On a serious note...

While answering a couple questions that were sent my way in the last month or so, one popped up in my inbox today (from a close friend of mine) that blew my mind. Not because it was a particularly special question -but because I had SO much to say about it. A little while back, I posted a poll asking what you'd like to see more of: interviews, baking recipes, cooking recipes, or musings about my personal life. I was pretty surprised to find out that y'all wanted to hear about my personal life...So, two birds with one stone! It's long. It ain't pretty but it's honest. And if you couldn't care less -hold tight, yummy recipes are soon to come!

WHAT'S WITH ME AND WEIGHT AND FOOD? If you've ever been curious, or heard me mumble something about weight, body image, disordered eating, or the like, look no further for an explanation. You asked for it, so here you go.

I have a complicated relationship with food.

Don’t let me fool you… I love the stuff. But it hasn’t always been that way. In fact, it used to be quite the opposite. Up until about a year ago, my mind was a bit of a battlefield, waging a constant war against myself using numbers, tracking, measurements, and rules as weapons. Every move required multiple calculations. Was I allowed to eat this? What would I have to do, or not do, if I ate that? This was the constant circle my mind spun in. As a curvier girl, this battle was a vicious circle, to say the least. The heavier I was, the more imminent I felt my restrictions had to be, and the more obsessive I became. The more obsessive I became, the less able I was to see and think clearly about what it was I really wanted. It was a catch 22, a cycle of false revelations, fuelled by a constant search for more tools, more tricks, more things to hide and commit my energy to with a religious sort of devotion. I mistook these ambitions as attempts to be healthy, which, as promised to me by the media, shallow individuals, and popular weight loss culture, insisted I could only be if I lost weight. This idea of ‘optimal health’ has led me to just about everything other than just that. The synonymous use of the words ‘health’ and ‘thinness’ led me to every diet you can imagine, a cohort of gyms and exercise regimes, the master cleanse, raw foodism, weight loss camp and, ultimately, horrendously disordered eating. This is a past that, until this point, I have opted to only share with those who knew me well enough to have figured it out for themselves. But the more I talk about it, the more I realize that I’m not the only one with these experiences, and that these stories need to be shared so that even more people know they’re not alone.

In retrospect, I have spent a great deal of my life trying to become something else. I’ve justified any dissatisfaction with my life with the idea that I shouldn’t worry because it will get better ‘when I’m skinny’, and thrown away countless experiences with this promise. I’ve dedicated hours and hours of my life planning, tracking, counting, measuring, weighing, contemplating, evaluating, and avoiding food, only to soon find myself eating everything in sight to soothe the anxiety that my rigid routines had given me. I have stuck fingers down my throat, gone days on only salad and tea, and felt, quite simply, disgusting, for long stretches of my life. I became a firm believe that it only mattered that I seemed like a ‘together’ person on the outside, regardless of whatever incorrigible thoughts and ideas were marinating in my head at the time. But the truth was, no matter what good news or opportunities came my way, it always boiled down to my weight in my head. I can’t do this unless I lose 15 pounds by this date…no matter how much this person says they love me I know they secretly think they are settling/are only being nice out of sympathy…

Things started to really change for me about a year ago. After at least ten years of this insanity (I put myself on my first official ‘diet’ at nine years old, though I’m sure these thoughts came long before that) I began to understand just how deeply these destructive thoughts and behaviours had penetrated my life. Weight loss hadn’t happened. I had fought and screamed, cried and begged, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to do it healthily. I couldn’t lose weight, it seemed, without losing my mind along with it. I was miserable. I needed a break. I needed to exhale, and see what was left in my head when it wasn’t churning out a constant new stream of reasoning, justification, and self-defensive, self-convincing, self-hating, over-compensating obsessive thoughts about my weight.

I did everything I could to stop my brain in its tracks, and decided that this was it. Not the sort of ‘this was it’ that was followed by a new, stricter, more aggressive attack on my body. This was the sort of ‘it’ that required a complete submission to who I was in that moment, a willingness to spend a little time not wasting the person I was (whoever that was) by trying to be the person I thought I should be. I was sick of measuring my life in calories in and calories out. Since I had been mostly unsuccessful at actually losing weight, despite the extreme emotional investment I had put into the endeavour, I figured I could take a bit of time off of dieting without missing some grand opportunity to lose weight and finally become my true, perfect self. So I decided to see what would happen if I existed without the only purpose I had ever given myself: to lose weight.

My mind fought me so intensely I was almost impressed with my own deeply rooted, highly developed dieting mentality. At first, it was as though my mind was subconsciously still functioning in its usual disordered way. Even after my first day of not tracking what I ate in, well, years –I still went to bed that night only to find the number of calories I had eaten for dinner floating innocently in the back of my mind. I could have sworn I wasn’t counting! It quickly became clear just how serious this was. It’s hard to see out of the fishbowl when that’s the only world you’ve ever known. Regardless of not dieting, my weight stayed the same, and I slowly began to put two and two together about how and why I became so obsessed with weight loss and food monitoring. There are moments I think back to that still terrify me –moments when I felt so out of control, so beaten down by my own mind, I actually felt frightened for (and of) myself. I still have yet to really make sense of how it got to be so bad. But after about a year of letting myself just be, I finally began to see clearly. I started to distinguish between the things I enjoyed, and the things I had convinced myself to enjoy because they acted as a disguise for my real interest: weight loss. I had to fill in the blanks, and that meant, well, a whole lot of soul-searching.

The first time I visited home after reaching these revelations, I made the storage room in our basement my very first stop, where I found boxes upon boxes of my old journals. I spent the entire night ripping out every single page where I had recorded some new plan, or tracked what I had eaten, or cried over how weak I was and how much I hated myself for what I was doing. I ripped out all the pages, tore them up into little shreds, and –I kid you not- jumped up and down on top of them, separating the words from each other beneath my feet, and picturing the meaning I attributed to them sinking so far down into earth, getting stuck forever within the cracks below me. When I got back to Montreal, I tried to throw out my scale (something that had always seemed like some romantic, fantastical impossibility), but was stopped by my then-roommate, who wanted to know if she could have it. My first inclination, of course, was to scream “NO! YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’D BE GETTING YOURSELF INTO!” and break it in two with my bare hands in order to save us both –but whether or not my ex-roommate had a healthy relationship with her weight/mind/body/self was not going to depend on a scale. I had learned that it was a much bigger issue than merely weight alone.

So where am I now? Well, I still have to correct my thoughts when they go astray. And some days are really, really tough when I don’t have my weight to blame for everything wrong in my life. But the way I feel about myself today is astronomically, beautifully, stupendously improved from the way I once felt about myself. There is no achievement that would be worth what I put myself through, and I wouldn’t wish that much self-hatred on anyone. Today I do yoga. I meditate. I am continually learning that ruminating about the past and planning compulsively into the future does terrible things to who you are in the moment you actually exist in. Where I used to want to change myself, now I just want to be kind to myself and allow myself to enjoy my life. This blog helps me to do that. It lets me look at food with love and creativity, as opposed to guilt and compulsion. And it allows me do so in a way that promotes the compassionate food choices I have always made, while also reminding me of the importance of seeing myself as yet another receiver of my own awareness and compassion.