How I Learned to Love My Body

Trigger Warning: Eating Disorders/Obsessive Dieting and Body Issue Themes

The following blog post is not meant to glorify any sort of diet. It is not meant to provide

any medical advice or opinion. There are sensitive themes and these are my personal

experiences.

As a millennial, I, along with many others, grew up in the culture of dieting. Our mothers were always on diets, our friends talked about diets, I remember reading about different diets in Teen Magazine as a preteen and in Seventeen Magazine as a teen. Diets were something very few of us could avoid. I suffered for a long time, always thinking that I was never small enough or good enough and I still have friends that do this still. This blog post is about not feeling confident in myself and the incredibly drastic steps I took to feel better about myself that were completely unnecessary. I am very thankful for the practitioners and mental health professionals that I have in my life that have helped me learn that being happy with myself is the healthiest way I can be. I hope that you enjoy my story and share some kindness with others that may be feeling insecure about themselves.

As I stand at the ballet barre, facing the mirror, I just stare. When I stare, I don’t see a

young, vibrant woman with her future in front of her, I see softness at my midsection as

my dance belt is pressing into my waist, I see thighs that are not nearly as thin as the

other girls, I see heavy cleavage pouring through the opening of the top of my leotard. I see

pounds, I see frustration, I see my future as a ballerina or performer slipping away from me. I see that as I stare at a 130lb, 5’6” healthy young woman. Now, I look back at photos from

when I was 16/18/20/22 years old and I wonder what the heck was wrong with me and why I thought so poorly of myself and my body.

The first diet I remember putting myself on was at the end of my seventh-grade year.

That year I had turned 13 and my body had changed a lot. I was an active teen who was

obsessed with dancing, and I was eager to do more than just the two nights a week I went to classes. I remember a Friday night in May of 1997, being in seventh grade and I had just

attended the eighth-grade graduation ceremony at my junior high because I was playing

trumpet in the band. I remember afterwards there was cake and punch and as I was offered a piece of cake by one of the junior high teachers, and I responded, “No thank you, I am on a diet.” They looked back at me with a puzzled look on their face and just said, “okay.”

I also have a lot of memories of tagging along to Weight Watcher’s meetings with my mom,

working out alongside of her at Curves, following along with whatever diet she was on at the time. Recently, I was looking through some photos of when I was younger and stared at ones with my mother in them. She wasn’t fat, she was always so thin and she was so beautiful. I knew as I was getting older, that I didn’t get my mother’s body in the genetic game when I was created, I very much had my father’s body, which wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as thin as my mom’s. In the Diet Culture of the 1990’s, my mom was always on a diet, hence, I followed suit and I was always on a diet. She never put me on one, but I think that a lot of women my age probably had similar experiences. I can think of the amount of diet books I saw from ones on how to maximize your Weight Watcher’s points, the South Beach Diet, the Atkin’s Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, and so on and so forth. I have memories of being a freshman in high school and crying to my mom about my

body and how I looked so different than all the other girls in my ballet classes. I didn’t

understand why my boobs were bigger, I never understood why I had such a shape to my body that they didn’t have, which I now know were just curves. I remember hating my breasts and wishing that I was much smaller chested. If I looked in a mirror, I didn’t see a healthy girl, I just saw a fat one (looking back now on photos I know I was never a fat teen though). My mom watched my struggles as I grew up and after a very hefty fight with her one morning before school about me refusing to eat breakfast, and not having much dinner the night before, she made an appointment for me to go see my family doctor. There she, my mom and I had a long conversation about healthy eating and she gave us a referral to see a nutritionist to help me “learn” how to eat appropriately for my age and body type.

I have a lot of negative memories about my body from my youth. I have memories of not

being cast in a specific roles due to my body size. I remember having a lot of attention (that I now know was negative) from boys due to the size of my breasts. I remember wearing sauna suits when I would work out excessively to try to lose every pound that I could. My body was an ongoing fight that I had that I just couldn’t win. It didn’t matter how much I worked out, how little I ate, how hard I worked, I was never happy with my body. If I could go back and have a talk with my 17 year old self, I would give her a giant hug and hold her in front of me and tell her how beautiful she was and how healthy she was. I would tell her to eat food to nourish her body, eat enough calories to be able to provide my body the

energy it needed to keep up with the constant physical activity that I would partake in. I would go back and tell that bright eyed teenager that she has got this, she has got a tribe of amazing people out there to lift her up, that will teach her to love herself, that will love her for just who she is.

Unfortunately, my body issues only got harder as I got older. When I was in college and

would stand in front of a ballet barre, inches from a mirror, multiple times a week, I struggled. Being away at school and truly living on my own for the first time I had to try and balance eating in the student center cafeteria or my sorority house with making ramen in my tiny dorm room on the second floor of Aston Hall, or going out until the wee hours of the morning and truly experiencing alcohol for the first time. Between sugar drinks and heavy beers, pizzas at two o’clock in the morning, my friend Kate, down the hall, perfecting the art of chili mac in the microwave, grabbing Quiznos between classes, and eating off the salad bar at Alpha Chi Omega, there was a lot to balance. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have anyone looking over my shoulder to make sure that I was eating healthy meals three times a day. Instead, I would go through periods of binge eating, living off of energy drinks, eating healthy, excessively working out, or taking diet pills to curb my appetite and give me the energy I needed to study. I never gained the “Freshman Fifteen” but I did gain a lot of unhealthy habits.

Spring of 2005, I found a lump in my right breast, it ended up being nothing to worry

about, but my family doctor still wanted it to be removed. She offered to send me to a plastic surgeon instead of a regular one because I was terrified of having a scar on my breast. The day of my appointment with the doctor, I remember being very nervous. When the nurse brought me back to the examination room, she told me to slip on the gown with it being opened in the front. I sat there and I waited for the doctor to come in, when he did, the first thing he said was, “I can fix those.” I wasn’t there to talk to him about having plastic surgery, but once I had left, he had worked me up to what I jokingly call my “shift and lift.” My boobs were large and lopsided, I hated them. That day the process was started for me to receive a breast reduction and lift. I was so happy, I would finally have a smaller chest and would possibly be able to quit hearing about my body in my ballet classes or when I would audition to be in a show. I remember my mom being very unsure about me doing this. She didn’t understand why I wanted to permanently change my body with surgery, especially being so young. Being a fiery twenty one year old, I didn’t care and thought I knew best for me. That upcoming August, my sister drove me for my surgery in Springfield and then I went home to recover for the upcoming few weeks before fall classes would start.

Following my surgery, after a lot of the swelling was gone, I remember getting on the

scale and thinking I would be twenty pounds lighter because my breasts were so much smaller. I wasn’t. I remember thinking to myself that I had just chopped off my boobs and the scale didn’t budge. I thought it would go down, I meant why wouldn’t it? In my eyes, that meant I must have gained weight and that didn’t sit well with me. I was always unsure and uncomfortable with my body and never felt skinny enough, good enough or pretty enough. My obsession with the scale really began to get worse. I would do thirty minutes of intense cardio before every dance class and then again when it was over. I thought that if I was skinnier that would make everything in life click into place, it would make me happy.

When I was 22, I experienced a personal crisis and I left college right before I graduated. I was overly exhausted, I had pushed my body too much and too far, and I broke.

During my senior year of college, my body started to change again, it didn’t matter how much I moved my body or what I ate, my body was just changing in ways I didn’t expect it to, and I struggled with it. I had started a variety of antidepressants and antianxiety medications in the spring of my senior year in college and my doctors kept telling me that was why I was gaining weight. When I moved home to Lincoln after I took a medical withdraw from school, I went back to working out at the local rec center and tried to eat healthy. I was really struggling, and the weight kept coming on. I knew in my heart that it wasn’t just the antidepressants and antianxiety medications, I knew that there was something going on with my body. Through the summer and early fall, I started having reproductive organ issues related to cysts growing on my ovaries and some of them bursting. In November of 2006, I had my first of many surgeries related to my eventual diagnosis of Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome that I would be later diagnosed with in February of 2012.

Through my early and mid twenties I fought and fought my weight. I tried every diet I

could imagine, I worked out with different trainers and did different work out routines but nothing would make a difference. I kept getting told by my doctors that I was just eating too much even though I knew that I wasn’t eating too much at all. I started the process of some crazy medical weight loss programs, like a straight liquid shake diet for weeks, to buying pre-portioned foods to injecting myself with the HCG hormone to lose weight. Sometime in the summer of 2010 I made the decision that I would have surgery to lose weight. I did the research, and frankly, worked the system to be able to qualify for lap band surgery. I seriously had to gain weight to have this done but I was at the end of my rope and just wanted to lose the weight. I was going to get married, and I wanted to feel beautiful in my wedding dress. In February of 2011 I underwent the surgery to have the lap band placed and I was more than ready to slim down and feel good about myself.

When I woke up from the Lap Band surgery, I was in the room that I would be staying in

for the next couple of days at OSF. I remember my sister Shana being there as well as my

fiancé. I remember the horrible pain I woke up in on the left side of my belly and immediately wondering why I made the choice to put myself through the pain I was in. I was hooked up to a morphine pump and just kept clicking the button on the controller, hoping to have my pain alleviated. I will never forget my sister asking the nurses if I could overdose on the morphine by hitting the button that they placed in my hand, but they assured her it was on a timer and I couldn’t. The following day my fiancé brought me home. The thought of food nauseated me and I had zero interest in having anything, but only being able to consume clear liquids was an awful way to live for a while. I placed so much hope in this surgery. I prayed that it would change my life, that if I lost the weight I would be happy with myself, I would be desirable again to my fiancé, that everything in my life would click into place. I placed so much on hold for planning my wedding. I was engaged for over eight months before I would try on a dress, and trying on wedding dresses was the worst thing I could have had to force myself to do. Eventually I started the process of finding a dress. I wish I could say that I had happy memories surrounding that, but I don’t at all. There were no laughs over champagne with friends and family, there are no photos

at all of me trying dresses, there was no excitement, just anxiety and stress. I went to a bridal appointment with one of my friends and bridesmaids and my mom and I didn’t get the feeling that society tells you that you have to have. Eventually, I ended up trying on dresses alone without any support other than my fiancé driving me from bridal shop to bridal shop in tears.

When I found the dress that I had seen online and wanted and finally tried on, I was at the bridal shop alone because I didn’t tell anyone that I was going. The thought of having other people tell me if I looked nice or not in a dress was very overwhelming and I struggled with it. All I wanted was to feel beautiful on the day I was going to marry my future husband, and unfortunately, because of my negative feelings that I had about myself and my body, I didn’t give myself a chance to feel that way.

A few months before I was married, I was diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome. It was a diagnosis that came with a lot of heavy emotions. At first, the thing that I heard was “this is why your weight is such a struggle” and I heard all of the reasons why. I also

understood that this would mean that I would struggle with ever getting pregnant and having a family, but my doctors told me that they would help me get a handle on it and I needed to really try to lose weight to be able to help the process of getting pregnant. I was started on a variety of medications that would help me with my body being prone to becoming a diabetic with this diagnosis and when the doctors started me on these medications, I did slowly start to lose the weight. With the understanding of my diagnosis, I went back to the surgeon that placed the Lap Band in me and had it completely deflated.

Over the next five years my weight slowly came off and I started feeling so much better

about my body and myself. I was comfortable at a size 8 and felt beautiful for the first time in years. I felt confident, and it was showing through my career as a real estate agent and

community projects. I felt like I could do anything, and the world was my oyster. In April of

2017, my world crashed around me. I found out my husband was having an affair, one that seemed much more intense than any he had been entangled in before and I knew was aware of it. I knew too much about it, and when I would approach him about the affair, he would tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that this affair didn’t exist, “it was all in my head.” That was the beginning of a cycle of abuse that completely rocked my world and the constant gaslighting over the affair caused me to feel like I was going crazy. I went into salvage mode, and when I entered salvage mode, my cortisol levels skyrocketed in my body. High cortisol levels come from your body being under constant stress and being in constant “fight or flight” mode, to try and protect yourself, your body does what it needs to do to survive, and when you are in survival mode in nature, your body hordes calories to protect itself, which meant the pounds started to pack back on. Between being depressed, worried about my life and gaining weight, my body issues continued to get worse. Most people noticed the weight that I was gaining, and that caused me to feel very insecure. I felt bad about my life, my marriage and my body. I struggled over the next few years to feel good about myself and I started to try to do things to make me feel and look better. I became very cautious about what I would wear and how I would look, almost to the point of obsession. All of this, as well as my life and marriage being upside down left me in turmoil both emotionally and physically.

In 2019, I dealt with the major trauma and fall out of my abusive marriage that eventually

led me to a residential treatment center for my trauma in May and June of 2020. My stay at The Refuge, A Healing Place started my journey of learning to be happy with my body and myself. While in treatment at The Refuge, I was diagnosed with Disordered Eating. Disordered eating refers to a range of irregular eating behaviors that may not fit the strict criteria for an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia but still disrupt a person's relationship with food. It can involve behaviors like skipping meals, restrictive dieting, binge eating, or obsessive thoughts about food and weight; when someone's eating habits become unhealthy or harmful, even if they don't meet the clinical definition of an eating disorder.

While I was at treatment, I met with a nutritionist twice a week to discuss my eating behaviors and what was okay for me to do and not okay for me to do. I was told to keep track of what I was eating or worry about the pounds, and I was taught to eat to fuel my body and soul. Between this and a lot of talk therapy surrounding my eating issues and body dysmorphia, I came out of treatment with a much different approach to food that I still have today. I learned to enjoy food, to not stress about the scale and frankly stop stepping on it all together. I can happily say that I haven’t been on a “diet” since I came home from treatment. When I came home, I made the decision to make food a fun experience and something that I didn’t fear. I started to follow cooking blogs and began to cook again. I had always loved cooking before and I took the time that I was home to find the joy in the experience of cooking for the first time in years. When I came home from The Refuge, I was forced to stay in hiding to avoid being subpoenaed in my abuser’s trial for domestic violence against me (see my prior blog post: My Recovery Journey: Forced into Hiding). Cooking and learning to love food was a welcomed escape while I was forced into staying home. I wasn’t able to go out to eat or really leave the house, so this was something that I found comfort in. I ended up creating an Instagram account devoted solely to food, @thedooziefoodie, and it was something that allowed me to share the joy that I found in food and helped push me out of my comfort zone when it came to being public about what I ate. This Instagram account was something that I enjoyed so much. I would post my wins and losses in the kitchen, share delicious things that I loved and it also made it fun for me to “elevate” and make something as simple as eating chicken nuggets and fries out of the air fryer by presenting it beautifully on a plate with a garnish. I took the time to make something special, that we as busy people take for granted. In years gone by, eating

was always a production. Multiple courses, wearing your best to the table, dining was an event, literally. Sometimes I feel like if there isn’t anything good about my day, it is easy to take a handful of simple ingredients and make something that is worth taking the moment to savor, while setting the table, putting a placemat and a cloth napkin down, even if I am all alone.

Since late Spring of 2021, I have lost quite a bit of weight, and by quite a but I mean a

lot. People don’t always recognize me when I bump into them when I am out and about. I

always am asked, how I “did it.” I think that people are hoping that I will tell them that I did some crazy diet, something that they can recreate, they want to know if I am taking medications or injections, they assume that I cannot be doing it on my own. I always respond that I got my mind right. I worked with my doctors to make sure that I was on medications to appropriately treat the symptoms of my PCOS, that I see a doctor that specifically works with women’s hormones. I left a marriage that was unhealthy to me. I decided to put myself, my health and my mental wellbeing first. I stopped worrying about the scale, instead I focus on how I feel. I now work out to feel strong and good about myself, I no longer workout focusing on the amount of calories that I can sweat off in a single session. I take time to make sure I have an adequate amount of sleep. I don’t step on the scale, or at least very, very rarely. When I go to the doctor’s now, I don’t worry about wearing the lightest clothes that I own or avoid eating or drinking a thing before I head to my appointment. I get asked a lot how much I have lost, and my answer is genuinely that I just don’t know. I don’t know because I stopped focusing on it and obsessing over what the scale said day to day.

Learning how to love myself made the difference. Learning that I am happy with who I

am and what I stand for made a difference. Treating my body with grace instead of abuse made a difference. Learning to love food and enjoy the experience made a difference. Choosing me and leaving an unhealthy marriage made a difference. I stopped caring about what society says is the right way to do something or not do something. I eat when my body needs it and I don’t deprive myself.

The diet culture of the 90s is over, forget what the world tells you to do and just do what

you want to do. I literally had multiple surgeries thinking that it would be what I needed to do to feel better about myself and I wish that I hadn’t because at the time, I wasn’t doing it for myself, I was doing it to live up to what I thought I needed to be. I will be honest, I have strongly considered having a cosmetic procedure to take away the sagging skin of the years of fighting my body. I don’t know if I will, but I do know that if I do, it will be for me and me only. It won’t be so someone else can be happy with me. How I feel about me is so much more important. I don’t have ill feelings towards my late mother for encouraging diets when I was growing up, but I do wish I could look at her now and tell her how absolutely beautiful she always was and still is, no matter what size she is. I wish that she would have had someone to hug her at 40 and tell her that she was amazing just the way she was and to throw the diet books into the garbage. I don’t have a daughter to pass those messages on to, but I do my best to tell all women and girls how beautiful they are each and everyday. I hope that you will share that message as well. I am not perfect, I still get insecure and that’s normal and okay but I am thankful for my growth that has allowed me to get to a place where I feel happy about myself.

Loving my body, finally!

In closing, there is no magic pill, injection, diet or workout plan; being happy with yourself and allowing your mind and heart to heal is key, at least it was for me. No matter your size, I hope that you will love yourself and treat yourself kindness and grace, you are amazing and you deserve it.

--Heather

If you or someone you know struggles with an eating disorder, there are people that want to

help. Eating Disorders Helpline-the ANAD helpline toll-free:

1 (888)-375-7767

ANAD’s free eating disorders Helpline is available to provide emotional support and referrals. Call us for any of the following reasons:

- If you think you have an eating disorder

 -If you think someone else has an eating disorder

 -Treatment referrals

 -Support and encouragement

 -General questions about eating disorders