Erin Jochum

I want everyone to think of a time when they weren’t worried about how their body looked,

or what size your jeans were,

or what you had for breakfast, dessert, lunch

how much you ate at Thanksgiving or Christmas. The amount of chocolate you ate from those little heart shaped boxes on Valentine’s Day.

or what your body looked like compared to your friends, siblings, coworkers.

 

Now, I want you to think of a time when you became painfully aware of how your body looked. For me, it was in the 3rd grade. A 5th grade girl in the same after school program as I named Jaycee asked me if I knew what Jenny Craig was. Yeah, that Jenny Craig. I don’t even remember if I reacted or said something back, probably because I didn’t know what to say. What does an 8 year old say to something like that?

I remember that moment like it happened last week, I still remember what Jaycee looked like and if you gave me a yearbook from Oakdale Elementary School Year ’08-’09 I could point her out. What Jaycee didn’t know, was that just a few years prior I had wrapped up 2 ½ years of chemo treatment for Leukemia and started school right before Kindergarten. I ate a lot of dino-shaped chicken nuggets because that’s all my young, diseased-body could stomach after chemo sessions lying in a hospital bed watching a purple dinosaur since about the magic of imagination.

After treatment wrapped up, my mom and I would go back to Memphis every year for yearly check-ups and every year, for 11 years I heard the same thing from Nurse Practitioners and Dietitians,

“Your BMI is higher than we would like it be, you need to focus on healthy eating and exercise”

“You’re weight is not in proportion with your height compared to kids your age…”

“So what are you eating? What does your diet look like? What are you doing for exercise?”

The hope was that as I got older I would get taller and the weight out “fill out” better. Needless to say, that did not happen. I got put on Weight Watchers when I was 12, that lasted maybe 6-8 months before I realized that it wasn’t working. This was about the time I started falling into this vicious cycle of believing that it was my fault, that it was my body’s fault. Clothes shopping was a nightmare for my mom and myself. Jeans never fit right, my thighs were too big. I hated going into dressing rooms with the hopes that something would fit, but mirrors would say differently. The room would become too hot, the lights are too bright and the sounds of a certain Rob Thomas and Santana song blaring over the speakers just made the situation unbearable.

There’s a running joke on TikTok about growing up in the 2000’s in a household that was caught up in diet culture and the foods associated with that. Every summer my mom would get the Victoria Secret Swim catalog in the mail, I obsessed over those catalogs and the pictures of the Angels in the too small, barely-covered bikinis. Posing on a beach somewhere in the Bahamas, while I sat and dreamed about the day my body would look like theirs. My mom kept bottles of Slim-Fast shakes in the fridge, she would take one sometimes for work as a snack. Whenever I craved something sweet and would ask for a piece of candy my dad would respond,

“Have an apple or an orange in the fridge. Or there’s bananas on the counter”. We never ate out much except for special occasions, on Sundays after we left church my dad would take my sister and I to Denny’s Doughnuts for a doughnut and Bug Juice. Or when we would go grocery shopping with him, he’d let us pick out whatever candy we wanted – I started getting 3 Musketeer’s bars because they were “lighter” and fluffier than the Milky-Way bar. The Nutri-System commercials staring “success story” Marie Osmond of “Donny & Marie” fame. The Quik-Trim Rapid Fat Loss commercials with the Kardashians. I can’t be the only one that remembers the covers of People or Us Weekly covered in images of Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohan praising them for their thinness.

Towards the end of middle school I started reading Seventeen Magazine, and the glossy pages of all the celebrities I loved and admired splashed across pages in slightly ridiculous outfits. I always lingered a little too long on the “Health and Fitness” section of the magazine, the pages were they show different workout moves with pictures of celebrities like “do this move to get Carrie Underwood’s long, lean legs” or “do these specific squats to get a bangin’ booty by Kim Kardashian”. That’s how they pull you in, with promises of having Carrie Underwood’s legs or Kim K’s butt without ever acknowledge the hard facts – when you’re wealthy, you can afford to have good trainers, organic foods, clothes that fit you perfectly. Those things don’t come from the pages of a $2.99 magazine sold at the local Jewel-Osco.

I remember they always included recipes and “food swaps”. Instead of having a slice of pizza for lunch to avoid “the bloating from all the salt and grease” bring lunch from home, or opt for salad at the salad bar. It’s fucking maddening.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my dad had a co-worker, a woman who went to this all-women’s gym in town and suggested we check it out. Both my parents and I drove out to the gym, sat down with the owner and the head trainer. The owner had been a body-builder and a physique model. Both women were in their early thirties and clearly spent a lot of time in the gym. They were friendly, engaging and I liked the positive energy. I liked that the gym didn’t have mirrors too. In my mind, the more I avoided mirrors and looking at own body the better.

The owner was a little dismayed at my age, 16, as I was the youngest client she’d had. But if I could keep up and I liked it, she said I could join. I was introduced to Quest Bars, “Paleo Diet”, and putting protein powder in plain Greek yogurt. I didn’t lose a single fucking pound during this time, I would get salads from the salad bar in my high school cafeteria, eat grapefruit and blueberries packed in Tupperware between classes and all I got was a stupid fucking t-shirt from the gym I was going to that said,

“I don’t SWEAT, I SPARKLE”.

I wore that t-shirt to school with pride. I took my mom, my sister, and one of my friends to workout with me one time and they all politely said they would not be returning. Looking back, I realize how toxic that environment was. This was the first time I equated food with value and giving it terms such as “good” or “bad”. Phrases like, “this is considered a treat meal” or “cheat day” became second nature to me. I started tracking my food through MyFitnessPal and in notebooks, and every week I would bring my journals to the trainer to critique, and every week, marked in red ink – “Quaker’s Apples & Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal has too much sugar, try opting for plain oatmeal with blueberries” and “Try adding in more protein like organic, farm-raised chicken or beef instead of buying the meat sold at the grocery store”. Every time I finished a grueling workout I would walk through the lobby and stare long and hard at the “Success Stories” wall, pictures of women who all lost the weight and looked… happier. I followed all the fitness accounts on Instagram and Tumblr, pictures upon pictures of fit bodies, shredded abs, sculpted legs. I had a whole Pinterest board dedicated to workouts, food, and “fitspo”, bodies that I admired and worked so hard to look like. VS Angel Candice Swanepoel was my inspiration, I had pictures of her plastered all over my Pinterest page. Quotes like “Here’s to us. Here’s to ordering a salad when you wanted a burger…” I never saw what I was pinning or looking at as “toxic” or feeding into diet culture. Perhaps because I had spent my childhood being the source of everyone’s jokes and scrutiny I wanted to show them that if I was thin and had ripped abs, then what is there to scrutinize? How can you make fun of me when I’m thin and beautiful now?

So after 2 years of squats, burpees, and ignoring the pain my body was clearly in, I developed terrible pain in my right knee likely from not stretching enough from working out. I went to two different doctors, described where the pain was and all I got in response was,

“You might want to consider losing some weight, that might relieve some of the pain you’re having because it all weighs down on your joints”

It was after this that I realized how biased the medical field was towards bigger bodies. I thought about the dietitians I met with as a child and later a young adult and thought about all the advice they gave me for losing weight but hadn’t taken their own advice? I was angry, because for a brief moment I had become aware of the fact that other people had a problem with my body when I never did. People, my parents, medical professionals telling me alter my body, shrink it to fit their idea of “healthy” as if making my body “smaller” would fix me.

I went on like this for a few more years. I no longer had the women’s gym, but I had just discovered the magical realm of YouTube Fitness Influencers such as Blogilates and XHIT Daily. I did Blogilates monthly workouts and the only thing I developed from doing that was bad hips and a hatred for leg lifts and side planks. I liked Cassey because her whole thing about recovering from her ED and being a bikini/figure competitor. She built a whole platform on building lean muscles and balanced eating rather than shoving protein powder down your throat. It wasn’t about eating chicken and rice for every meal it was about working out and having fun while doing it. Concepts that had never occurred me to when I started my fitness journey years before. Because when your in a larger body, there is no such thing as “enjoying working out” and just having a meal, it’s “eat salads, chicken, and rice because that’s much healthier for you than a 6-piece chicken McNuggets from McDonald’s”. When you work out, when you force yourself to do squats or pushups it’s not because you want to do them. It’s because the dream of being in a thinner body is that much more important than working out for enjoyment or moving your body in a way that feels good.

I think it was when I started community college is when the glow of the health and fitness world started to wear off. The constant pain in my knee combined with the cycle of eating too much to compensate for not eating enough or not eating enough and devouring everything in my fridge at 10 o’clock at night became my routine. I ate because I was stressed about my job at the time and how fucking awful it was on my mental health, I ate because the guy I liked didn’t like me back, I ate because eating became the only thing in my life I could control.

“Emotional eating is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness…In fact, your emotions can become so tied to your eating habits that you automatically reach for a treat whenever you’re angry or stressed without thinking about what you’re doing” (Mayo Clinic).

Emotional Eating. I wouldn’t realize that that’s what I was doing until years later, but the thought that I might have had some form of an eating disorder, or disordered thoughts crossed my mind long before I knew what emotional eating was. I knew what I was doing to myself was bad and that I needed to fix it, but I didn’t know how to ask for help or even how to describe what I was doing. When I bought two doughnuts from Jewel-Osco and ate them both as soon as I got back to my car without giving a second thought as to how sick it would make feel later, it didn’t occur to me why I was doing it, I just knew that eating those two doughnuts made me feel good for a few minutes. I was making up for those years in high school I spent eating grapefruits out of Tupperware containers in between classes, the protein bars, the countless squats and burpees I did… But I wasn’t really “making up” for it, I was determined to destroy that person and I created something much worse. I used food as the weapon because it was easy, accessible.

It went on like this for a while. I would fall back into cycles of emotional eating, feeling like shit because I was eating too much so I would compensate by working out for a few weeks which would improve my mental health so I wouldn’t eat as heavily. But that cycle only got me so far. If it wasn’t the food dictating my emotions, it was my mental health and how I saw myself in the mirror. I hated looking at my body in a mirror because all I saw was fat around my armpits, the stretch marks on my hips and thighs, the fat under my chin and neck. Even after working out, I stood in the mirror for a few moments and all I saw was a body that wasn’t changing fast enough or that I didn’t push hard enough. I started buying large, like 3x my actual size, clothing- sweatshirts mainly to burrow myself in. The sweatshirt covered the body I didn’t want others to notice, that I didn’t want to notice. I think in my mind, if I covered it up the problem would go away because I couldn’t see it – out of sight out of mind.

But it’s still looming, and it comes back to taunt me in the form of my sister running back and forth from her bedroom to mine asking if a pair of jeans makes her butt look big. But she means it in a good way because she always liked the way my butt looked. How funny, my sister

who is half my size telling me she liked the way I looked. Other times she’d be twirling around the bathroom mirror in some crop top or blouse she’d bought to go out that night. Feelings of envy come over me, I always felt insecure wearing clothing that didn’t have sleeves or were cropped. Even wearing oversized clothing was a struggle, instead of looking trendy and mirroring a model I saw on Pinterest, it just looks schlubby and like I didn’t put any effort into finding clothes that fit me. After some time going back and forth between this blouse and that top, she’d asked me those fatal words: Erin, am I ugly? I knew whatever I said next wouldn’t change how she saw herself in the mirror in the moment. I wanted to swallow my tongue right then and disappear into the floor than answer that question coming from someone who’s 60lbs. smaller than me.

I can’t recall a singular moment when I said, “fuck it” and stopped following all the fitness Instagram accounts. Over time I started to slowly detach myself from that life, it wasn’t a matter of I started loving my body or treating it right, I just caring about it all together. I even had to stop following so-called “body-positivity” accounts. It’s difficult following people that preach about how much they love their bodies when I did not. No amount of inspiration quotes and posing in cute clothes was going to make feel any better my body and how much I wished it wasn’t mine. I did, however, take my first small steps towards healing my deeply fractured relationship with my body. One night maybe a year or two ago, I was scrolling through my “health and fitness” Pinterest board I mentioned previously. Those thin, desirable bodies I reposted and idolized, the workouts, the “sore today, strong tomorrow” quotes… I deleted that board. But it didn’t come without some mild hesitation and second thoughts. I thought for a brief moment about the years I spent agonizing over the pictures of the models, the thin body I didn’t have. The workouts to build stronger arms, to lose fat, get a perky butt or ripped abs. I scrolled through it for a few minutes and thought about the years I had spent hating my body and putting it through hell only for nothing to change. With a single tap on my screen, that perfectly curated board was gone.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve been working on and off with my current therapist to undo all the mental and emotional damage those years put on me. I have this terrible habit of starting to broach a difficult topic and instead of diving into it, I skirt around it as long as I can until the emotional anguish becomes too much. I did that for the first few months in therapy, hell, I even blamed my mom for a while as the reason why I hated my body and had a fucked up relationship with food. I blamed the two trainers at the gym for pushing a 16 year old girl into a lifestyle they should’ve never been pushing her into. I blamed my friends, because they all had slim and beautiful bodies and never had to worry about the caloric content of a slice of pizza or piece of candy. Similar to buying the doughnuts from Jewel, it was easy to blame the people around me than deal with the underlying causes for my unhealthy relationship with food.

Recently, I started listening to a podcast – Food Psych with Christy Harrison, she had a guest on the show, Amy Pershing, and the two women started discussing intuitive eating and the negative impacts of diet culture. Pershing said, “When I first learned about intuitive eating my knee-jerk reaction was, I couldn’t possibly trust my hunger, because my experience of my hunger was that it was voracious…because I was so hungry, but it felt like my eating would be so out of control if I ate in regard to my hunger”. I was sat at my desk at work and I just stopped, internally processing what Pershing had just said and thought, “That’s it. That’s exactly how I feel”.

I almost broke down crying in my therapy appointment later that evening, not out sadness but out of realization and perhaps, shock. Because for the first time I was finally able to contextualize how I had felt for so long and I was better able to explain why I had felt the way I do about food and about my body in a way that made sense, that wasn’t just boiled down to simply hating it for what it was or hating myself. All those years spent eating foods that made me feel less healthy and more miserable, wearing clothes that covered me and shielded me from the outside criticism, the thoughts that kept me up at night telling me I was never thin enough, my ass was never perky enough, my thighs didn’t have a gap between them. I gave it a voice.

I feel like I’m finally able to work on those thoughts better, I don’t have to be so ingrained in those thoughts I can look at it from the outside and see what’s happening and why those thoughts and feelings occur. Where they started, taking away the blame that I long placed on others, and maybe, start living in this body rather than hating it.