Un-diet.

In November 2001, I suddenly found out I was a little bit fat.  I was a size 16, I weighed 187, and apparently, this was not acceptable for a 5′5″ woman.   News to me, which considering I grew up in the US of A, the fact that I could be fat and not realize it and be relatively shame-free about my body, says something about my utter obtuseness.  So, at 24 years old, I embarked on my very first diet.

You know what I’m good at?  Dieting.  I am an A+ dieter.  Oh, the enthusiasm of those early days.  The excitement of realizing I could be incredibly disciplined with myself, the thrill of shopping for smaller sizes, the smug sense of superiority to people who were not successful with dieting. 

Flash forward 5.5 years: I defied that statistic that said most people who lose weight gain it back within five years.  As a matter of fact, I discovered in January 2007, that I could actually get as skinny as I wanted.  After several years of settling in the mid-130s and a fairly normal but not at all skinny size 10, I decided I wanted to be a size 8.  It started out as being “more careful” in my food choices, but after a while, it took on a life of its own.  I adopted highly ritualized eating patterns, I exercised twice a day, I dropped to a size 4.  I could see every bone in my chest and count my ribs on my back.  Hot, no?

I also felt more anxious, more ashamed of my body, more terrified than I’d ever felt before.  I kept setting lower goals, lower weights I wanted to see.  I kept exercising harder and started lying to the people who love me about what I was eating because, while I realized that I was doing harm to myself, I didn’t want anyone stopping me.  I turned down social invitations and took my lunch to work every day because I couldn’t risk eating foods that weren’t known quantities.  I became isolated and sad and all the while, I got more praise than I ever had in my life.  And being praised for hurting yourself?  Confusing as all get-out.

Then something finally snapped inside me.  I cannot be on a diet for the rest of my life.  I don’t know what a healthy weight for me is, but I’m planning on finding out.  Pre-11/01 I wasn’t at a healthy weight for my body because I had exceptionally poor nutrition and didn’t get any exercise at all.  At the height of my disordered eating and compulsive exercise, I wasn’t at a healthy weight either because my periods had actually ceased and I was hungry all the time and had constant hip and back pain from hours on the treadmill.

But I really, really want to be healthy, on the inside.  Whatever the outside looks like at the end of all this?  Well, that can’t matter to me right now, because I found out that even when the outside looks just look society says it should, if you’re sick on the inside, it won’t matter, because it will not be enough to make you happy or make you stop.

It’s been a month since I’ve stepped on a scale, and three weeks since I’ve counted calories.  I thought losing weight was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I’m finding out that this is harder.  Because losing weight is easy if you think you already suck to begin with–it’s easy to punish yourself if that’s what you think you deserve.  But taking care of yourself when every impulse is screaming that you have got to earn your value with penance and pain?  This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.