Waking Up and Letting Go: Eating, Body Image, and Self-love

As a radical feminist trying to make the world a better place for women, I sometimes feel like a sad cliché sitting in my therapist’s office telling her I hate my body. But as a Buddhist, I KNOW that the only way to change is to first compassionately acknowledge the reality of what is.

I didn’t always hate my body. In fact, I managed to not pay much attention to it for many years, choosing to focus on my brain instead. During all of that cerebral activity there were hints of discontent brewing. In high school I had this belief that I was heavier than all of my friends. When I look back at those photos now, I see a petite girl with a body indistinguishable from her peers.

The body image problem I had as a young adult was focused on my choice to not shave and the hostile reactions I received from strangers for defying society’s idea of what a real woman is (see blog entry To Shave or Not to Shave: That Has Always Been the Question). During this time I purposely chose to never go on a diet for fear of destroying my metabolism and as a feminist stance.

Things became very hazy and then very clear the year I became very ill. A string of traumatic events and contracting adult chicken pox caused my nervous system and my immune system to derail. I became severely depressed and anxious. I developed debilitating insomnia. I lost a lot of weight. At the lowest point of my life, I loved my new body. And I was lucid enough to know how fucked up that was.

It took a lot of medications, in just the right combination, to penetrate my depression and for me to begin to heal. Inevitably, I gained weight as my system normalized, and I gained weight from the medications. Still, I was so grateful to be regaining my health, to be returning to school, to having my life back, I didn’t pay very much attention to my body size. I began hiking again, starting with an extremely difficult backpacking trip through the Canyonlands of Utah that signified my new beginning. I rode my bicycle all around town and swam laps at the community center. Eventually, that time when my body had failed me became a faded memory as I joined the throngs of outdoor enthusiasts to play in the Rocky Mountains.

Four years later my world changed again. I was driving with a friend to go camping in the mountains of Colorado when a May snowstorm arose. As she drove her truck over the infamous Vail pass, my friend skidded on ice. Going 70 miles per hour the truck slammed into the median. It then skidded onto the right shoulder flipping ¾ of a turn and slamming into a boulder that reshaped the front of the truck. I was very surprised that we survived. I seemed to have sustained nothing more than a bruised tailbone, not suspecting that this injury would develop into years of chronic pain.

As any body worker will tell you, when one thing goes wrong in the pelvic arena, everything can start to shift and strain. Within months I had S.I. joint, back, and leg pain so severe I could not sit down for any length of time. I began to stand for two hours in my graduate courses, but eventually had to drop out due to my physical pain and the accompanying depression. Over the years, the scope and degree of the pain receded, but I have not been able to do most forms of exercise since. My inertia, coupled with a new round of increased depression and the accompanying medication regime change made my weight soar. The pounds piled on over the years until, in the last year, I became the heaviest I have ever been. And I hated it.

Having spent nine months in the sleepy mountain town of Glenwood Springs this year, I had a lot of time to pursue personal reinvention. It was a fresh start and I decided to increase my walking for exercise, which led to a reassessment of my eating habits. Based on an earlier highly successful trial, I decided to remove refined sugar from my diet. Because of alternative natural and manufactured sugar replacements, I didn’t feel deprived. Fresh fruit became sweeter. Chocolate rice milk tasted like a dessert. Agave nectar made tea taste wonderful. I discovered that although refined sugar is highly addictive, after many weeks without, the cravings disappear. After six months I felt totally committed to my new way of life. I told myself that I could eat as much as I wanted of this healthier diet, a notion I have come to dispute.

So, I lost twenty pounds and went down one dress size thanks to my no sugar diet. But my fundamental relationship with food had not changed. I was still eating compulsively, using food to drown out anxiety and other undesirable emotions. I was using food to reward myself for undertaking difficult tasks. And I was bloated and miserable. As I started dating in Denver again, I felt excruciatingly uncomfortable about my body and could see no circumstances under which I would be excited to be intimate with another person. And, as we say in Buddhism, I finally woke up.

I decided it was time for phase two of my dietary reinvention and I contemplated what that might be. I realized that the sheer volume of food I was consuming needed to change. I have always refused to weigh food or count calories because I believe that would be a slippery slope to being obsessive and the idea here is for eating to take up less of my psychic energy. I created a few ground rules for myself and began to test them out. I drink water throughout the day because I sometimes mistake thirst for hunger. I tune in to my body and determine if I am hungry or if I want to eat for some other reason. I eat throughout the day to keep my hunger at bay. Each time I eat, I eat half of what I would normally consume which, as it turns out, is usually able to satisfy my physical hunger completely.

Ultimately, the most important piece is that my relationship with food is improving steadily. In a way, I was living to eat—always making food my touchstone for good feelings. Now, I am eating to live. I still enjoy food, but it no longer has such an elevated status in how I make myself happy. Anytime I want to overindulge I remind myself that the temporary pleasure from eating that extra bowl of ice cream is so far outweighed by the pleasure I will feel as I lose weight and feel more comfortable in my body. There’s also a deprivation component stemming from being poor for so long: I often feel compelled to eat as much as possible for fear the food will not be there the next time I am hungry. I am learning to identify this underlying belief and to challenge it as not being true. Finally, I just feel happier. I like myself better and feel more positive about life because I no longer feel I am being controlled by unconscious compulsions. I chose to see the reality of my relationship with food, to accept myself compassionately and to make new more self-loving choices in my behavior. I woke up.