The
podcast this week discussed a rule for waiting 24 hours to post to see if the need to share passed. Virginia Sole-Smith and were discussing Devorah’s wonderful book Growing Up in Public. I haven’t read the book yet, but the 24 hour posting rule resonated with me. I feel torn about sharing about my kids when they are still too young to really understand what it means for me to talk about them in a public space. Today I wanted to share about my kids because they are directly responsible for me wanting to do the work to help them have a more positive relationship with eating than me. I had a triggering interaction with a new healthcare provider this past Friday, and I can’t let it go without sharing.I started reading
about a year ago. I finished her most recent book Fat Talk over Labor Day weekend, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. My 5 star review of Fat Talk on Goodreads sums up my feelings well.The most important parenting book I have ever read, but it is for you even if you are not a parent. This was a very tough read. I can’t imagine any person who hasn’t been damaged by diet culture and this book will help promote healing for all people in any size body. As a person with a history of disordered eating for myself and my sister, it was very hard to read what triggered eating disorders in different families. Research is top notch, from a sociological perspective I loved how in depth Sole-Smith went in her discussions and follow ups with the families. My 6 yo has had a recent growth spurt like me at this age and I have heard more body comments lately that made me feel this was a very necessary read to get ahead of it if I can possibly protect him more from frankly a lifetime of feeling like I needed to be smaller. I’m thankful to my kids for helping me appreciate my body and get past my misguided attempts at intentional weight loss and participating in diet culture. I haven’t spoken badly about my body in front of them since my 4 yo was born, the mental process is a work in progress.
There were so many moments I screenshotted pages for future reference. The line that moved me to tears on the last page cemented my 5 star review.
“We’ve been told that fat kids are failures and proof of our own poor parenting. They are not. Fat kids are just as smart, capable, strong, beautiful, and lovable as their thin peers. And every child deserves to grow up in a world that celebrates, protects, and respects their bodies and their fundamental right to body autonomy.”
I hope my kids can grow up in a world where the anti-fat bias does change and the answer to being bullied over weight isn’t to say it would be easier to change your body. All bodies are beautiful and I hope they know that and will always believe it.
I read about fatphobia, body positivity, and the Health at Every Size movement for the first time in May 2020 in Matt McGorry's Journey to Radical Body Positivity. When my second son was born, I saw myself falling back into my patterns of undereating during the early postpartum period, and my thoughts turned to the disordered patterns which are uncomfortably familiar to me now. I was thinking I “looked better” and thinking about everyone telling me, “You look great to have a brand new baby.” I initially did lose all the weight I had gained with Naveed during the first month and I stayed at that size until the pandemic. I started panicking in May 2020 as I slipped into depression and anxiety, and I wanted to start restricting my eating again. But instead I read Matt McGorry’s article and I...didn’t restrict my eating. I couldn’t put a name to my thought process at the time, but this week
wrote a wonderful piece about emotional eating and the underlying part is that emotional eating occurs because food is comforting. If food weren’t comforting, then there wouldn’t be so much stress about how we are all eating emotionally. There is morality tied to emotional eating because so much of diet culture is about “willpower” and the idea everyone should be in a smaller body.When Naveed was 10 months old, I was panicking about my weight going back up, and I had a conversation with my mom. I didn’t see my parents for a couple months during the early pandemic, but I talked to every immediate member of my family every day. There were a lot of FaceTime calls in April and May. My mom said, “If we all ARE going to die, then don’t you want to have enjoyed your food?” It’s hard to think about now, but the fear of family members dying especially our grandparents was real. My worst fear did come true when my husband’s grandad died in May 2020 though it wasn’t from COVID. I regret I didn’t see him more in those last few months. All the grieving of the loss of our regular lives was tied into my disordered eating thought patterns. I went back to working out again in June 2020 when Fit4Mom returned to outdoor workouts. I still hadn’t quite figured out my thoughts around body positivity but I made it a personal goal that summer to say zero negative words about my body in front of my kids and to take more pictures with them throughout the summer. I was very “online” during the pandemic and Busy Toddler’s page convicted me on taking more #proofofmom photos. I don’t want to go into all my feelings surrounding the pandemic, weight fluctuations, and the grief of my grandma and uncle dying in an 18 month period with accompanying body changes for me. Bodies change, and I don’t want to dwell on how my body has changed over the last 4 years.
I want to call out healthcare providers for continuing to perpetuate fatphobia and ignoring Health at Every Size.
has done great work in this area, and upon coming home from the doctor I looked up her cards for medical doctors. I am still a straight size, but my BMI now means I always get coded as having “elevated BMI.” I don’t owe an explanation to anyone, but the only time I have had a normal BMI in my adult life was when I was studying for the bar exam in 2013 and had severely distorted eating patterns. I have tried to trace the beginning of my disordered thoughts.My sister was struggling our senior year at Duke, and I found out her secretive over exercising habits the summer of 2010. I also lost weight unintentionally that summer due to my own stress about moving to a new city alone for law school, navigating the pain of being in love with someone who was never going to want to be with me, and helping my college roommate plan her Ohio wedding from SC. I was very honored she asked me to be her maid of honor, but the logistics of trying to help plan bachelorette party with her high school friends and her much younger sister was difficult. I did not delegate until it became clear I couldn’t handle it on my own. I started law school and decided to stay in Greensboro for the summer after I found a job at Home Instead.
In summer 2011, my now husband was my new boyfriend, and we had weekly date nights out. He was a big Groupon user, and acts of service, specifically feeding people great food, is his love language. He cooked for me more starting in October, but my weight was higher than it had been throughout high school and college, and I had gained some weight during my first year of law school already so I was already stressed. My husband was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 18, and he played rec league kickball and soccer. He told me he had been working out daily at the gym for 1.5 hours following the previous Christmas where he had to go to the hospital after a bad low. When we started dating, he was deeply ingrained in diet culture because he had been getting great feedback on his diabetes management from his endocrinologist and he was getting a lot of positive feedback from peers. My feedback that he was hotter only because a full beard suited him better than the Super Mario-esque moustache he was sporting when we first met in April was mostly ignored. I began working out more consistently during that summer because my friend wanted a running partner. We alternated houses for who made lunch following our runs, we both had an afternoon work schedule. We didn’t lose weight and we decided to discontinue our running workouts in September.
My husband is in a family of athletes, they all played soccer throughout their life, and his parents are both naturally athletic and running the yearly Reindeer Romp 5K is a big part of the family culture. The first year we were dating I wasn’t fully aware of how his family interacted until we went to the beach in May 2012. Two weeks before we went to the beach, I had been in a car accident while my husband met with a female friend for lunch who had come to town for Mother’s Day. I was driving home for Mother’s Day when I was in the accident. She commented I had crashed the car on purpose so he wouldn’t eat lunch with her. I found the comment very suspicious and subsequently read his Facebook messages with her. He was always logged in on our shared laptop at his house. The intimate details of those messages have only been shared with my sister and therapist , but there were comments in their conversation about me being unathletic and not his usual type from 6 months prior. I logically know most people would not have been triggered by that conversation. The date of their discussions, I remembered us having a dispute in our nightly phone call over my January term group project to research whether a planned religious magnet should have access to public school extracurriculars. I knew he was mildly annoyed with me that night, and we had been trying to decide if we were a forever kind of love. I thought we had decided we were when he said I love you in February.
To see the comments from January made me question the strength of our relationship. I told him I didn’t want to go to the beach with his family feeling insecure about us. I saw my husband’s middle brother at the gym. He said, “Are you excited for the beach next week? I said “Umm...Nemat and I are in a weird space, I’m not sure if I can come.” He gave me a level stare and said, “Tell my brother to stop being weird, [Mazi’s girlfriend] Linds is looking forward to meeting you and hanging out with you. It’ll be fun.”
I went to the beach. Beach trips are inherently triggering for people in larger bodies. I was straight size back then, but I had trouble being around some of the thinnest, most beautiful people I had ever spent time with on that trip. Navigating spending an extended amount of time with his family for the first time was difficult too.
I started my internship at the public defender the Tuesday after Memorial Day when we got back from the beach. Our county has two offices for one county, and I was working in the office with 8 attorneys. We had 4 interns, two women including me, and two men. All the attorneys at that time were men. In an office full of men in their late 20s and early 30s, they chose to eat lunch out on a near daily basis during the 12:30-2 pm break. I wanted to participate in the office culture so I also ate lunch out on a near daily basis. My former running partner decided to try Zumba and I joined her on a 10 class pass. Because I was eating huge lunches every day and working until the close of the courthouse, we would work out from 7-8 pm and chat after class, and by the time I got home I wouldn’t eat much dinner. At that time Nemat was still working out at night and we didn’t eat dinner that often together. I mostly stayed at his house because it was closer to High Point. Similar to 2010 I unintentionally lost weight again. This time when I lost weight, I got so much positive feedback I decided I needed to keep going. My friend told me about logging food on an app. I put in the amount of weight I wanted to lose, and it gave me a restricted calorie number. I stayed on a restricted calorie diet from 2012-2014. I consistently lost weight at the supposedly safe level of 1-2 pounds a week for the next 13 months.
The summer of 2013 was my most mentally unhealthy. I graduated law school and I was studying for the bar exam. I was always told how great I looked, my now husband had no idea I was struggling with eating because he made me dinner every night and I ate it. From his perspective our nights weren’t very different from when I was in school. I studied all day, so I rarely studied at night. He made me dinner, we watched Jeopardy, and I fell asleep. He didn’t know I was drinking coffee and walking the streets of Greensboro every hour for “brain breaks” and snacking on a can of almonds when I felt like I was going to pass out. He didn’t know I walked to daily workouts at the Downtown Y so I wouldn’t have to move my car and could go back to studying after I worked out every day at 4:30 pm. My sister got married the weekend after I took the bar exam, and I wish I could say I got better after that but as
has taught me, of course I started to gain weight back when I stopped severely restricting as I did during the 8 weeks of studying for the bar.Labor Day Weekend 2013, I found out I failed the bar exam. A few weeks later I found out I failed by 1 point. And once again I was panicking and working out every day to try to get back to my lowest weight. First it was triggered because I was studying for the bar again, and I was trying to study while working part time at a small law firm in High Point. Then Nemat and I got engaged on my birthday and I needed to “look my best” for my wedding. I couldn’t be fatter than I was at my sister’s wedding! We hadn’t set a date, but we started planning when I was done taking the Februrary bar exam. We planned most aspects in one trip to the beach in March 2014. The toughest aspect of this time of my life was my husband’s family had only known me during this time of disordered eating. No one I was spending the majority of my time with actually knew how mentally unhealthy I was; I talked to my parents but when they were in Columbia and I was living with Nemat alone, I wasn’t nearly as connected with them as I am now. My sister Laura and I saw each other frequently, but frankly we both were struggling with underemployment post graduation, and we weren’t much help to each other at the time. In April I found out I passed the bar, and after restricting my eating and logging every food I ate for 1.5 years, I started eating snacks again. I berated myself for it, I vividly remember a time I was home alone while Nemat went to see his best friend’s grandad at Myrtle Beach before his grandad died. I was watching The Spectacular Now, eating Doritos and M&Ms knowing I was never going to “lose the last 10 pounds” before my wedding.
I credit our wedding day with being the day I found out my thought patterns were very bad. My mom took a picture of me in the locker room of the restaurant when I was finishing getting ready. My stomach didn’t look flat in this side view picture. I cried on my wedding night because I had “worked so hard,” and I still found a picture that made me unhappy. I won’t diminish how much I enjoyed our wedding day because I did feel beautiful the majority of the day. I didn’t sleep well the night before, and I know the sleep deprivation and adrenaline of the day were all adding to my emotionality. Of course Nemat told me I was the most beautiful woman in the world when I was crying at 3 am over a damn Facebook picture. I hate that I have this memory. I hate to see the way diet culture has damaged all of us.
Mostly I hate going to a new healthcare provider when I don’t write a whole damn newsletter including my life history and patterns of disordered eating for myself and my sister. We are more at risk to be triggered by even one weight loss comment. This older white man who already treats my husband and parents felt the need to talk to me about intentional weight loss. The appointment was fine up until the triggering moment. I have been treated for high blood pressure since I began trying to get pregnant in October 2015. I have never gone off blood pressure meds, but I have also never increased my dose. I have had no health complications from my high blood pressure so far, I was closely monitored for preeclampsia during my pregnancies, and I got weekly growth ultrasounds for my kids from 30 weeks until their birth due to growth restriction concerns. Both my pregnancies ended in full term births. My OB had planned to induce at 39 weeks. Nemat came spontaneously 10 days before the scheduled induction. After a failed version attempt, we scheduled Naveed for c-section due to him being frank breech.
I reviewed my health history with the new doctor I told him my paternal grandmother (who has always been thin) had been on blood pressure meds for 65 years since she had my dad. She has no other health complications from her high blood pressure. My dad has likewise been on medication for at least a decade. I can’t recall when they started medicating him, but there were many years of him getting elevated readings when donating blood. I am proud of myself for standing up for myself and seeing genetic component written in my chart. I wish I could talk about the Health at Every Size movement to a new doctor who I don’t need to impress. I was happy to talk to the doctor about my workouts and finding joy in Taylor Swift spotlight workouts for cycling, dancing, and running. He wanted to tell me how good walking is for health. I saw him hesitate before he commented on my weight. He couldn’t let it go. He had to suggest to me perhaps my elevated blood pressure would go away if I lost weight. I wish I could deal with ludicrous comments like this perfectly in the moment. I didn’t educate him on how a lifetime of dealing with generalized anxiety can also affect blood pressure or how fear of receiving healthcare in a larger body can also raise blood pressure and over time it can stay high. I walked to the lab to get my blood work done, and I made no further comment to him. I am disappointed in the healthcare system for continuing to print off rote forms about striving for weight loss. Those papers went straight into the recycling bin. I read the Health at Every Size worksheet at the encouragement of a
commenter.Does it help the fatphobia ingrained in the healthcare system if I write a newsletter? Do the older guard of doctors care they are wrong about the health benefits of weight loss? Do they care health promoting behaviors I already engage in are more responsible for my long term longevity than intentionally trying to lose weight again and continuing to weight cycle for the rest of my life? I spent 25 years of my life trying to be smaller. I don’t want to waste the next 65 years trying to be smaller. I don’t have the time to hate my body anymore. I have an important job of parenting boys in a world full of fatphobia. I have stories to write.
I went to the 18th Annual Bookmarks Festival yesterday. I took this note from the keynote speech with authors Celeste Ng and Jason Mott: “You voice matters and people need to hear your voice. Our differences make our life richer, and our perspectives add to our experience.”
For all the what about health people, all my labwork was perfect.
My sister Laura encouraged me to write my story. I haven’t found notations of diagnosis of atypical anorexia prior to 2013, and neither I nor my sister ever received any diagnosis. Cases of atypical anorexia were historically treated as outliers and less harmful because the patients were at a “healthy” weight. Our doctors only praised us for our weight loss during our times of disordered eating. She received therapy through her grad school program and credits that therapist with working through her experience. I never shared my thought processes of 10 years ago with my sister, husband, or any family member until I started going to therapy this year. If any part of this story resonated with you, please like and subscribe to my posts. If you feel seen in this post, please comment. Life is too short to worry about taking up less space for the rest of your life.
I’m so proud of you for writing this! I love you and I appreciate how vulnerable you are in this piece. I’m proud to call you my best friend, and I wish I had known back then what you were going through so I could’ve been more help to you the way you were to me.
Wow, yes this resonated! Thank you for sharing your story.