I’m crying while reading Smash the Wellness Industry, but it’s a good cry.
My eating disorders started when I was 15. It was painfully innocent. I was coming to New York and my sister said, “Oh no, that’s where people eat so much bagels and cream cheese and that’s how you get fat.”
I was thin with no awareness of diets whatsoever but my sick mindset told me hmm well you like yourself now, right? If you don’t wanna gain all the weight, why don’t you just find a way to lose a few pounds so you could still like yourself after you adjust to the way they eat there. So the goal-oriented, fast-learning perfectionist easily lost a few pounds and as planned, I met my starting point weight after a few months in New York. But my relationship with food and my body were forever tainted, even though it was never about food nor body.
The ability to starve myself became my superpower. So did my ability to over-exercise without passing out. And don’t get me started on my short stint with vomiting on call (Talk about superpowers! Finger down the throat is for amateurs. I loved emptying myself of the little food I ate.) I was so terrified of the insatiable monster inside that wouldn’t stop eating if I let her. I hated my eating disorders but I wasn’t able to stop my disordered behaviors, even through therapy and hardcore self-awareness.
One day I saw the “LIGHT.” I “healed” myself thanks to the loving wisdom of “health & wellness.” I was now the queen of HEALTH! Heck, I even wrote and performed a one-woman show about conquering my body dysmorphia and eating disorder! I celebrated leaving it behind, I “cleaned up” so hard, ate so purely and superfooded the shit out of life! I wrote recipes and took pride in my vast nutritional knowledge even when I eventually arrived at a very short list of “safe” foods. You know what I’m talking about because, for instance, most of us don’t have celiac and yet we are all convinced that gluten is inflammatory evil.
I corrected all my wrongs by hyper-focusing on health, except that this newfound discovery was called orthorexia, the shiny, new, sexy and trendy eating disorder. We think food has moral value and so I ate the best of the best. I was on a slippery slope of taking health to the sickest extremes. And sick it was. I was miserable in denial. I had convinced myself that the way I ate meant I was truly taking care of myself and repairing my starving days, even though I was still somehow hungry, fearing food and drowning in a swamp of stressful rules.
Enter INTUITIVE EATING. How I was introduced to Intuitive Eating and how it saved me is for another post; also the many gifts it has given me in all aspects of life.
I’m still in the midst of this very complex journey, which makes it challenging to turn this a post into an Intuitive Eating post. Letting go of giving food (and myself) moral powers has probably been the hardest part for me. Getting to know my internal hunger and fullness cues rather than eating based on external ideas was the most liberating part, along with connecting with what feels good to eat rather than what I think should feel good to eat.
The list of how my life has changed is long, but I will tell you now that I have found freedom for the first time since I was 15. I have tasted freedom and it’s more delicious than I could have ever imagined.
And now I’m sitting here in tears because it looks like Intuitive Eating is finally entering our main stream. It’s time for ALL OF US to know that the “wellness” industry is nothing but the diet industry in disguise. It’s time for real power, not fake power. If it tastes more like jail and less like profound emancipation, it’s not real. It’s time for us to truly trust ourselves. It’s time to set ourselves free.
And in Knoll’s words, “The diet industry is a virus, and viruses are smart. It has survived all these decades by adapting, but it’s as dangerous as ever. In 2019, dieting presents itself as wellness and clean eating, duping modern feminists to participate under the guise of health. Wellness influencers attract sponsorships and hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram by tying before and after selfies to inspiring narratives. Go from sluggish to vibrant, insecure to confident, foggy-brained to cleareyed. But when you have to deprive, punish and isolate yourself to look “good,” it is impossible to feel good.”
Thank you Jessica Knoll and NY Times for the inspiration for this post: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/women-dieting-wellness.amp.html
