This is so hard to talk about. I can’t quite get into words what’s been brewing in my head about my battle with my body and my constant worry about being fat.
I was never extremely fat. I was never skinny as an adult either. I’ve always had belly fat that I’d obsessed about as an adult. I was (probably still am so envious of people with flat stomachs)
When I was little, I started thinking I was fat. As kids, we were constantly berating each other’s perfectly normal bodies. I guess even just with magazines and a little bit of television, women were being fed the obsession with being thin. My sister and cousins called my sister a ‘lobber’, by which we meant she was a fat slob just because her hips were filling out and her thighs were getting big. In retrospect she was developing an attractive hourglass figure.
I myself saw myself as Humpty Dumpty. We didn’t own a full length mirror so, as hard as it is to believe, I didn’t even know how I looked. I only know I wanted to be thin. Very thin. Like Kim up the road or my cousin Feroza. When I looked down on my body, I saw a perspective distorted image of what I really looked like.
In reality, I was very active and athletic and the one time I glanced at my reflection in the reflective tint of a friend’s long sliding doors leading to the pool, I was amazed at how great I actually looked. I looked amazing, at 14 years of age, I finally really saw what I looked like. Do you think that made life any better? Nope, constantly plagued by thinness or people remarking how I was plumping out, I can’t believe people did that to kids. I hope that it’s no longer a norm.
At some point I taught myself to vomit. Stuck my finger down my throat and that was that. It was a revelation, a great tool to get thin and stay thin. Before long, my mom was onto me, and not dealing with it in a sympathetic way, so I lost the opportunities to vomit as much as I’d wanted to to get as thin as I wanted to. My mum’s intervention was embarrassing to me, and it curbed the purging, but did not cure it, so when I finally went to live on my own in my twenties, it only got worse. Having that control to be able to just get rid of my stomach contents at a whim, turned me into a massive binge eater.
This escalated so much. It just got worse and worse. I never wanted to be anorexic thin and I didn’t always vomit, but when I binged, I vomited. First, only at home, but then a sense of desperation made me lose my initial disgust of crouching, head over a public toilet. The lowest size I ever got down to as an adult was a 10, I’d mostly been a size 12/14 when I wasn’t bingeing and purging. I rotated between periods of no bulimia and then periods of slight progressing to extreme bulimia. I developed acid reflux problems. Even saw specialists about it, knowing full well that my bingeing and purging was the cause of it. I’d have acid reflux for days after a purge. At some point in my late twenties/early thirties I made a decision to just stop. The anxiety and worry and acid reflux just wasn’t worth it. I’d rather be fat and free of all that. And so it was, for years and years. When I opened a business that kept me so busy that the only joy I could find was eating, I blew up to my heaviest weight ever, of about 90kgs.
Now, enter the technological age and all these apps to track your calorie intake and calorie burn, I got back into shape, and it seemed to me the solution to all the universe’s problems to be able to know what I put in and what I burnt off. But guess what, it made me obsess too much and feel so bad about not sticking to the allocated intake of calories, for what my weight loss goals were, I turned to my old friend, the toilet bowl for a purge now and then. It’s then that I noticed that my binges were triggered emotionally. When I felt rejected, and shit about myself, that’s when I binged… and purged.
At the age of 43, at my lowest weight in years, about 74 kg’s, I considered that I’d rather wanted peace of mind, and I needed to enjoy food, because I’d been seeing it as the enemy since I was a teenager. Even when I was bingeing on the most delicious things, I wasn’t experiencing it as a pleasure, but rather as a curse. I felt guilty about every single thing I ate that wasn’t a carrot stick or a blueberry. Delightful carbs were the enemy and I realised that I’d started interpreting feeling of satiation as undesirable and disgusting and sickening. It’s then that I thought to try out hypnotherapy to get over this useless desire to be thin. I did start to wonder how the Caucasian ladies that I saw all around me maintained rake thin bodies, that to me seem unnaturally thin, and based on how much, I knew, exercise was needed, and how little food, to maintain that size, I developed a strong sense of these ladies are either neurotic about their food intake and calorie burn, or also doing what I did, which is purge of the excess. I can’t confirm this of course. In time this rake thin look, on older women, started looking sad and unhealthy to me. How could we have bought into the idea that it’s beautiful to be tiny and fragile.
Reading up on hypnotherapy, I came across and article and one thing about that article stuck with me. It made me see ever more that I had started seeing food as something bad, yet irresistible. I needed to enjoy it again, and be conscious of how it made me feel warm and fulfilled. The thing in the hypnotherapy article that stuck with me was regarding bingeing. It said that just like other urges (the urge to go to the toilet to pee example) the urge to overeat can also be put off. As obvious as this sounds, it doesn’t always hit home that you can decide not to do it, and not in an anxiety inducing sense. I realised that the calorie counting the constant weighing, the constant worry, the search for the best advice on getting thinner, it was serving no purpose in trying to be content and comfortable in my skin, even when I lost the weight, it was then a case of keeping it down. Constantly always wasting time and brainpower on something so unimportant. For who and for what?
This has been my most successful attempt so far at overcoming bulimia. I enjoy food. The feeling of fullness is good. I still am aware that I overeat, and I acknowledged the worry about it, but I don’t come anywhere near binge level eating now. I know I can buy whatever I want to eat, and there is no lack in my life. I’ve picked up a few kilos based on the fit of my clothes now but it’s a concern that I acknowledge as a silly thought and move on from. I’ve started doing the exercise that it takes to keep my body feeling strong, flexible, and pain free. No more overboard cardio, no more kilometres of running just to lose weight. I look how I look and I have peace, mostly. The most important thing was to stop binge eating, to enjoy food, to see fullness as a happy, positive, comforting experience, and not to try to look like what the vision of a perfect woman must be, that ever changing target that’s really completely silly. I’ve started asking friends and family to stop commenting on my body size.
The Mind's Eye 