My Relationship with My Body Pt. 1
I GREW UP HATING MY BODY…
I grew up seeing every female in my life hating their body. I grew up during what I consider to be the most toxic of times during the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” 90s diet culture. To this day my Pinterest is a graveyard of workouts, low-cal versions of recipes, and “thinspo” boards.
All before my 16th birthday I had done everything from:
Atkins
Weight Watchers
Diet Pills
Calorie Restriction
Excessive cardio
All in the name of being thinner, tiny, petite, more attractive, and desirable.
My weight started fluctuating from the age of nine, as that is when my breasts started to develop. I had my first moon the summer we moved to Canada, I was 10 years old.
I entered 5th grade with very large breasts and horrible cystic acne, needless to say, I was made fun of and teased on a pretty consistent basis.
My summers were spent with a sleep schedule that was not in alignment with a growing body and had early mornings and late nights for my family’s business.
It was over the summers living on an island that my dad would fly back from town with groceries and the latest “Us Weekly” magazine that I would see the headlines revolving around Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan and if they were dealing with “eating disorders”. I wanted so badly to look like them, ribs protruding, and small, petite, and tiny.
At the age of 12 I had my breast reduction. I was a 36DD and some nights I would fall asleep crying because of the pain my back was in.
Once the literal weight of my chest was removed I had the freedom to finally move my body in a way that I hadn’t been able to in so long.
That is when everything kicked into high gear for me. I had moved on from the diets to taking a more aggressive approach to weight loss. I would run for hours on the elliptical while eating as little as possible and taking slightly more than the “suggestion” on the bottle of over-the-counter diet pills.
On the days that I wasn’t able to burn off as much as I’d like I would conveniently excuse myself halfway through dinner and go to our cabin to purge everything. This was also around the time that I started to steal phentermine.
I loved the attention I got from those that knew me as a 12 year old that couldn’t fit into the largest size American Eagle jeans, to a 16-year-old who was having a hard time keeping a 0 up on my waist.
(as I type this out I realize how HIGHLY inappropriate most of the comments were as the majority of the comments were made by men and I was still very much underage a child)
I have looked at the pictures below for years, not longing to be a size 0 again, but “close to it” and now looking at them to share for a visual representation, I have nothing but compassion and sadness albeit, grief while looking at these pictures.
It was at this point that I started dating my now husband. I had just turned 17 and the purging and binging had stopped, as well as the excessive exercise. The diet pills continued until my 18th summer when I spent my first summer in the US, away from my parents, and with a family friend. I started grocery shopping for myself at this age.
I would buy all the “healthy” options. Soy milk, egg whites, low fat etc., and almost everything was prepackaged, and this continued for the years that followed.
I got on birth control about 3 months prior to our wedding in 2011 and thankfully stayed on it less than a year as I hated how I felt on it. My diet was still what was listed above, and my excessive working out had tapered to only an hour session daily and was more “socially acceptable”.
In 2012 I decided in the name of health weight loss (I had been married for a year at this point and put on a few “happy lbs”) that I was going to be a vegan. I did it all the wrong ways. Not a lot of plants, all the bread, and my personal favorite cringe-worthy “vegan versions” of meat or plant-based meat options. This lasted for less than a year.
When we moved to FL in 2013 it was evident that we were still in vacation mode even though we were permanent residents. Drinks when we would go out for dinner, and an extra appetizer here and there started to become more frequent. All of this matched with my job now being remote and working from home led to a much more sedimentary lifestyle very abruptly. This is also when I started going to the farmer’s market and looking to shop locally for produce.
After about 6 months in the larger city, we bought our first house about 45 mins away. Since my husband’s commute was almost an hour one way, we were basically eating take-out again on a consistent basis and the meals made at home were the rarity of a handful of times a week.
It was at this point that we had been trying to conceive for two years…
Continued in part 2…