When I’m recovered

One day I will write a list of stupid things I used to do when I was stuck in diet culture mentality. I’ll laugh and groan as I write it, slapping my forehead from time to time at the inanity and shallowness I was mired in, the way I traded one life crisis for another. Silly me, I’ll think, look how much energy I wasted, spinning my wheels thinking I was moving forward, the whole time only sinking deeper in the mud.

The list will look something like this:

1. I used to mix powdered fiber, glutamine powder, and salt in a little bowl with water to make a pudding like substance and eat it with a spoon to feel full right before going to bed. I called it “topping off the tank”. The thick gel sat heavy in my stomach and absorbed all the water in my gut, often leaving me constipated.
2. I used to play games with My Fitness Pal, putting in more calories as a goal then eating under by a hundred or so, then switching to less calories and eating over by a hundred or so, just to change how it felt, to feel like I was cheating the system and beating the game one way or the other.
3. I wanted to take some cut fruit or a bit of rice from the school cafeteria to eat with my lunch (I couldn’t take anything else because it was virtually untrackable, at least for me) but I couldn’t track it accurately and didn’t want to eyeball it, so I devised all sorts of hacks. I took two pieces of fruit that were about the same, ate one, then took the other home and weighed it then tracked the one I ate. I finally started bringing my kitchen scale with me to work, which felt like such a relief and sense of freedom at the time, though when I went to weigh my food on it I would strategically place it behind my lunch bag to hide what I was doing from my coworkers.
4. All my meals had to be trackable, so either home cooked, packaged with a label, or whole foods with zero other ingredients. I spent long stretches of time in shops with a food item in one hand and my phone in the other doing complex math, converting kilojoules to kilocalories and dividing package weights by unit numbers, seeing if I could fit the item into my daily plan, reconfiguring the rest of my day around it.
5. I switched from chicken thighs to chicken breast, from eggs to egg whites, from oil and butter to frylight, from salmon to shrimp, and from whole fat to zero fat yogurt. Did you know if you make these switches you too can lose an average of 78% of the little joy you have left in this life?
6. My normally average to low cravings for sweets grew out of control and I started making low calorie desserts. Foods that have names like “ice cream” and “brownies” but are actually just protein powder, jello powder, ice, diet coke, sugar substitute sweeteners, and air. None of these were satisfying, all of them made my stomach hurt, and I would overeat them. I’d make a recipe that boasted how much you could eat for “only 120 calories” then eat the entire tray of brownies and feel gassy and uncomfortable from the sugar alcohols.
7. I stopped eating out completely. I couldn’t track any of the food. I started saying no to social outings and panicked at the thought of going out for too long, feeling out of control not knowing what the food situation would be like. I started bringing apples and shelf stable packs of chicken breasts called “pocket chicken” with me everywhere.
8. I started second guessing food labels. I couldn’t trust what I had eaten and would obsess over it for hours. This always happened only after I ate something, unfortunately.
9. I started second guessing My Fitness Pal after it gave me wildly different calorie counts for various foods. I downloaded Chronometer and started double tracking all my food. I never considered that I was completely ignoring the world’s most intelligent, personalized, and always up to date calorie needs tracker: my own body.
10. I obsessed over what other people ate. I had to know what they were eating. I wanted to see what the inside looked like, what it tasted like. I wanted to live vicariously through them. I struggled with feelings of intense desire and jealousy watching others eat.
11. Thoughts of food, planning, tracking, eating, not eating completely consumed my mind and day. It was all I wanted to think about. I opened up my calorie tracker app and scrolled through it constantly. I watched nothing but food videos. I saved countless diet recipes to make. I thought about going to school for nutrition. I found out research subjects in the Minnesota starvation experiment left that study obsessed with food, many changing their career paths to become chefs or food scientists.
12. I started cooking for ease of tracking rather than pleasure in eating. Instead of making a beautiful mix of whatever mushrooms, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and oils called to me from my refrigerator, I would choose one vegetable and make a whole pile of it just because it was easier to track. I started eating like a gym bro. Chicken breast, broccoli, rice or potato.
13. Instead of making a higher calorie but satiating meal, eating to enough and stopping, I would make the lowest calorie highest volume boring ass version of whatever meal it was just so I could fill my stomach to bursting. Look at all the food I can eat. I would eat it all, every last bite, no matter how full I felt. Every meal was around 300 calories and I would like the plate. I would like the goddamn plate. The animal in my body that I was starving wanted more. I didn’t realize this until the dishes were already put away and I was journaling after dinner, but the first nice meal I made myself after I decided to stop dieting, stop tracking, and eat intuitively I didn’t lick the plate. I didn’t even finish the meal. I ate until I felt satisfied and put the rest, a couple pieces of the juiciest soy sauce marinated chicken thigh and some of the sautéed mixed vegetables back in the fridge for later.
14. I used to weigh the peels of bananas, cores of apples, and pits of stone fruits to subtract from the grams to “get the calories back”.
15. The all-or-nothing thinking that led to the worst binging of my life. If I felt like I had eaten something I couldn’t track, had gone out to eat and overeaten, or had a vacation coming up where I wouldn’t be able to stay strictly on plan, I completely gave into unrestricted overindulgence. This was my one chance to get it all in, to really scratch the itch, to eat. I ate 10 ice cream bars. I went to Taiwan and for five days in a row ate to the point of stomach pain and distention, heartburn, difficulty breathing, flushing, sweating, wanting to force myself to throw up but not being able to, etc.
16. After one particularly gnarly binge, I woke up so disgusted with myself I fasted for three days. This was right before I was supposed to get my period and my body shut down hormone production and stopped ovulating for four months and counting. I still don’t have my period back as I’m writing this.
17. I kept going back to calorie counting over and over. I lowered my calories. I raised my calories. I lasted less and less time before another binge. I was binging every week, every few days, then eventually every night.
18. Once, a long time ago, when I was 27 or so, before this recent spat of dieting, I got liposuction on my stomach. I wanted a flat tummy like all the pretty girls have and I never had. I was so happy to get it and also too ashamed to tell anyone, to admit the depths of my vanity, not even my boyfriend’s parents who lived next door and knew I had taken time off work for a surgery but didn’t know what it was for. The pain was unreal. I wore a compression garment for six months.
19. I kept thinking back to when I lived in the States and my environment was so controlled and my life so stable that I dieted for a year without feeling deprived. I lost weight effortlessly. Why can’t it be like that again? I thought about just two months ago, before Taiwan, when I dieted for 6 weeks and lost a few pounds and people started telling me I looked thinner. Why can’t I just do that again? What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep binging?
20. I thought about the last time I “hit rock bottom” and gave up on dieting and decided to fix my relationship with food, not knowing if I’d ever go back to tracking. I went right back, and I binged harder than ever, and I lost my period. When will I learn to stop using a tool that broke, that broke so hard its sharp edge is hurting me as I use it.
21. I think about my struggle with food and body image and feel so alone then realize I am in the middle of a toxic diet culture. I told my friend tonight about my struggle and she said oh my god no listen to your body eat food don’t starve yourself. When I got to her house the first thing she said was how much thinner I looked and how I looked so thin and how much I work out. She said she only eats once a day and I can eat because I work out but she can’t eat. I ordered dinner and ate it alone chatting with her in her living room while she had a few pieces of watermelon and a couple grapes all evening. As she sent me off she said we should go out but not for all you can eat sushi like she likes because I can’t eat as much in one sitting as she can and it would be a waste on me. I hugged my bag of fruit and chocolates she sent me off with to my side as I hugged her goodbye.
22. I used to think I had to try so hard to get what I wanted. I had to hold on so tight. Control everything. Be perfect. Do every last thing right. I never considered what I was backfiring, doing was doing more harm than good. I gave food more control than it ever deserves. I put it on such a high pedestal, made it a god. I thought I could hate and shame myself into change. I called myself all kinds of nasty things. I felt so out of control and disappointed in myself when I failed, when I binged. I forgot that my whole life I’ve had an indestructible core of self-worth and survival. I forgot how strong I really am inside, how my internal compass always, no matter how much I fuck with it, points due north. I forgot that no matter what, I won’t do what’s not right for me, not for too long.

Yeah so, one day I’ll write a list like that, and that’ll be a good day, laughing about those dumb things I used to do. Then I’ll make some banana bread and cut two thick pieces and have it with some milky tea, and wrap the rest up nice and tight in its tin and leave it on the counter while I go for a hike with a crusty french bread, some brie and jam. A bottle of lukewarm water in my pack with a sock around it to keep it warm, just how I like it. My phone in my pocket ready to take pictures of the trail, the flowers, the clouds. Footfall after footfall, left right, left right, the alternating rhythms of nature, body and brain. Tingles of gratitude and connection flowing through me as I soak in the magic of the woods.