Summer is a fun time of year, although it goes by so fast. With the heat, you may enjoy going to the water parks at the Dells, your friend’s pool at their apartment complex, or traveling to another state and visiting a well-known beach. I’m sure you noticed the similarities between all these activities — water and swimwear. I love the water, but wearing a swimsuit makes me feel self-conscious about my body.
I know the ads are coming – the ones that try to entice you to get your bikini body! Get your beach body! It’s as if it’s an outfit hanging in your closet or on the rack at your nearest Target, waiting for this very moment to be put on and shown off.
As much as I find this annoying, your body is your body. Sure, it changes, but it’s still YOURS. This is your one and only. You don’t get a whole new body when you lose or gain weight. Our society loves getting the next best thing out there and trading in our older version, but that’s different from how bodies work.
Everyone can relate to having a bad body image day, and for some people, those days are far too common. It’s hard not to pick yourself apart, especially when comparing yourself to those around you or worrying about what others think. During social interactions, I’d rather focus on the conversation, getting to know someone better, having a laugh, listening to a problem, asking for advice, whatever the topic is, instead of juggling all of that as well as hoping who I’m talking to isn’t judging my size. I don’t want my body to define me. I want to be a person.
Unfortunately, the message I received since childhood is that my appearance is tied to my worth. That somehow, my weight and size can control situations and outcomes. I still struggle with the notion that if I am beautiful and thin, people will like me. It’d make me like myself and give me confidence and a sense of self-worth. My therapist reminded me even when I was a smaller size, I still didn’t like my body, and I still struggled with liking myself and feeling worthy of good things. I find that annoying as well, but she’s right. The problem isn’t my body but how I view myself and the world around me.
Recovering from an eating disorder (ED) is a lot of work. One phrase I’ve heard before is “choose your hard.” Emily, do you want to continue hating yourself and using maladaptive coping skills to get through life, or do you want to push back on those ED thoughts, learn how to make peace with your body and food, and enjoy life? Choose your hard – they both take a lot of time and energy. It seems futile to recover because I don’t see any progress, and then there are days I’m determined to work on recovery. The swinging pendulum is exhausting, and I wish I could pick a side and stick with it. Of course, it’s not that simple.
It may not be easy for those who have not personally experienced an eating disorder, disordered eating, and body image issues to fully understand the journey. When someone gets help, they may seem to improve – they’ve reached a normal weight, they’ve stopped binging, they are eating regularly, they haven’t purged in months, etc. Our loved ones express how proud they are and are so glad we can put this behind us. We don’t want to disappoint anyone or cause concern, so we smile and nod. Don’t get me wrong, moving away from eating disorder behaviors and adopting better coping skills is a wonderful goal. Again, it’s not that simple – on the inside, we are screaming, or maybe better said, our ED is screaming at us. On the outside, we may appear to be doing well, but on the inside, we are still fighting those same thoughts, that same chatter that fueled us to engage in ED behaviors, to begin with.
After I left treatment from a partial hospitalization program, I stepped back into the real world. I didn’t feel prepared at all, even though I was given a toolbox full of knowledge and coping skills. It was like a video game. I had to learn how to use the game controller. Which sequence of buttons blocks the lobbing attacks of diet culture and body talk? Which sequence of buttons strikes my sword of knowledge? Did I mention I’m not any good at video games? And it certainly felt like I wasn’t any good at navigating the real world. It seemed at every turn there was another diet ad, another body comment, another difficult menu with “bad” foods, another painful clothes shopping experience, another mirror… I still have trouble maneuvering through those traps, although there are small victory moments when I roll my eyes and move on. Choose your hard, choose your battles. They aren’t all worth it.
People don’t always appreciate it when I share something I learned in treatment because recovery does not follow the diet culture narrative. The diet industry wants us to feel insecure and hate our bodies. How else will they sell their products and programs if everyone has made peace with who they are and the body they reside in? I feel for those who fall for the marketing ploys that promise a smaller body within weeks – LOOK, these OTHER people did it! The people who follow rigid diets and exercise plans believe they must try harder and have more willpower to finally earn their new body. The ones who feel like failures because nothing is working and they must be doing something wrong. And I get it. I do my best to ignore all the ads about weight and food, but sometimes my ears perk up like a rabbit’s — what did they say? I was intrigued and seduced by the idea that I could “get my body back.”
Get my body back? Did I misplace it? Did it secretly go somewhere when I wasn’t looking? Or maybe someone stole it, and that’s why it went missing? I probably have to wait for a ransom note, and then I’ll be reunited with my “real” body and get rid of whatever this is. But the ransom is too high a price, and the kidnappers can’t even prove they have my “real” body anyway.
That’s the thing about eating disorders – they promise we will achieve the body of our dreams if we keep digging and go further down the rabbit hole. We are convinced by doing this, everything will be better and every problem will be fixed. We’re so focused on digging that we don’t even realize how far away we are from the surface. In a way, we don’t care how far we go. We want that buried treasure; we need it. And AHA! We find it and open it up and… Well… it’s “good” in the beginning. We’re excited at first, but then we realize this isn’t the grand prize. We look in the mirror and see our bodies are still wrong and everything isn’t better yet.
Our ED tells us there are more treasure chests with even better treasure, like the beach bodies we’re so anxious to “get.” We keep digging and digging because it keeps promising and promising. Though they are empty promises, our minds and bodies can only take so much.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good and feel good in your body, especially when wearing a swimsuit. How your body looks and how your body feels are two separate concepts. You can look amazing and feel disgusting. Feeling good in your body has more to do with your mindset instead of your physical body. I know it’s annoying.
Recovery is not a linear path. We start climbing with our new gear, but we’re novice climbers. Our feet may slip, we might lose our grip, and we are scared of how high we are. It’s too much, so we remove the gear and grab our shovel. Digging is what we know; we are good diggers. And then, we feel stuck. We know digging doesn’t do us any favors, although we often think it will be different this time. We look up and see how far we have to climb, and we can’t fully see what’s up there; the unknown is terrifying. So, we sit. We can’t make a decision and move. JUST PICK ONE!
Currently, I’m sitting in my journey. I look up and down a lot. One day, I’m ready to eat regularly and let my body figure itself out, let it do its thing, and heal. The next day, I felt awful, and I stayed away from food as best I could because, this time, it would work.
Although sitting, I have made one decision: I’m not chasing a bikini body. Do I want a bikini body? Yes. It won’t make me feel better, and it won’t fix anything. It’s not a battle I need to fight, nor do you.