My body and Dysmorphia

Trigger warning: disordered eating

Sometimes I forget how much time I’ve spent trying to make myself feel better about my body. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like anything of significance has happened between now and three and a half years ago when I would question the caloric value of rice. I don’t remember the countless hours wasted worrying about what I ate that day, what I would need to eat tomorrow to make up for it, or what I could physically do to make everything “worth” it.

Although this daily operation feels far from my memory, there are days, and several ways, where my mind is taken straight back to the original user manual. Suddenly, I’m staring at my stomach in the mirror, wondering how I’ve gained ten pounds, and contemplating how many calories my lunch will be. Most of the time, I can snap out of this and don’t let it interfere with my decisions. Lately, however, I’m finding these days of regression are becoming more frequent. It’s becoming harder to remind myself of the significance of this bullshit. Mentally, I understand how unhelpful it is to be constantly reminded of how you could potentially not be worthy of all the things you need (love, affection, kindness) due to something outside of your control, ie: how you look. What my body dysmorphia does, because she knows that I’m smarter than her, is try to manipulate my emotions by convincing me that my weight, and how I feel about it, is in my control. I’ll get sucked into this because she’s half right. I know that how I feel about my body is in my own hands. This is why I intended to give up the control I falsely held for 6 years. To keep your body at a specific weight, that it doesn’t necessarily want to be at, does not actually ensure that you are worthy of all the things you need (love, affection, kindness). Body dysmorphia is projecting that weight loss, and the maintenance of the arbitrary scale number, will secure everything you’ve ever wanted. She’s lying.

I know this when I think of it.

When she is louder than me, when she has been fed by too many unintentional comments from people around me, when she knows that I am tired and have been numbing my stress with comfort food, I think that she is telling the truth. I think that I have ruined my life by letting go of daily weigh-ins. I think that if I had kept up with only eating 1,200 calories per day, I wouldn’t have gained this weight and that’s the reason that I’m so unhappy. I don’t care about how hungry I was. I don’t care about how I didn’t enjoy going to dinners with friends because I was so concerned with how everything on the menu was “unhealthy” and would throw me off my meal plan. I don’t care about how the second that I knew that she was lying, my life was automatically filled with overwhelming joy, love, compassion, kindness, and abundance. When the conditions are right for her, I realize that she still lives in me.

For now, I’m able to let the dissonance flow in and out of my body like a loose blockage in a drain. It goes in, and then it goes out. I’ve gone back to normal and waited for her to reappear. As these moments of rest are becoming fewer and farther between her nagging me to starve myself, I wonder if I might one day forget for the last time that my life, my spirit, and my heart are better when she’s not around. Instead of my consistent worry that my size is holding me back, I am now concerned about the potential to be held down again. Does this inherently release me from the prison that I once understood as comfort and home, or am I inevitably bound to return here again and again until it is all that I know forever?

Healing is not linear. I’m aware that my responsibility to dismantle my body dysmorphia is only as likely to be accomplished as the destruction of current society. As I continue to remind myself that the happiest, most well version of my body is the woman I have created, I will also not be able to avoid the constant downpour of opposite arguments. She exists only to keep me in line with what I have been taught, how I have been raised, and what is expected of me. As mentioned, she’s partially right. The world we live in may only find me worthy of love, affection, or kindness if I follow her rules. Maybe the missing piece that will keep her quiet and allow me to flourish in my joy is knowing that she is, in some ways, always telling the truth and why it’s vital to never listen to a word she says.

To let go of body dysmorphia, I need to know that what I’m giving up was never going to bring me love, affection, or kindness at all - ever. Because to listen to her, to do what she says, to build my life around her will only bring me halfway.

Great job, you’re skinny, but not skinny enough.

You had a nice workout but it wasn’t exerting enough, you need to be more tired.

That meal was really delicious, but it wasn’t healthy enough - you used olive oil, which is bad for you.

Letting her win only makes sure that I lose every time. I gave her up three years ago because I was tired of losing a game I didn’t sign up to play.