After reading Jessica Knoll’s opinion piece “Smash the Wellness Industry,” I shared a bit of my story on Facebook. I decided it was time to share the full story here.
How It All Began
My freshman year of college I gained about 30 pounds. No joke. People could tell I gained weight, but when I said the actual number, they couldn’t believe it. Not because I “carried it well” or anything like that, but because it’s double the number of the standard “Freshman 15.”
I know exactly how it happened. Unlimited dining plans encouraged me to eat as much as I wanted at meal time. And who wouldn’t want a breakfast of one of everything from the buffet? My declining balance money separate from that allowed me to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s whenever I was having a bad day. And between the stress of my first year in college and first time playing field hockey at that level and first time being away from home for an extended period of time…let’s just say I classified many days as being worthy of an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
Even before that fateful year I was always self-conscious about my weight and how I looked. At 5’2″ 1/2, every pound gained or lost was noticeable on me and I hated it. I had spurts in high school of healthy eating before proms and big events to try to get fit. There was also the time in elementary school at a Girl Scouts meeting where I refused a snack because “I don’t want to eat 2 hours before I go to bed.” Yes. In elementary school.
Coming home that summer after freshman year I felt pretty terrible about myself. I had no energy, nothing fit properly, and I basically felt like a walking blob of worthlessness. Enter, Weight Watchers.
How the Real Trouble Began
Weight Watchers is a really great system if you don’t abuse it, and it started out really well for me. I worked with a personal trainer and stayed within my allotted points for the day. By the end of the summer I was down about 5 pounds. After a week of pre-season I was down a total of 10 pounds.
I remember the turning point. It was right after field hockey season ended and I had a really busy day where I didn’t have the time to eat. Like that time in elementary school, I wasn’t eating anything 2 hours before I went to bed, so I ended the day having used 12 out of my 20 daily points. I woke up the next day and saw a dramatic change in the scale…and that’s when I decided that a serious point deficit was the surefire way to look and feel the way I wanted.
How to Be a Control Freak and Annoy All Your Friends
From then on, each day began with waking up before all of my roommates and stepping on the scale. That number set the tone of the day. Then I would do an ab workout in our common room, followed by staring at my stomach in the mirror. It was the first time I had any definition in that area, and that image played in my mind any time my stomach growled begging for more food.
The disordered eating wasn’t completely obvious. After all, I was eating. Things like vegetables were 0 points on Weight Watchers so I filled up on those with a salad every day. I even put cheese on that salad for a mere 3 points (plus 2 for the dressing). Every morning I ate oatmeal in plain sight of my roommates (just 3 points!), and I’d usually opt for a chicken wrap for dinner (6 points).
And then I’d do my homework and watch Food Network to satisfy how hungry I was, just by staring at the food.
Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays I went to the weight room, and Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d run a timed mile at the indoor track. On the plus side, I managed to train my way into a sub-7 minute mile. On the negative side, I stopped getting my period.
The compliments poured in and drove my motivation to continue on this diet. Every meal meticulously planned. Every invitation to go out to eat was extensively researched beforehand to see what I could have and at what cost. I even started getting attention from guys – something that rarely happened freshman year.
Of course, a few friends would say things like, “just eat the cookie! It won’t kill you!” or flaunt their food in front of me. At the time I thought they were just jealous of me, but in hindsight it’s clear that they did actually want me to eat more. But the internal battle that raged within me everyday was excruciating, and I couldn’t just eat the cookie. It felt like the cookie would completely throw off what felt like a delicate balance.
When It Stopped
When I got home that summer, I was down to 125 pounds. Exactly 35 pounds down from the previous year. While the compliments continued, they were accompanied by, “Why did you do that? There was nothing wrong with you” and “You look like a 12-year old.” Then there was the day when I was working with my trainer and he told me to stop sucking in my stomach…but I wasn’t. When he asked me if I was eating I told him yes, and it wasn’t a lie. He just never asked how much.
When junior year rolled around things started to fall off the rails. Doctors, mentors, and colleagues started pressuring me to put on some weight, but the thought of breaking the routine, going back to how it was before, not getting the attention I now had, not being able to wear whatever I wanted…it was too much. I rarely left my dorm room and kept trying to maintain control.
Eventually it all broke. I bought a bag of Halloween candy and gorged on it until I felt sick. And luckily didn’t develop a habit of purging. As I went back and forth between control and unruly eating in my second semester that year, I met a dude (now my husband) that loved me no matter what I looked like.
This along with starting to listen to family and friends ended the disordered eating, but it took another eight years to make peace with my body.
A Journey Across New York
Upon graduation I watched my dad finish a half marathon and felt inspired. I threw myself into running and training for my own half, and in the process learned how to feed my body to be healthy with room to indulge. A few months after my half I moved to New York City for a job in my field, and the anxiety of looking perfect returned (though the disordered eating, thankfully, did not). Working near Lincoln Center, I saw impossibly thin, tall women every day. Meanwhile, my short self had to convince people I wasn’t an intern and was, in fact, of age to drink alcohol.
Even after moving upstate from the city, I continued to avoid public situations where my picture would be taken. I couldn’t bear to look at my less-than-perfect self in a photo where all my friends looked great. The thought of having something like that posted to social media literally made me freeze with anxiety. Every time this happened I thought back to the control I had in college, back when I thought I always looked great in pictures. But rather than going back to disordered eating I just felt…sad.
As of about two years ago, I decided it was time to stop hating myself. I don’t remember the exact point where I realized that I was enough as is, but I do know that I’ve never felt more relieved.
On Letting Go
Women especially are taught early on that their bodies are never quite good enough. We’re introduced to rail thin models that starve themselves before shows (or that have insane metabolisms, and power to them). Celebrities are tucked and smoothed and perfected in photos, and often get surgery and professional help to make that look permanent in their day to day. And we’re told that that’s the ideal – something that’s usually completely unnatural.
At 5’2″ 1/2 with an athletic build, I’ve learned that that’s just not attainable for me, and I’m absolutely ok with that. I’m meant to have muscular thighs that power me through long distance runs. I don’t really have a cinched waist, and that’s just how my body is. My nose has a bump in it as a combination of my Italian ancestry and getting hit in the face with a field hockey stick in college. My weight fluctuates between 140 and 145 and according to BMI measures that’s overweight. And all of this is ok.
Once I stopped putting energy into picking apart my appearance and destroying my body as a result, I could start putting it into things like my relationships, my job, my hobbies, and new ventures. I’ve actually never felt more fulfilled in my work life and honestly, a big part of that is working on a team of women that doesn’t talk about what they hate about themselves everyday.
And so now that I’ve got a few years of loving myself under my belt, hearing other women pick themselves apart honestly breaks my heart. As Jessica Knoll states in her opinion piece, “When men sit down to lunch, they don’t waste it pointing out every flaw on their bodies.” We’re so much better than that scene in Mean Girls where The Plastics grasp for imperfections to point out to one another. We have much more important things to discuss, like strategies for growth, ideas for new ventures, or even the most recent episode of Big Little Lies. All of those things are more interesting to me than pointing out something on yourself as being wrong when, more than likely, it’s perfectly fine.
Please – next time you go to verbalize something mean about yourself, take a second to think it through. Is it true? Probably not. Is it within your control? In the case of my nose, nope! So let’s all move on and agree to work on loving ourselves instead. Our minds, bodies, and our friends and families will be thankful for it.
...And What Would Bri Say? 