This is August’s theme. This one is scary. I’ve been doing a ton, and I mean a TON of inner work to dig up the roots of my insecurities and release them. Tonight’s was a big one. And it’s seemingly vain and shallow, but it’s important to get it out of me because I’m so tired of carrying it.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a slave to skinny culture. I think my first real memories of feeling too fat wrong about my body were when I would see my step mom at the time obsess about her weight and talk openly about it in front of us kids. She. Was. TINY. I can’t remember how old I was, but I really looked up to her, and that’s when I decided I needed to be skinny too. My childhood best friend’s parents were also very controlling of her weight, and I picked up a lot of their rhetoric through osmosis.

Most of my life, I’ve been relatively thin but convinced I’m fat. Like, I look at pictures and I’m rail thin, but I KNOW I thought I was fat. I have one photo with a friend of mine who was teeny tiny, and I felt so fat around her… but in the photo, I WAS WEARING HER DRESS. We swapped clothes all the time. We were the same size. But I thought I was this fat weird alien or something. I’ve always been very obsessed with how I look and what size I am, but I never really had to do much to maintain it. I’ve always been able to eat what I want and rarely exercise and remained pretty much the same size. Disclaimer: as I get older, I like eating things besides buffalo chicken dip and margaritas four nights a week, and I really do like exercising, so my habits have matured along with me.

It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I actually started to put on weight in a way that felt foreign to me. I had absentmindedly gained weight at one point and saw of photo of myself and was like, ‘OH FUCK.’ So I did what anyone in 2015 would do and jumped on the HCG diet. It worked like a charm! I lost 30 lbs in month! And it pretty well stayed off, but what took it’s place was a new fear of eating that I didn’t have before. The HCG diet is insane for anyone who hasn’t heard of it. You take these hormones and eat 500 calories a day. Your body basically thinks you’re pregnant, so you lose all this weight as if you’re sustaining a baby. But you’re not. And you’re only eating 500 calories so they just BURN. Frankly it’s amazing, but I’m no doctor so I don’t recommend this.

Clearly, this diet is not sustainable. It did it’s job for me once, but then I didn’t know what to do after that. If I put back on too much weight, I’d try to do it again, and each time it got harder and less effective, and I got more and more scared of eating. Fast forward to like what, 2018, maybe? Keto. Paleo. Low Carb. No meat. Vegan. Intermittent Fasting. Carb cycling. WHAT THE FUCK. I think I tried and failed at them all. Add this to the fact that I’d practiced plenty of diets like South Beach and general food restriction on and off since high school. I laugh now, but in college, I even did the baby food diet to crash before Spring Break one year. I was just so scared of that photo I had seen of myself, out of control of my body and fat, and I was going to do ANYTHING to make sure that never happened again. Well, what you resist persists, I’ve learned.

Over the last couple years, the fear, shame and confusion I feel around food has finally pushed me to a breaking point. I had a breakdown and sobbed in the mirror admitting to myself that I’m afraid of eating. I’m currently in a body I don’t feel connected to and every time I’m about to eat, I disassociate, try to convince myself that it doesn’t matter what I eat (if it’s something “unhealthy”) or I’m doing a good job (if it’s something “healthy”). It starts first thing in the morning with my coffee, which I shouldn’t drink because caffeine is bad, and then I add my creamer, which I shouldn’t have because dairy and sugar are bad. It ends with dinner. I had vegetables and rice tonight and felt really guilty because I ate too much of it and cooked it too long so there was probably no nutritional value and I just wasted all those calories. The weekends? Junk food? Forget about it. I absolutely binge junk food because I know I’m going to deprive myself of it until the next time I’m in a social setting. So then after the binge is over, I feel viscerally larger and more disconnected to my body. Then Monday rolls around and I get to start over.

I’m exhausted.

I don’t know what the answer to this is. But today, after following a guided hypnosis and connecting the pit in my stomach I feel when I think about food to literal fear, shame and guilt, I’ve realized that if I can shine a light down the tunnel, maybe I can find my way out of it. What I know for sure is that the key to my health and my body lies inside of me and nowhere externally. I will not be googling diets or superfoods. I will not be asking friends. I will not be reading what this or that celebrity does to lose weight. I’ll be taking really good care of myself and listening to what my pits and pings are telling me.

For now, I’m trying on my own, but this is nearly 20 years of disordered behavior and thought patterning now magnified, so I may need to seek therapy. I’ll do what’s right for me if that time comes and I’ll ask for help. For now, I’m just going to be honest with myself and own that I have a real fear of food and my body doesn’t trust me right now.

That’s all. No answers. Just outing what needs to get out.

xoxo,

Liz