For many years of my life, I ate according to what others dictated I should eat—and I ate according to whatever number registered on a scale on any given day.
If the number was favorable, it fueled a happy place in my brain.
If the number was not dropping quickly enough—or worse—if it was going up. . .it set the tone, and my focus, for the rest of that day.
As the result of a higher number, skipping meals would be on the agenda for that day. Or, I’d skip eating fruit, grains, nuts, beans. . . in order to see the number drop quickly.
And sometimes, the number would drop a pound or two—and even more if I resorted to drinking only water for meals. Some call it intermittent fasting/fasting. That empty feeling and lost weight gave me a dopamine rush of exhilarating happiness.
Either I gained or lost the same five to ten pounds over and over. . .or I just kept climbing the numbers ladder. . .higher and higher each day.
Consequently, my body unknowingly lost its ability to eat intuitively.
Now, I realize I never lost it.
The ability to regulate what my body needed to eat was buried years ago at age six.
That was the age the rules and rituals of diet culture collided with my natural gift of body regulation. That’s the age others started dictating my food choices and amounts—and even what time of day I could eat—and the age I was introduced to the scale god.
The scale god was a cruel master.
The scale god dictated what I could put into my mouth or not.
As I got older, the scale god dictated if I’d have a social life or not.
The scale god dictated the clothes I’d wear. . . or if I was camera-worthy or not. If the god approved, I didn’t hide from cameras.
The scale god even dictated my ability to receive love or not.
I surrendered the deep places of my soul to the power of the scale.
The scale god also dictated my emotions, not just my happiness or despondency. . . .but also levels of anxiety.
Heaven forbid if I’d run into someone who seemed to weigh an “ideal” number—and I didn’t.
I saw the world through the lens of a number.
And eventually, I met others who also saw the world through the lens of a number.
Sadly, friendships were formed over numbers; my world shrunk to striving to reach an arbitrary number.
I once heard a grieving mother, who lost a child to diet culture, state (paraphrased): scales are soul-sucking devices that cannot measure health, creativity, intelligence, or mental well-being.
Unfortunately, many people, old and young, have lost their lives to this soul-sucking device.
[I’ll go into the pitfalls of diet culture deeper, and how I got free, in the course I’m developing. (There’s a level of vulnerability I’m unwilling to share with the general public at large; thus, a course instead of a book this time.)]
Ever since walking away from diet culture, I’ve realized I didn’t know I was trapped so deeply into its dark abyss. There was a suffocation of air and sunlight that I learned to live with on the daily.
Now, I breathe fresh air again. Every. Single. Day.
Here’s to your freedom as well!
(By the way, the year I lost 100 pounds, I put away the weighing scales, except for a monthly weight check to include in biomarker data I was collecting for my art exhibit. More than a decade later, I finally charted those monthly weight checks. There were some months, I only lost two pounds for the entire month!
In addition, it was the first time in my life my focus was on EATING instead of NOT eating. Unfortunately, I eventually backslid into the pitfalls of diet culture again.)
Emily Boller, artist, mother, and author of Starved to Obesity, lost 100 pounds more than fifteen years ago by eating an abundance of high-nutrient, plant-rich foods. Today, she’s certified in whole plant nutrition from the Nutritarian Education Institute. She’s on a mission to combine practical, no-nonsense and cost-effective tips—with easy to understand science—in order to help anyone escape the addictive grip of the Standard American Diet. And now, she’s on a mission to bring awareness to the suffocating and potentially deadly trap of eating disorders as well.