Here is the story of a hungry lady

This isn’t the sort of thing one publishes in a column anyone pays you for. But it’s something that I need to put out somewhere. And my birthday makes me introspective. (Happy birthday to me!)

This is going to be a surprise to many people who have known me for a long time. That’s part of why I think it’s worth saying out loud that I had, for over a decade, an extremely disordered relationship with food and exercise.

About 15 years ago, my body changed shape as I entered my mid-20s. This is normal, but I didn’t know that and I didn’t expect it. I started to check myself in mirrors more and more frequently. In response, I funnelled badly managed anxiety into dieting (Weight Watchers) and exercise. I lost about a quarter of my body weight relatively quickly. I got lots of compliments. At 118lbs (down from 162), I didn't feel skinny, but because I'd hit the bottom of the BMI "healthy" range I decided I should try to maintain where I was rather than keep going. (Thank goodness.)

Of course, like 95% of people who diet, I was not able to keep that weight off long-term. A small relaxation in diet (but not exercise—I was inflexible about clocking a minimum of seven hours of cardio a week, often more) and weight started coming back. I commenced a years-long process of severely policing my body.

I ate on special occasions and with friends, happily and greedily, so it was easy not to know what I was doing the rest of the time. It was easy to make the problem invisible. Here’s what almost no one saw:

I meal planned obsessively because I was always hungry. I knew every last thing I wanted to eat in a day. When I gave myself permission to eat I would eat lavishly, putting the time and effort into elaborate food and meals. The rest of the time I weighed my food, to the gram. I carried a jeweller’s scale in my purse. I weighed myself at least every day. I never missed a chance to check my reflection, and I was never happy with it. I would eventually put a cap of 1,260 calories a day (the Minnesota starvation experiment assigned 1,570 calories a day), unless I exercised (cardio! ordinary activity didn’t count) to “earn” more food, and prided myself on usually staying below the calories I was allowed. Some days, I would give up sleep to make sure I didn’t skip a day of cardio. Other days I would go to bed early to try to stop feeling hungry. I skipped meals. I drank so much water and black coffee. I told myself that I didn’t know how to tell when I was full—the app told me I should be full after a 250- or 300-calorie meal, but I wasn’t. Eventually, it became true. When I let myself eat, I could eat and eat and eat. The only thing I associated with satiety was when I started to feel physically sick. I felt broken. Feeling broken reinforced my belief that my body needed external control and that I couldn’t trust it. Compliments about my body reinforced my belief that what I was doing was good and healthy.

I am actively working now to be able to tell when I am hungry and respond by eating so that my body will trust that I won’t starve it and will tell me when I’m full.

I’m ashamed that I pushed my habits on people, including people I love, and encouraged them to join me in my broken relationship with food. I believed it was about health, and almost everything about the world fed into that belief.

Eventually, I got serious about tackling anxiety that was badly interfering with my ability to live the life I wanted to. My family doctor declined to prescribe medication or therapy (I asked!) and instead pointed me to a free online cognitive behavioural therapy resource. Through that, I learned to recognize that my relationship with food was obsessive. I stepped back a bit. CBT helped me step back from the edge of a lot of things and establish a more meaningful structure to my life instead of an imposed Potemkin village of order hiding a person who was falling apart. I did daily CBT exercises. I took up meditation.

But I didn’t believe that my relationship with food was part of the problem. I believed that I had to be “less healthy” physically to support my broken brain.

The underlying problem wasn’t fixed. But I had a new tool. I taught myself to apply CBT to feelings of hunger. Hunger, I believed, was a disordered feeling trying to throw me out of control. I could learn to recognize it and substitute “healthier” behaviours, like drinking water, going to bed, or running until the hunger faded.

I downloaded MyFitnessPal and resumed tracking my meals. I told myself that the straight calorie counts rather than controlling categories of food and not having to stick to specific “cheat days” gave me more freedom and wouldn’t let my anxiety take over.

I still weighed my food. I still skipped sleep to exercise or skipped meals and subbed in sleep. I still didn’t consider walking to be an activity that needs fuelling. I had learned to live with it, but I was still hungry and tired all of the time.

And my body, my amazing body, found a way to continue on. Like many people who diet, despite fairly extreme calorie restriction I slowly regained weight as my body learned to more efficiently store and use calories in response to evidence that I did not have access to enough food, trying to save me from myself.

I posted photos of myself in a small body and I talked about how I was learning to live with a big body. When we weren’t able to get pregnant and I received a diagnosis of PCOS and started fertility interventions, I doubled down on the only thing I felt I could control and focussed again on diet and exercise. When I finally got a positive pregnancy test, I complained because I had just reached my (compromise, higher) goal weight.

I continued to track my food while pregnant, even though most food was revolting and the struggle was to eat enough. I tracked running and took up swimming. I allowed myself to eat more and exercise less, but I didn’t want to lose the habits that I would need to get myself “back under control” postpartum.

And then, birth: a cesarean section with failed anesthesia, severe hallucinations from the sedative they gave me when it was obvious that the anesthesia had failed, and a clear memory of all of it.

I am lucky that my reaction to traumatic birth was to develop fiercely protective feelings about my body. I am lucky that I had the resources to give up on getting a doctor’s permission and just find a therapist. I am lucky that my OB referred me to a perinatal psychiatrist. I am lucky that both my therapist and my psychiatrist were dedicated enough to dig into my history and help me pull apart the threads so I could start to heal. I am lucky that I found a program while pregnant that takes a Health At Every Size, trauma-informed approach to physical activity. I am lucky that I have a supportive partner. I am lucky that I have my girls to help me believe that doing the work to get myself in order is worth it. And I am very lucky that my struggle with my body never put my life in danger.

I will probably be picking up the pieces for a long time. I struggle because I miss enjoying food as intensely as I did when I was starving. I struggle to find a balanced way to approach exercise. I struggle to reclaim my love for running and cooking, which feel poisoned. I struggle not to worry about what’s on my plate. So much of my clothing was purchased with policing my body in mind, and so t-shirts that should be souvenirs of good memories and dresses that used to help me feel pretty are instead ill-fitting reminders of how cruel I was to myself. I struggle to be comfortable in my own body, even though I am finally struggling less to believe that I need to eat as much as I do. I struggle with unrelenting ads that tell me that my body isn’t good enough and that the food I eat will make me sick.

I struggle with the ways that people around me broadcast their anxiety about food and body weight. I wish I could hug them and give them permission not to be hungry anymore and I wish I could push them away until they’re so far that I can’t hear what my brain still feels are demands on me and my body.

I struggle with how to approach food and bodies in our home to give my daughters the best chance at not following me down this path. I’m struggling to help them find the tools they might need to navigate a world that will probably tell them their bodies are broken.

I struggle to navigate a world in which this is so common, but so seldom discussed.

And that’s it. That’s my story of invisible disordered eating.

If this hit hard for you and you want to know more, these three podcast episodes are accessible, available as transcripts, and will point you to more information: on eating disorders; on calories; on weight and health.