The year my body shed 100 pounds, it stopped losing weight and stabilized between 136-138 lbs. (I’m 5’8”.) I felt as if I got my health and stamina back. My blood pressures and other biomarkers were excellent. For the first time since age six, my focus was on EATING instead of NOT eating or under eating. And for the first time since age six, I enjoyed a “fully belly and happy heart.”
Interestingly, that year, I had no weight goals in mind to reach. I was merely experimenting with food to see if it could be used as an artistic medium. . .in the same way a painter uses paint or a potter uses clay.
In fact, I didn’t even track the weight loss progress that year until more than a decade later. (And I discovered that some of the months, I barely even lost anything.)
July 2009. . . one year after starting the Transformation Art Exhibit
July 2009
However, according to an arbitrary “ideal weight” for my height, I was still allegedly ten pounds overweight.
So, for the next fourteen years, I restricted food intake. I reduced amounts of fruit. I cut out grains and starches. I tried limiting eating to only twice/day. I incorporated intermittent fasting, juicing, and water fasting. I did just about everything I could to lose those ten extra pounds. But my body just couldn’t do it without resorting to extreme methods of deprivation.
Unfortunately, the intense focus to be an ideal weight fueled atypical anorexia followed by episodes of rebounding binge eating—my body’s attempt to replace the nutrients I had deprived it. The binges fueled even more periods of food restriction until it became a vicious cycle.
Once again, the pressure to be a smaller size hijacked my physical health. (After carefully following a restrictive dietary protocol for twelve months, my LDL cholesterol soared to dangerously high levels.) Not to mention, the pressure hijacked my mental and emotional health and well-being as well.
Ironically, the intermittent fasting protocol mentioned above was theoretically recommended to reverse heart disease. . . but it had just the opposite affect on my body.
I was trapped in an eating disorder yet again. . .just as the external pressure to be smaller had done many times previously throughout my childhood and early married life.
But I’m not the only one.
Many others have shared their stories with me as well.
If you are a parent: please don’t pressure your children to become smaller while their bodies and brains are rapidly developing. And please don’t express displeasure with your own size and appearance in front of them. Children are watching and listening; they sense disappointment. Their undeveloped brains equate a parent’s disappointment with love and approval. Plus, they are inundated with a diet-crazed culture obsessed by size and appearances.
If you are a significant other: please don’t pressure your loved one to become smaller. If you don’t like their size, get over it. Give them the freedom to breathe. The desire to improve one’s health has to be internally driven; not externally forced.
If you are a pediatrician/healthcare provider: please don’t use shamed-based language to coerce your patients into a smaller body. The external pressure can easily hijack some of your patients’ thoughts and wreak much havoc.
Eating disorders are the second leading cause of death among psychiatric illnesses; next to opioid addiction. Diet culture has subtle pitfalls that can easily hijack the mind.
If unaware, they can ruin one’s quality of life, health, and even become life-threatening for some individuals.
Health is so much more than a number on the scale. It also encompasses mental and emotional health.
Here’s to your good health!
“Dear friends, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.” (3 John 1:2)
Emily Boller, wife, mother, artist, and author of Starved to Obesity, is on a mission to bring awareness to the suffocating and potentially deadly trap of diet culture and eating disorders—and to bring understanding and compassion to those suffering in silence.
In her free time, she loves to grow flowers and vegetables—and can homemade soups.