My Biggest Fear Was Not Being Skinny

Most of my life, excessive eating has been the problem. However, one year, I severely and consistently restricted.

After all my life feeling pudgy, I decided I'd had it, I was finally going to be skinny.

Keep in mind I grew up in the 90's USA with the “heroin chic” — or at least very thin — look being the ideal according to a lot of society and also my own mother.

The ideal body type has changed over the years for women, but it remains the same that there is pressure to look like whatever the trendy look is for the moment.

I started counting every calorie, and I started weighing myself all the time.

There were days I weighed myself over 10 times in one day.

I'd check in before and after every meal, using the bathroom, or drinking water.

I was completely consumed with the obsession to be thin and to stay thin, and the biggest terror I could conceive of was to not be able to maintain this thinness I had wanted all my life (spoiler alert, I didn't keep it).

I thought if I monitored every calorie and every weight fluctuation, hour by hour, I could control it.

The control of food was a result of the beliefs about body image and my worth related to my body size.

My disordered, restrictive eating was not really about food, it was about body image.

I was taught that a woman's only value was to be wanted by a man, and that the only way you are ever going to be wanted by the man was by being the thinnest possible.

I was also taught that the way you feel better about yourself is to look better than other women in a competitive sense.

I believed that the only thing that really mattered about a woman was how she looked, and this was the only source of self-esteem and only chance at attention, approval and validation.

Interestingly, it was far more my mother who instilled these beliefs in me than my father.

For anyone with restrictive-style eating, we can recognize that we have a set of beliefs and fears that are driving our behavior.

These fears and beliefs can be healed, because they are not something you were born with, they are the result of something you absorbed from someone.

Who did you absorb them from? And most importantly, are they really true?

Photo by Katie Sue Photography