I remember thinking I was fat when I was four years old. I remember standing at the barre in ballet class, looking in the mirror, and comparing my body to everyone else’s. I remember using food to cope with my emotional anxieties at an early age. On the outside, I had a tremendous amount of privilege growing up, which made it complicated to live amidst the pain in my mind and the trauma within my body. I started starving myself at age eleven. I struggled with an eating disorder, mostly bulimia, for a full decade. I was molested for a year and a half in high school and raped my first month of college, the week before my younger brother was hit by a car and killed.
Two years later, I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my best friend and I laid out my entire life, trauma by trauma, and had a major realization. I was killing myself. I had actively been putting my body in jeopardy for ten years. Other people had violated my body, and my brother no longer had a body at all. Everyone only gets one body in their lifetime. I knew I had to start treating mine differently. I made a choice to love my body for the rest of my life. Every single day.
Recovery was like peeling layers of an onion. First, I promised myself that purging was never going to be an option. I learned to sit with what it felt like not to purge. Then, not to binge. Then, not to eat emotionally. Then, not to fear food. Then, not to fear my body. And I learned that how I eat and move has to come directly from within me. It took a lot of practice, and I learned the art of intuitive eating, where I eat what I want, when I want, eat when I’m hungry, and stop when I’m full. That has single-handedly been the tangible practice that’s allowed me to maintain full recovery for the past ten years.
I witness all the ways the world tells bodies not to love themselves. From the billion-dollar diet industry to war, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and all oppressions. I know that the choice to love my body is both revolutionary for my ability to live in my own body, and also the key to allowing me to love and respect other people’s bodies. Because I made a choice to recover fully, I decided every day doesn’t have to be a struggle. I’ve learned to sit with my feelings. To feel everything and wait – and it’s utterly intoxicating.
Even though I love my entire body, there are moments that are difficult. Sometimes I feel fat, and when I think I feel fat, I remember that fat is not a feeling. There’s no such thing as feeling fat. So when I feel fat, I know that means I’m feeling something else, and it’s worth figuring out what that is. In these moments especially, I take deep slow breaths and I remember that my body’s ability to do this incessantly, unconsciously, and involuntarily is a miracle. I choose to be grateful in these moments. Grateful for everything my body can do, and everything my body has overcome. I choose to love my body.
