I want everyone to think of a time when they weren\u2019t worried about how their body looked,<\/p>\n
or what size your jeans were,<\/p>\n
or what you had for breakfast, dessert, lunch<\/p>\n
how much you ate at Thanksgiving or Christmas. The amount of chocolate you ate from those little heart shaped boxes on Valentine\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
or what your body looked like compared to your friends, siblings, coworkers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now, I want you to think of a time when you became painfully<\/em> 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<\/em> Jenny Craig. I don\u2019t even remember if I reacted or said something back, probably because I didn\u2019t know what to say. What does an 8 year old say to something like that?<\/p>\n 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 \u201908-\u201909 I could point her out. What Jaycee didn\u2019t know, was that just a few years prior I had wrapped up 2 \u00bd years of chemo treatment for Leukemia and started school right before Kindergarten. I ate a lot of dino-shaped chicken nuggets because that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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,<\/p>\n \u201cYour BMI is higher than we would like it be, you need to focus on healthy eating and exercise\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re weight is not in proportion with your height compared to kids your age\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cSo what are you eating? What does your diet look like? What are you doing for exercise?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The hope was that as I got older I would get taller and the weight out \u201cfill out\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a running joke on TikTok about growing up in the 2000\u2019s 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,<\/p>\n \u201cHave an apple or an orange in the fridge. Or there\u2019s bananas on the counter\u201d. 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\u2019s Doughnuts for a doughnut and Bug Juice. Or when we would go grocery shopping with him, he\u2019d let us pick out whatever candy we wanted \u2013 I started getting 3 Musketeer\u2019s bars because they were \u201clighter\u201d and fluffier than the Milky-Way bar. The Nutri-System commercials staring \u201csuccess story\u201d Marie Osmond of \u201cDonny & Marie\u201d fame. The Quik-Trim Rapid Fat Loss commercials with the Kardashians. I can\u2019t be the only one that remembers the covers of People<\/em> or Us Weekly<\/em> covered in images of Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohan praising them for their thinness.<\/p>\n Towards the end of middle school I started reading Seventeen <\/em>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 \u201cHealth and Fitness\u201d section of the magazine, the pages were they show different workout moves with pictures of celebrities like \u201cdo this move to get Carrie Underwood\u2019s long, lean legs\u201d or \u201cdo these specific squats to get a bangin\u2019 booty by Kim Kardashian\u201d. That\u2019s how they pull you in, with promises of having Carrie Underwood\u2019s legs or Kim K\u2019s butt without ever acknowledge the hard facts \u2013 when you\u2019re wealthy, you can afford<\/em> to have good trainers, organic foods, clothes that fit you perfectly. Those things don\u2019t come from the pages of a $2.99 magazine sold at the local Jewel-Osco.<\/p>\n I remember they always included recipes and \u201cfood swaps\u201d. Instead of having a slice of pizza for lunch to avoid \u201cthe bloating from all the salt and grease\u201d bring lunch from home, or opt for salad at the salad bar. It\u2019s fucking maddening.<\/p>\n When I was a sophomore in high school, my dad had a co-worker, a woman who went to this all-women\u2019s 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\u2019t have mirrors too. In my mind, the more I avoided mirrors and looking at own body the better.<\/p>\n The owner was a little dismayed at my age, 16<\/strong>, as I was the youngest client she\u2019d had. But if I could keep up and I liked it, she said I could join. I was introduced to Quest Bars, \u201cPaleo Diet\u201d, and putting protein powder in plain Greek yogurt. I didn\u2019t 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,<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t SWEAT, I SPARKLE\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d. Phrases like, \u201cthis is considered a treat meal\u201d or \u201ccheat day\u201d 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 \u2013 \u201cQuaker\u2019s Apples & Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal has too much sugar, try opting for plain oatmeal with blueberries\u201d and \u201cTry adding in more protein like organic, farm-raised chicken or beef instead of buying the meat sold at the grocery store\u201d. Every time I finished a grueling workout I would walk through the lobby and stare long and hard at the \u201cSuccess Stories\u201d wall, pictures of women who all lost the weight and looked\u2026 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 \u201cfitspo\u201d, 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 \u201cHere\u2019s to us. Here\u2019s to ordering a salad when you wanted a burger\u2026\u201d I never saw what I was pinning or looking at as \u201ctoxic\u201d or feeding into diet culture. Perhaps because I had spent my childhood being the source of everyone\u2019s 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\u2019m thin and beautiful now?<\/p>\n 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,<\/p>\n \u201cYou might want to consider losing some weight, that might relieve some of the pain you\u2019re having because it all weighs down on your joints\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019t taken their own advice? I was angry, because for a brief moment I had become aware of the fact that other people<\/em> had a problem with my body<\/em> when I never did. People, my parents, medical professionals telling me alter my body, shrink it to fit their idea of \u201chealthy\u201d as if making my body \u201csmaller\u201d would fix me.<\/p>\n I went on like this for a few more years. I no longer had the women\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u201cenjoying working out\u201d and just having a meal, it\u2019s \u201ceat salads, chicken, and rice because that\u2019s much healthier for you than a 6-piece chicken McNuggets from McDonald\u2019s\u201d. When you work out, when you force yourself to do squats or pushups it\u2019s not because you want<\/em> to do them. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019clock 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\u2019t like me back, I ate because eating became the only thing in my life I could control.<\/p>\n \u201cEmotional eating is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness\u2026In 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\u201d (Mayo Clinic).<\/em><\/p>\n Emotional Eating. I wouldn\u2019t realize that that\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2026 But I wasn\u2019t really \u201cmaking up\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t eat as heavily. But that cycle only got me so far. If it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t changing fast enough or that I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t want others to notice, that I didn\u2019t want to notice. I think in my mind, if I covered it up the problem would go away because I couldn\u2019t see it \u2013 out of sight out of mind.<\/em><\/p>\n But it\u2019s 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<\/p>\n who is half my size telling me she liked the way I<\/em> looked. Other times she\u2019d be twirling around the bathroom mirror in some crop top or blouse she\u2019d bought to go out that night. Feelings of envy come over me, I always felt insecure wearing clothing that didn\u2019t 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\u2019t put any effort into finding clothes that fit me. After some time going back and forth between this blouse and that top, she\u2019d asked me those fatal words: Erin, am I ugly?<\/em> I knew whatever I said next wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 60lbs. smaller than me.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t recall a singular moment when I said, \u201cfuck it\u201d and stopped following all the fitness Instagram accounts. Over time I started to slowly detach myself from that life, it wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cbody-positivity\u201d accounts. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u201chealth and fitness\u201d Pinterest board I mentioned previously. Those thin, desirable bodies I reposted and idolized, the workouts, the \u201csore today, strong tomorrow\u201d quotes\u2026 I deleted that board. But it didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Over the last 2 years, I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n Recently, I started listening to a podcast \u2013 Food Psych<\/em> 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, \u201cWhen I first learned about intuitive eating my knee-jerk reaction was, I couldn\u2019t possibly trust my hunger<\/strong>, because my experience of my hunger was that it was voracious\u2026because I was so hungry, but it felt like my eating would be so out of contro<\/strong>l if I ate in regard to my hunger\u201d. I was sat at my desk at work and I just stopped, internally processing what Pershing had just said and thought, \u201cThat\u2019s it. That\u2019s exactly how I feel\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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<\/em>, my ass was never perky enough, my thighs didn\u2019t have a gap between them. I gave it a voice.<\/p>\n I feel like I\u2019m finally able to work on those thoughts better, I don\u2019t have to be so ingrained in those thoughts I can look at it from the outside and see what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Erin Jochum I want everyone to think of a time when they weren\u2019t 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\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"parent":18,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-491","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","clear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/491\/revisions\/626"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/17-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}