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I thought I wanted to lose weight. I thought I would be happy if I lost weight. This is what we’re told, right?
There are so many boxes we think we need to check to find happiness, and weight loss is one of the typically unquestioned ones. But, I checked that box. I lost weight. I wasn’t happy.
In fact, at my lowest weight, I was also my least happy.
I remember my dad’s secretary complimenting me, “oh my, you lost weight over vacation! That’s so hard—how did you do it?”
I told her it was easy. Because it was easier to try to control my weight than admitting my truth and what I really wanted.
The summer after eighth grade, my family moved from Japan, where we had been living for the past 12 years, to Brazil. My dad had started his international education at the Escola Americana do Rio de Janeiro, and wanted to return to the city of his heart.
That summer, I also spent a blissful week of adventuring in New York City with one of my best friends from Japan, who had moved to New York City. During the day we went to the Met, took long walks in Central Park, ate bagels, and talked about everything in the sincere, earnest way of youth. Each night we would cuddle and talk late into the night.
The last night of my visit, she bravely led me into uncharted territory for us both.
“I want to kiss you,” she softly spoke from her bed. As long as I’d known her, I’d never heard her speak so softly.
“Okay.” I crawled up from my trundle bed to hers, and we put our lips together.
“That was nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Shall we do it again?”
“Okay.” I crawled up from my trundle bed to hers, and we put our lips together.
“That was nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Shall we do it again?”
I somewhat knew that I had been jealous of the boys she had made out with in seventh grade. I just didn’t know how much it would set off the fireworks in my heart and body to be the recipient of her desire.
“Somewhat knowing” had been a trademark of the exploration of my (queer) feelings. I would kind of recognize desire, but wouldn’t actually let myself feel or know it because it didn’t “fit” within the categorizations I had been handed.
After that night, I remember thinking really clearly to myself, “That was amazing. Yep, I’m definitely gay.” Such clarity. What a gift.
But then fear immediately clouded over my clarity as a form of protection. I tried to not know that I was gay, because if I knew that then I didn’t know what I would do.
Like all of us, I wanted love, acceptance, and belonging. If I shared my newly discovered truth, I didn’t know if I would get those things—from my family, teachers, and peers in my new school.
I didn’t really have friends yet in Rio. I thought my best friend in New York would support me through my international move, but it turns out that bringing up repressed sexuality is scary for everyone, and a wall erected itself between us. I didn’t know anybody else who was gay. I didn’t know how to be with all the uncomfortable feelings arising.
So I pushed my truth down. I pretended it didn’t exist. In other words, I pretended I wasn’t a sexual being. I pretended the desires of my body didn’t exist.
How could I relate to my body having desires that I wouldn’t allow? I needed something to fill the void of pushing my truth and desire down. I needed something to keep me company in the depths of my loneliness and disconnection with myself. Enter dieting.
“It seems like maybe you’re gaining a bit of weight. Maybe you could eat less and move more.” Mom, channeling society. She certainly did not mean any harm by this comment, and I don’t blame her for it. It wouldn’t have held any weight if it wasn’t so deeply approved and propagated by society.
Dieting was unequivocally “a good thing to do.” Packaged and sold by the 50 billion-dollar diet industry as the panacea for all of my problems.
Unhappy? Dieting will make you happy.
Lonely? Dieting will make you attractive and therefore loved.
Feeling unworthy? Dieting will make you worthy.
Great! I wanted to be happy, loved, and worthy.
I couldn’t control homophobia. I couldn’t really control my gayness, even though I tried. I had been told that I could control my weight, and that would give me happiness. So I channeled my energy and attention into losing weight.
I entered the trap of thinking that I could find an individual solution, on my own, to a systemic problem.
Without understanding larger cultural context, we can drink in poison thinking it’s medicine. We can think that we should control ourselves on our own, instead of banding together to fight for a new way. This strategy of solely individual healing to systemic issues is particularly insidious when the solution we’ve been handed actually further embeds us in disempowered systems of control, like in the case of dieting.
Systemic problem equals homophobia. Individual attempt at a solution equals starve myself to lose weight.
Was starving myself an effective way of dealing with my sexuality? Focusing on weight loss did give me a sense of control when life and feelings felt so out of my control. Dieting gave me an anchor. Purpose. Self-worth. External validation. It gave me a way of relating to my “wrong” body that was societally approved.
It sort of worked, as far as coping mechanisms go. I sort of “forgot” about the gayness, the loneliness, and the fear. But that came at a price. I lost my previously loving relationship with my body. I felt like I had control—but really, dieting controlled me.
As Naomi Wolf so powerfully writes in The Beauty Myth, one of the books ushering in third wave feminism in 1990: “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
I find myself vigorously nodding my head whenever I read or share this quote. When I severely controlled my food intake, I felt a certain sort of mastery that people seek when dieting. But ultimately, I felt controlled by the compulsion to limit food in order to lose weight. Losing weight (and being the best student possible) became the main foci of my life. I felt like I lived to control my body, rather than simply living my life, in partnership with my body.
Ultimately, I felt empty, not just physically, but emotionally, and spiritually. My real thoughts, feelings, and desires still existed, no matter how far I had pushed them down. I felt even more lonely because I lacked a real connection with other humans. Most importantly, I also lacked connection to myself, because I hid my own truth and lied to myself.
Just like I knew, deep down, that I was gay, I also knew, deep down, that the way I was relating to food and my body was not good. I knew it wasn’t sustainable, or healthy. Yet, I lived in the lie for a couple years. I watched myself like watching an engrossing movie, totally caught up in the plot.
Certain moments of pain punctured the illusion, and I would become momentarily, painfully aware of the cycle of harm I found myself caught in. I’ll always remember the moment of breaking down crying about eating a pastry. I came home tired and stressed after school. As per usual, I hadn’t eaten much that day. My mom offered me a pastry. I accepted it, ate it, and immediately burst into tears. I felt terrible about myself. How could I have been so thoughtless so as to eat this “bad” food? I both beat myself up, and at the same time, knew that I must be caught in a nightmare to have that strong a reaction to eating a pastry.
When I got weighed and shared that I lost my period at an annual checkup, my doctor told me I may have a “borderline eating disorder.” In my world of looking up to authority figures at that time, this one diagnostic statement supported me in beginning my healing process. In my eyes, it legitimized my struggle. The doctor telling my parents also outsourced what I had been screaming through my behaviors. I could finally acknowledge, to myself and my parents, “Okay, it’s true. I am not okay.”
So, how did I heal?
First, and most importantly, I found love and acceptance through changing my external circumstances. Often in the personal development world, we’re told to work on our internal landscape. But our external landscape matters, too.
In my case, I moved back to Japan and lived with my best friend and her family, attending the American School in Japan, which had visible support of gay students. I saw a kid walking the hallway who had a rainbow pin on his backpack and thought to myself, “oh my God, could it be? Could he be gay?”
That kid came from Palo Alto, and we ended up going to prom together as friends. I didn’t have to pretend with him. I met someone else who became one of my best friends on one of the first days of school when I saw her writing a letter to her girlfriend. “Oh my God, could it be? Like, girlfriend girlfriend?” She came from Ohio, and similarly to the first girl I kissed, I fell in love with her through hours and hours of conversation.
I joined the Gay Straight Alliance and had my first taste of advocacy, and the healing potential of collective action.
I certainly couldn’t even have begun to address homophobia completely on my own as things were for me in Brazil. Going back to my old school in Japan, I helped organize “Ally Day.” I remember so clearly how much it meant to read “gay? fine by me,” on the shirts we distributed. I began to feel accepted—by others and subsequently by myself. Bit by bit, I felt better in my own skin.
After coming out to myself and a few select friends, I began to eat and laugh again. However, the effects of my allegiance to the church of dieting lingered. I still judged myself based on my weight and what I did or didn’t eat. When I finally started letting myself eat again, I felt insatiable. I ate so much. After years of starving myself, I was so hungry. Yes, I was hungry for love, and I was also hungry for food.
This could have easily become a cycle of yo-yo dieting if I had blamed myself for eating so much and put myself on another diet, restricting again. Yo-yo dieting happens almost all of the time because the body is biologically wired to seek food, since it is, in fact, one of the main building blocks for living.
However, luckily, I intuitively had a sense that I needed support, and I applied my curiosity to how to really heal my relationship beyond the paradigm which I sensed had trapped me. I recognized that the coping mechanism of dieting, even though it was literally fed to me as the solution to all of life’s problems, actually caused more harm than good.
I followed that hunch into college, where I took a class on the Cultural Politics of the Body, studying the diet industry, and following the breadcrumbs to fat activism. I learned the biology of why diets don’t work, and culturally why they had taken hold.
Understanding my individual, personal coping mechanism as part of a larger cultural context helped me direct the shame and blame I had toward myself to the appropriate target—outward, to the industry and cultures which had shoved this misguided system down my throat.
Think about it—if everything the diet industry promised really worked (i.e., if diets actually worked to keep weight off long-term), they would put themselves out of business.
I decided to learn everything I could about brave new anti-diet ways of approaching food. What did I learn? Diets don’t work. And by “work,” I mean that they don’t accomplish the main thing that they’re purported to do—help you lose weight. They don’t. In fact, there’s research about how they can increase one’s set-point weight.
Not to mention that the underlying assumption that “thin equals healthy” is not backed up by science. I’ll let you explore that one on your own—if you don’t believe it, I’m not going to convince you now. If you’re curious about this possibility, I encourage you to research on your own, particularly following the threads of the thinkers I cite below.
Our bodies are smart and we can listen to them. Dieting breaks the trust because it’s based in following external rules, so if we’ve dieted we have to really consciously relearn to trust our bodies.
To understand the science between why diets don’t work, I suggest Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, by Dr. Linda Bacon. She presents a convincing counterargument to common assumptions about weight and health. This book, first published in 2008, contributed to more mainstream understanding and acceptance of what fat activists had been saying for the previous 60 years through the skillful combination of strong scientific research presented clearly, in easy to understand language. Dr. Bacon explains the science of why diets don’t work to keep weight off long-term and are actually harmful, and proposes a Health at Every SizeⓇ (HAES) alternative, weight neutral approach to health.
More recently, Dr. Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor also co-wrote Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight, which widens the dialogue to include the impact of oppression on health, eating, and weight, and some may find this to be a more accessible read.
For those looking for a quicker read, Health At Every Size (HAES): A Guide for Binge Eating Recovery is an excellent blog post by Isabel Foxen Duke, a binge eating recovery coach.
I also highly recommend Caroline Dooner’s recent book, The F*ck It Diet:Eating Should Be Easy, which explains the why and how of eating from a Health at Every SizeⓇ perspective, including journaling prompts and action items. You can get the gist of the basic principle from the title. F*ck it. Eat what you like, when you like. Apparently Margaret Chou has also naturally found (and summarized) the F*ck It Diet herself. Although she does share that she lost weight from it, which is not part of Dooner’s F*ck It Diet, and what ultimately healed my relationship with food and my body.
What I’ve found to be key in forging and maintaining an easefulrelationship with food in a way that helps me feel well in all of the ways—physically, emotionally, and mentally—has been increasing both internal and external knowledge, and then making my own decisions from a place of care rather than punishment.
To truly learn to eat again, I also had to actively read fat activists, and convince myself that if letting myself listen to my hunger and eating led to weight gain, that it was actually okay. Part of breaking free from the shackles of dieting had to include an active acceptance and celebration of all bodies, including fat ones. I had to really recognize that just like my gayness wasn’t a problem to control, fatness isn’t a problem to control. It’s homophobia and fatphobia that we need to battle.
I starved myself in a misguided attempt to find acceptance. Ultimately, I had to do the work of accepting myself. I had to accept so many levels.
Accept my queerness.Accept my hunger.Accept my body.Accept my emotions.
Basically, I had to accept my humanness.
Acceptance takes work. It is not a passive process. It takes support. I had a tremendous amount of luck, privilege, and support to be able to do this work so that diet culture, fatphobia, and homophobia didn’t steal decades of my life.
In addition to studying these topics in college (particularly in “Cultural Politics of the Body”—thanks Professor Molé!), I participated in a semester-long residential leadership program at a yoga center, which gave me a supported opportunity to heal. I got to integrate these intellectual understandings on an embodied level. I got to practice slowing down and really listening to myself on all of the levels. I got to practice trusting in a supportive container.
Now, I have a relationship of loving gratitude and also neutrality with food and my body. My energy and attention goes to my passions, my relationships, and the new world I want to be part of creating where we celebrate and respect every single body.
I couldn’t have done it on my own. I share my story in the hopes that some tidbit might be helpful to you in your own journey.
What about you? Do you have any habits that might seem “good” to the external society, but are really tactics to avoid something about yourself that you need some support to face, accept, and ultimately maybe even celebrate? I see you. No shame. We all do it. Coping mechanisms are basically necessary for navigating this world which tries to beat so many of us down in an attempt to maintain the current power structure.
And, together, with support, we can take back our power. We can recognize when we’re outgrowing our coping mechanisms and it’s time to do the next level of work of nourishing ourselves in deeper ways.
Let’s stop starving ourselves and start nourishing ourselves.
Especially those of us who are marginalized in various ways.
I know this is hard. I know this takes work. It takes community. It takes support. And it is possible.
~
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