Processed sugar & guilt

I don’t know how to start this.

Sometimes there’s good days.

Sometimes there’s bad.

I think about it a lot.

I think about how it makes me feel.

The emptiness.

Is it control? That’s what people smarter than me say.

I wait and wait and wait. I think I like waiting. Makes me feel like I’ve earned it.

I wait until I see the stars in my eyes and I lose feelings in my hands. But I walk past my mirror and see the smaller version of myself.

I poke and prod until I’ve identified all the things wrong with me.

When will the eyes of my reflection look at me with kind eyes? When will she love me?

When you’ve been told your whole life that you need to lose weight, suddenly you don’t feel like you’re good enough. What a shitty thing to say to a little kid. I was only 7, maybe 8. I remember hearing the tone of disappointment from my pediatrician when she told my mom I needed to lose some weight, I didn’t understand why but all I know is that a few weeks later, I was sitting in front of a giant desk with my mom next to me while another doctor explained the food pyramid to us. She told us what foods to cut out and what foods to add in. I tuned her out, at least that’s what I thought. But her words are seared into my brain forever.

It’s not easy growing up hating everything about yourself. Hating how your childlike body feels too soft, too squishy. You never forget those moments of shame when your mother tells you to stop eating so much. You never forget those moments of regret when you accidentally over-ate. I was also the big girl of my friend groups growing up. I envied the girls who could shop in clothes that correlate to their ages. I envied the people who were told they were too skinny and that they needed to eat more. They had the luxury of enjoying food, whereas I always felt ashamed.

Bodies change and we get older. By the time I was in college I thought I finally learned how to love myself. I was no longer pinching and prodding my body and I was starting to embrace my “curves.’’ I had moments of doubt though. Constantly questioning whether or not I was eating the right things, if I was eating at the right times. There were still all these rules in my head that I didn’t know how to escape from. But my body kept changing, kept growing, kept expanding. The more it kept growing, the harder it was for me to love it, to be kind to it.

It makes it harder when a lot of the conversations we have as adults is how much we want to lose x amount of weight. There is so much normalized internalized fatphobia within all of us and it all comes out so casually, but it cut me like a knife when I saw people smaller than me complain about how much they hated themselves. In their eyes they must find me repulsive too. In my eyes, I started to find me repulsive too.

When we all spent that year at home, there was so much talk about how we were all in this together and it’s okay that there was weight gain because this was a once in a lifetime type of thing. But the talks of “it’s okay” quickly turned into “I gotta lose this quarantine belly.” The funny thing is people say they do it because it makes them feel better, they’re doing it for their health. Perhaps there is some truth in that statement. But no one will ever admit that everyone hates being fat because we treat fat people like shit.

Here I am, in the middle of all of it just trying to find some sense. Trying to find a shred of love for myself. But I hadn’t realized that I had stopped eating regular meals. Cooking brought me anxiety and the idea of feeding myself gave me nothing but more shame spirals. I went grocery shopping less and less and when I did, I could only get the basics. The shame worsened when I tried on all the clothes that fit me in 2019 but not in 2021. No one knows that even in those moments of pure hunger, I’ve never felt prettier. It makes me feel smaller, which makes me feel like I’m finally doing something right. But through therapy, I realized that these are disordered eating patterns, I have an eating disorder and I need help.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending right now, life is rarely that simple. I don’t know where to go to find treatment. What does that even look like for someone like me? Someone who isn’t in dire need, someone who doesn’t stereotypically fit the criteria of an eating disorder. Someone who does eat every day but chooses to skip meals, who purposefully ignores hunger cues for as long as possible, until it’s physically painful. Someone who doesn’t want to be in a room where there’s a white doctor explaining the food pyramid to me again, just like how they did when I was 7. I think of little me sitting in that doctor’s office and I want to give her a hug. I want to tell her I’m sorry for failing her. For still not liking who I see in the mirror. But I am trying everyday to see the joy in eating. To allow myself to indulge without feeling guilty. Because it’s the guilt that’s killing me, not the processed sugar.