose weight.”
Looking back, I find that scenario kind of funny in how ridiculous it is. Most of my classmates wouldn’t give me the time of day, (I was a socially inept kid, but that’s a story for another time,) and she was awfully bold to come sit with me for a week straight to critique my food choices. I knew nothing about food aside from what I liked and didn’t, so I didn’t understand what she was talking about at all. The fact that I apparently was so fat that she needed to say or do something gave me a lot of strange and unnameable feelings.
I don’t remember if I told my parents about this or not, but they too started to drop hints that I was fat. They stopped buying certain foods I liked at the grocery store, calling things healthy or unhealthy, and eventually scheduled an appointment for me with a dietician when I was around 12.
Eagerly, I went to the appointment with my dad. I was hopeful that my fat problem would be a thing of the past. I remember telling the dietician what I liked to eat and him very quickly telling me I couldn’t eat them anymore. I can still recall most of the rules too:
– no fruit except for 1/4 cup of blueberries once a day
– no bread, pasta, corn, or potatoes (basically no carbs)
– no sugar
– a list of supplements to take daily
Ultimately, I was put on an unsustainably rigid diet. I was just a pre-teen and reliant on my parents to grocery shop for me. At first, my mom and dad were very diligent about the plan; they read every label, tried to make meals that I could eat for the whole family, and made sure to keep my supplements stocked.
My diet (spoiler alert) ended up being far too restrictive. The meals that my parents could reasonably throw together on a school night were not things that I was “allowed” to eat. I made things for myself when I could. I remember one particular Saturday when we were all eating sandwiches and I had to make a tragic-looking lettuce wrap; I felt more than ever that this whole thing was my fault and my inability to lose weight represented my failure as a person. I understand now that I had been given an insurmountable task to complete and insufficient tools to work through it.
Over the course of the next 20 years, I still applied those rules to myself. I followed the keto diet a couple of times, restricted my intake to as low as 200 calories a day, and considered every kind of carb and sugar pure evil. I lost weight a few times, but it never stayed off. I still felt like a failure. I can’t even eat right! In frustration, I started binge-eating. The stress of my ongoing defeat and my day-to-day life caused me to experience my highest weight gain ever.
I made a commitment to myself this year to take my health seriously. I got a physical, and miraculously, everything came back normal. My doctor very gently advised I lose weight (no shit, doc), and recommended a very experienced dietician in my area. I researched her and she seemed legit, but I made a promise to not work with her if she made me feel the same way my previous one had.
She is nothing like him. She is encouraging of the good food choices that I make and recommends coping techniques to stop binges before they start. She’s a self-confessed research junkie and shared recent findings in the nutritional field that she thought I would find interesting. She proved to me that keto is just “pissing yourself to happiness” in the matter of two minutes.
I knew this was right for me as soon as we got off our video call. (Wow, that’s going to sound weird once quarantine is a thing of the past.) I felt good. I felt empowered. I did my food log homework for three days and realized that I usually do make good choices and I need to recognize that weight loss for me will be a marathon and not a sprint. Through analyzing my food logs, she highlighted what I’m doing right and proposed a few small adjustments to make sure I was getting enough key nutrients. For example: checking the calcium content of my almond milk and making sure it’s enough, adding an extra serving of chia seeds to my yogurt, etc. All very doable stuff!
After our most recent meeting, I realized just how bad that previous dietician screwed me over. She noticed that I don’t eat much fruit and asked if I liked it. I LOVE fruit! I told her that I had it in my head that it was bad for me and explained that another dietician had told me that when I was young. She looked enraged. She said, “I am so sorry that happened to you,” and it hit me. I needed to hear someone acknowledge how damaging that experience had been. It had caused me to have bad or disordered eating well into adulthood.
I feel compelled to grieve for the years I’ve lost to thinking and feeling so negatively about myself because I couldn’t stick to the diet I was given as a pre-teen. I wish I had done this years ago, but I didn’t, and I can’t hold onto that regret. What I can do is feel and release the sadness I have for my younger self, then refuse to let that troubled part of me dictate my present actions.
Today, I saw beautifully in-season strawberries being sold as a buy one, get one free deal at the store. I joyfully put two containers in my cart, knowing I could eat them, enjoy them, and reap the benefits of their vitamins. For the first time, I feel like I can truly love food and eat it consciously. I still have to unlearn a few things, but I know I can do it, and that’s more than I could have said a few years ago.