Sometimes we ARE our bodies

Content note: this post contains mentions of mental health struggles, fatphobia, disordered eating behaviors, and binge eating.

When I was a baby feminist, having my mind expanded in early college, one of the most freeing concepts I encountered was all about how women should be seen as more than their bodies. I was definitely a fat girl who felt lifelong toxic pressure to be thinner and who was taught that a woman’s value is related to her attractiveness “for men.” I was enormously relieved to find ways to call out those bullshit messages.

A casual glance at the work I’ve been involved with online tells this story well. At my old blog, I’ve got no less than six tags with many posts under each that deal with the umbrella topic of body politics, like “beauty,” “body image,” “eating,” “health,” and my personal favorite, the ever succinct: “fat.” Over on Tumblr, I can be found to be calling out fatphobia and its cousin healthism, and the archive I’ve amassed under that is mind boggling in depth and scope. It makes me proud.

As I was in direct services with girls at the time my mind was expanded on these issues, I wrote curriculum for elementary girls to stop thinking of how their bodies LOOK and focus on what bodies can do for them. I would tell girls, “your body is a resource for you, it is not you.” Mid 2000s me never felt higher than when an 8 year old would tell me something like “I love my legs because of how fast they run on my soccer team.” Or “I love my hands because they write stories.” As a young woman, I felt so reduced to being viewed by men as my body (and therefore worthless because I wasn’t conventionally attractive ie., thin) that I probably bobbed and weaved a little bit too much into divorcing myself (the inner me…or like, my brain, I guess?) from my physical body.

This was a necessary step on my growing up journey. It felt good to create some space there, after having grown up in a home where it was drilled into my brain that no matter how much I achieved, it would amount to nothing if I wasn’t attractive enough to keep a man. Even the most supportive, loving, and non-abusive adults in my family promoted the value of looks (and using thinness as a proxy for beauty mind you.)

Worshipping thinness was intoxicating to a suburban white girl in the late 80s-early 00s. Barbie and her grotesquely impossible proportions was my home girl. “Heroin chic” was a real aesthetic. I thought that the only way someone could look cool and beautiful was if their hip bones visibly stuck out of their ultra-low-rise jeans like Fiona Apple’s did in her “Criminal” music video. (God, toxic messages for chunky 13 year olds aside, that remains such a good video.)

My best friend at the time was almost Fiona Apple thin and I hated her for it as much as I loved her for who she was. I remember laying in her bed on our backs and talking about her “whackity bones” (her name for hip bones) jutted out enough to have the Fiona look. For my part (being the thinnest I would ever be, but not being THIN-thin) I commented that I just wished that my stomach would look as flat as it did when I was lying as when I stood up. (Of course, this was the same friend who a few years before when I nervously changed in front of her told me she was surprised that I was as heavy as I am because I “hid it well.” Not to be outdone for cruelty, I told her that I was equally surprised to learn that her boobs were actually so super small because they looked bigger normally. Listen, kids can be BRUTAL and I was no exception and years later this friend and I shared how we both walked away deeply burned by that convo, only remembering what was said to each of us and not the parts we said ourselves.)

Anyway, at the same time that I was navigating trying to understand these images and messages, a body that was majorly changing due to puberty, and the reemergence of gross bro culture in the late 90s (watch Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage for more on that), I was also managing the abusive situation of my nuclear family. One of my dad’s most intense mental illness fixations is around health and an obsession with doing all he can to change longevity. With a very ignorant view of what that means, it translated into constantly policing my weight, and to a much greater extent, my mother’s.

The shape of my dad’s control over my weight manifested mostly as cruel comments, restricting what food was allowed in our house (only ““““healthy!”””” options) and systematically teaching me to overeat, but then wondering why I was chunky. He’s totally that parent who, from day one, chose power struggles with me about anything and everything. Forcing me to eat “healthy things” when I didn’t want to was just a day that ends in -y. He’s a lifelong member of the “you can’t have dessert until you CLEAN YOUR PLATE,” club, therefore overriding my ability to learn naturally when I am full and that is when eating stops. Because, like, who doesn’t want dessert?!

But witnessing what happened to my mom was maybe worse than even all of that. He meticulously forced her to weigh in, regularly. If she wasn’t within his prescribed “acceptable range” then he took away simple joys in her life, like time to read. (Have I mentioned lately how they had, and probably HAVE, I’m not sure, one of the most toxic relationships ever??) Everyone in my house knew if my mom was “currently over weight” and it made us all miserable. My brother and I were even encouraged to watch her food consumption and tattle on her if she overindulged or whatever.

Moral of the story is that it was fucked up.

As always, during this time in my life, my grandmother’s house was my refuge. It was where I could escape all that bullshit at home and get access to “good snacks.” It was where there was a loving person, who was eager to take me on a McDonald’s run and didn’t bat an eye if I ordered the full Big Mac Meal at age 8. The only person my dad didn’t attempt to totally dominate was his mom (this grandmother) so I knew I couldn’t even get in trouble for eating “bad” with her. She’d never tell him what I had been eating, anyway.

While my grandmother did believe a great many of her own fatphobic biases, her house was also where I generally felt fully accepted and showered in love. It’s never been lost on me that as I was forming all kinds of neural pathways in my child and then adolescent brain, I grew up with the concepts of LOVE/ACCEPTANCE and EATING DECADENT FOOD as twins, neighbors, best friends, and partners. Forever bonded are love and food in me!

All this context laid out, it’s no wonder that I never really stood a chance at developing a healthy relationship with food. A loving relationships yes, but not a healthy one…in fact, if you wanted me to describe my relationship with food any time in the past 18 years or so, the first thing that you’d hear is that I love it. I just do, I love eating. I love experiencing new places through food. I love sharing food with people I love. I love cooking and the only thing I love more is baking. I love sharing meals as times to talk and laugh. I love when someone cooks for me. I love butter, and sugar, and fats, and bread. My god do I love bread. There’s just about no circumstance in which I don’t want to eat. Like, I don’t know if I’m ever not a little hungry for the right delicious item. Eating makes me happy, just as a given. And I’ve been proud to wear this fact plainly, while being a fat lady, and not apologizing for it or pretending that ya girl doesn’t love to grub. There’s something revolutionary in that for me. Yes, I’m fat and yes I love food and I’m not going to shame eat. hidden away…middle fingers up, I’m noshing right here, LOOK AT ME.

You get it. I love food. For a long, long time, I’ve also known that I am also prone to episodes of binge eating, but never quite at a volume or frequency that concerned me. It’s just that the little love=eating shortcut in my brain is strong and when I’m REALLY stressed out, nothing can make me feel much better than the momentary rush of eating.

So what, right? I’m doing great!

I’ve learned to love myself as the fat person I am.

I’ve learned that someone’s weight doesn’t tell you anything about their health and that “health” is a nonsense construct that no one owes society, anyway.

I’ve learned to stop reducing myself or my value to my body.

I’ve learned to reject people who try to reduce my value to my body.

I’ve learned to derive a sense of self-worth from many non-body things. And to find worth in my own body despite what society may say about bodies like mine.

I’ve learned to move on from limited notions of “body positivity” into more radical places of self-acceptance and fat liberation.

I’ve learned to not give a single fuck about anyone who is uncomfortable with my ample bodied self or who may try to define me by it.

All of these are incredible lessons and I’m grateful for them. But last week, I also got a much needed reminder that as much as I talk about my body, my body is trying to talk to me too, and when I ignore her, I’m doing neither of us any good.

You see, the pandemic has fucked with us all in many, diverse ways. One way that it fucked with me was manifesting in some serious can’t-ignore binge eating behaviors. During the pandemic, my evening/weekend behaviors had dissolved into a lottttt of endless eating. Like way beyond what has been “typical” episodes for me as I was isolated, terrified, bored, etc. and was getting real high off eating what I will refer as “a fuck ton,” the proper measurement for my binges.

This was no passing evening of regret and discomfort. It was a sustained activity over many countless weekends. It was to the point that my partner very, very gently and lightly asked me about it a couple times because it was genuinely concerning to behold (and I knew it.) Well fast forward like 16 months into that behavior and after doing some routine bloodwork my doctor was like, “Holy shit your cholesterol is terrifyingly high for someone of your age.”

(Queue a lengthy denial/shame/despair reaction period.)

But then about a month ago I just flipped a switch. I have always been a bit of an “all or nothing” person so one day with the worries of my health feeling very strong, I just decided to stop nighttime binging. I cold turkey immediately quit snacking incessantly and made some other food choice changes to drastically reduced my overall intake of high cholesterol items. I want to be clear…I have no goal or intention of weight loss. I am not on a “”””diet”””” and I never would be. Yesterday I ate Little Caesars because I wanted Little Cesears. (I said I love food, but I didn’t say I have a refined pallet!) Day-to-day I’ve been trying hard to intuitively eat, I’m not restricting food intake or leaving myself hungry at all. I have shifted what’s available in my house to eat and most saliently to my revelations, I’m not eating if I’m already full.

Wellllllll for just over a month I’ve ALSO been experiencing the biggest bought of depression I can recall in recent memory. The sense of hopelessness has overwhelmed me at times. And I’ve been all, “it’s the shitty state of the world and its endless, devastating crises and my pandemic burnout, and work frustration, etc., etc., WHICH IS ALL TRUE, but then I listened to an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air and everything suddenly felt so clear to me.

In the episode, Terry Gross is interviewing Psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke's. Dr. Lembke is on the podcast circuit for her new book, 'Dopamine Nation,' which, as the show notes explain, “explores the brain's connection between pleasure and pain. It also helps explain addictions — not just to drugs and alcohol, but also to food, sex and smart phones.”

I was hanging on every word of this podcast, my friends. I felt like a mysterious veil had been lifted from over my eyes and I started to SEE myself, my pandemic survival technique, and how I had RIPPED myself, suddenly, away from a major dopamine source I had grown accustomed to. I realized (and was finally was truthful with myself) that I really had been binging that much.  Where I used to get dopamine rushes from hanging out at a party and socializing a bunch, I found the same momentary reprieve of happiness and love feelings from inhaling far too much food on the regular. And since quitting that habit, I realized that I’ve ALSO been going through withdraw from the previous levels of sugars, fats, and constant dopamine rushes I was getting from eating all the GD time for over a year.

I don’t have some beautiful way to tie a bow on this topic because I am very much still in the middle of uncovering and discovering what’s been going on for me. But the biggest feeling I am left with is the relief of knowing that how depressed I’ve felt is temporary, and probably had a biological component to it. Like it’s so obvious to me now…SOME of the worst of these depression feelings will subside. My brain needs time to adjust.

In fact, I can say with certainty that they ARE subsiding the further I’m into the process. THANK GOD. Because how I felt all throughout late July and August was not sustainable.

I have some things on my “to do” list about this. I have to talk with my doctor at length. I have to talk with my therapist at length. But admitting to myself (really admitting) that I was binging so much has been a huge step. I don’t think that I would have ever had this realization without the depression following it and hearing this podcast. I am taking a way a big lesson here…I am not JUST my body, but my body is a part of me, and she is always communicating things to me, should I take the time with her that she deserves. Her ancient mechanisms tell me when I feel afraid or uncomfortable or unsafe, if I’m smart enough to pause and notice. Her inherent wisdom tells me when I need something, if I’m listening. Her natural rhythms syncopate the song of my whole life, if I’ll let them.

It might have been a needed step in my growth to reject being reduced to my body. But I am not someone who is well served by continuing to build a wall between my mind and body. I am someone who needs to get more in my body, to be grounded in her and to really feel what she feels. I am not baby feminist me anymore and I’m ready to embrace more of the maturity that my body can teach me.