Because I want to be honest, this post is hard to write. Because being vulnerable is always hard, even if it’s often worth it… Anyone who’s read my newest collection, Her Whole Bright Life, knows I struggle with disordered eating. That collection opens with a poem titled “Self-Portrait” and contains the lines:
I cannot stop…counting calories…seeing every bite an act I need to undo
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A few pages later the poem “When My Therapist Asks How I’m Doing” appears and contains the lines:
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I don’t tell her of my daily / ritual of stripping down, exhaling every ounce of breath / before stepping onto the scale.
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So it’s not a secret, but it’s also not something really I talk about. I write about it, but putting it in a poem is somehow easier for me than saying I struggle with disordered eating. Saying those words out loud is scary. And there’s a lot of shame that goes with disordered eating — the fact that I’m 44 and still fighting my body is embarrassing and feels ridiculous, even though I know it’s not.
My disordered eating contains three parts: counting and restriction of calories, excessive exercise, and binge eating. These three behaviors form the trifecta of my disordered eating and take up so much space in my brain.
Last week something happened – my scale died. Just as the poem says, every morning I step onto it and the rest of my day is built around the number I see. I bought new batteries but when I put them in, my scale did something strange – it gave me an error message. I stepped onto the scale: ERROR. I stepped off and stepped back on, trying to get it to reset itself and the numbers lit up, telling me I weighed 9.7 pounds. I took the batteries out, put them back in, and stepped on it again. This time it gave me the error message and then told me I weighed 91.3 pounds. Upon realizing the scale was, for whatever reason, no longer working, I tossed it into the garbage and texted a friend. She also suffers from disordered eating and understands my unhealthy attachment to my scale. “Go without it for a while,” she suggested, “see how you feel.” I thought, “I’ll order a new one tonight…”
Later that day I got a message from the app I use to track my eating and exercise (calories in/calories out) offering a lifetime subscription at a reduced rate. I immediately paid it. And then I stopped and thought about what I’d just done – did I really want to keep tracking every bite, every snack, every morsel of food that went into my mouth for the rest of my life?! Couldn’t I just learn to eat without the burden of knowing the calorie count of every meal? Couldn’t I just workout hard because I love the way it makes me feel, rather than focusing on the calories I burned in an hour?
That night, while scrolling through Instagram, I came across this post on binge eating. I felt like I was holding my breath as I watched it. She was describing me. And I didn’t like it. It can be hard to see yourself in something you find ugly. In something you feel ashamed of.
After watching that video on Instagram I started thinking about my eating, about my body, about what I wanted. I went to bed with these thoughts swirling around in my brain. When I woke up the next day I decided I wanted to change. I didn’t want to continue to fight this monster, I didn’t want to continue to give so much energy into hating myself and my body. So I did something brave. I focused on how I was feeling when I ate and what I was actually craving. I journaled that morning, telling myself I was ready for a new way of living. I went to the gym and had a hard workout but I didn’t record it in the app I’ve used daily for over 5 years. I ate that day when I felt hungry and stopped when I was satisfied. I went to bed that night feeling content and proud.
And then I did the same thing the next day and the next and the next. It’s now been a week since I participated in the behaviors that I’ve held close for so long. It’s hard to let go of habits, it’s hard to rewire my brain into new thinking. But I’m determined to do it, I’m determined to love myself and have a better relationship with food.
And of course because I’m a poet I’ve been writing, albeit rather crappy poems about this. It’s what we do, we write our way through it. This is from an untitled poem, written the day I decided to make a positive change and stop battling my body:
And when I stopped bingeing the world didn’t / crack open but I think, maybe / my heart did.
