When I was in my twenties there was a period of time where I stopped eating everything but bagels. I had been fat all my life and put through the traditional paces of how wrong I was fundamentally because my body was large. It made me a target for harassment and threat. It made my mother uncomfortable and constantly trying to feed me melba toast and get me to do calisthenics (despite the fact that she and everyone in my family? Also fat.) It made doctors and schools and random strangers on the street feel like they could whittle down who I was to a number on a scale.
I internalized it. I fought the battles, went to the gyms, read the Richard Simmons book and tried to drink my lemon water in the morning, I sweated to the Oldies. I tried.
But nothing ever changed.
When I got to college, which I was good at, I developed this romantic attachment to hunger. I felt like I was virtuous if I was hungry. On warm days I walked around in my big bulky sweater, shivering because I had not eaten and had only consumed a ton of coffee. I was a poet. It was romantic. It certainly wasn’t an eating disorder.
Except food increasingly became gross looking to me. One food that I had formerly liked after another became uncomfortable even to look at. Eventually I was eating nothing but a couple bagels a day and endless coffee.
Mind you, I was still fat. So this was certainly not an eating disorder.
Until one day I woke up and the bagel looked gross. Panic flooded my body. I suddenly realized that I had talked myself out of the means of survival. That I was not going to be able to survive if all food looked horrifying to me.
I was reading A Handmaid’s Tale at the time, ironically.
A day passed of my bagel hatred and I sat myself down for a heart to heart. I looked in the mirror and months of not even eating that much I WAS STILL FAT.
This, I told myself, is just the way it is. This is who you are. This isn’t going to change. And you can either destroy yourself or accept yourself.
So I went to a bakery.
I bought myself a vanilla buttercream birthday cake.
I came home. I sat down. I told myself “This is it. From now on, screw everyone else’s opinion of your body. This is the end of this.”
And I ate the cake out of the box with a fork. Not the whole thing. But an awful lot of it.
After that, I began adding back foods into my diet and within a month was eating like a normal person again.
I would like to say that’s the last time I cared about what people thought about my size. It wasn’t. I struggled with the oppression people drop on you over their judgment for decades.
But I never punished myself again.
And now, in my 50’s I am sitting here at 5:45am eating a huge delicious vegan breakfast - avocado toast on 21 seed/grain bread with cucumbers, vegan eggs with corn and kale and tomato. Well seasoned, delicious. I cook for myself every day, cook for my husband. I eat a 100% vegan diet but I shoot for 40 plus different plants in my diet every week and every day I eat a minimum of 10-15 servings of plants. I am not really into sweets usually but if I get a craving, I indulge it. My relationship with food is incredibly positive - I love it and it loves me. It keeps me healthy, it heals. It strengthens. It brings joy.
But I am still fat. A fat vegan.
I also am beginning to learn to like moving my body - a pre-osteroperosis diagnosis made me start doing some light strength training a few times a week and upping my steps/cardio to keep myself strong.
But this is who I am. As a menopausal woman I am not sure my body is going to let go of any weight, but if it does it sure won’t be a ton. I am never going to weight 120lbs like I thought was ideal as a teenager. Maybe as a corpse, that’s about it.
And I am okay with this. I am focused 100% on being healthy, on strengthening my body so we can be in harmony. For the first time in my life I fully and 100% do not care what ANYONE thinks except my doctor, who is incredibly size positive and also entirely focused on how my systems work and how to make them work better. For the first time in my life I am fully embracing the joy of having a body and being human and loving food, and the sensation of movement, the pleasure of just being grounded as a soul fully in a body.
I wish I could go back to my younger self and tell her to eat lavishly. To love herself absolutely. To ignore the haters.
But all I can do for her is thank her for eventually eating that cake. And starting to heal.
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