My eating disorder told me fat was bad. Healing taught me to accept my body
CBC
This First Person column is written by Karli Jahn, a master's student at Athabasca University who is writing her thesis on weight stigma in counselling interventions. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
"Are you sure you have an eating disorder?" the doctor asked me. "Why do you think you have an eating disorder? You're not underweight."
You're right, I thought, looking at the stubborn fat on my stomach, rolling over the size 0 shorts I was wearing. I was 25 years old, five feet tall, and probably weighed around 110 pounds at the time. To be considered underweight, I would have had to weigh 94 pounds.
But I hadn't made that appointment based on how much I weighed or how fat I felt. I wanted a referral to an eating disorder program because I had returned to behaviours I'd been treated for six years earlier as an 18-year-old in Windsor, Ont.
After moving to Calgary and enduring a traumatic summer, I found myself spending hours in the bathroom, monitoring my body in the mirror by lifting up my shirt to look at the fat around my waist. I'd suck in my stomach to make it as hollow as possible, making sure there were two or three inches of space between it and my pants.
I would purposefully buy clothes that were too small to motivate me to continue shrinking my body. Each night in bed, I would revel in the sharpness of my pelvic bones while going through the list of every calorie I had consumed that day and making plans on how to consume even less the next.
It had taken me two years before I made that doctor's appointment.
In Windsor, I was diagnosed with an "eating disorder not otherwise specified" (EDNOS), a mental health diagnosis that has since been replaced with "Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorders" (OSFED). Basically, I fit the criteria for an anorexia diagnosis except I wasn't underweight.
I've struggled with body image and self-esteem for as long as I can remember. When I describe how my eating disorder started, I say it's as if a switch went off in my brain.
Of course, it wasn't that simple.
From a young age, I believed there were good bodies and bad ones. A thin body was the epitome of good — the good me, the real me was thin. The bad me was the fat one. I remember looking in the mirror, gathering the fat around my stomach, bunching it together in my hands and thinking: If I'm good, this will go away.
My eating disorder told me I just had to try harder to be good. Whatever the price was, I was willing to pay it. I was desperate. But my body was also desperate. It was stubborn, clinging onto fat for survival.
For years I did everything "right." I ate less than 500 calories a day, I worked out two to three times a day, getting up as early as 4:30 a.m., and not going to bed until well after midnight. I was burning dramatically more calories than I was consuming but no matter how many hours I exercised or how little I ate, my body refused to surrender to the basic laws of physics. Despite my best efforts, I was failing at trying to be thin. At trying to be good.
I had a bad body, I thought. Therefore I was bad.