With Eating Disorder Awareness week coming up from Feb. 27 to March 3, I wanted to share a pretty personal story with my experiences as a person that lives with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia.
A very common phrase I utter is some variation on, “I’m gonna have to run a lot if I eat this.” Sometimes it can refer to a large meal with lots of sodium, a dessert, some fast food, or a massive brunch.
I run so that I don’t feel guilty about eating. Almost any time I eat, my brain tells me, “You need to run now. You need to burn off whatever you just dumped into your body. You need to go now. Leave. Run! NOW!”
That internal narrative is pretty frustrating to live with. This has been my reality for the last eight years or so, when I really started to develop a distorted vision of my body, a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
Essentially, I don’t view my body the others may view my body. I am hypercritical of every perceived curve, roll, stretch mark, even if they aren’t really there. My mind often exaggerates these aspects of my body, and it makes me overcompensate by running. Or by under-eating, fasting, or harming myself when I don’t feel good about my body.
I have a love/hate relationship with running. I don’t actually like running. But the endorphins I get from running have always helped with my depression and anxiety—some of which is caused by my eating habits.
Thus, I’ve also used running to make up for the way I ate. Which also means I have used guilt to motivate myself to run. My complicated relationship led to me hating how stubborn I was being with food during college. I would do all of this running—great exercise, wonderful for my heart and mind—but ultimately, I wasn’t returning the love to myself. I wasn’t losing weight; I wasn’t necessarily “fit.” I was just going through motions of somewhat self-destructive behaviors, and running became how I masked my insecurities.
One day, I returned from a run, and my roommate said, “with all the running you do, I figured you would be in much better shape.” One of the worst things I could’ve ever heard. It sent me directly to food. And I ate a lot.
Those words still echo in my brain.
I know I’ve never been “fat,” but my anxiety about my body kept convincing my brain otherwise. It was an endless cycle of comparing myself to my other male friends, not feeling “fit” enough, not feeling JACKED enough. I’ve never really been a huge person, or one to pack on muscle, but I kept convincing myself that I was a complete mess.
I know much of this critique is due to a severe concern for my health, but it’s also very much influenced by the way I interact with other men. Growing up in a hypermasculine society has been pretty detrimental to my mental health—constantly being in locker rooms with muscular dudes checking themselves out in the mirror. Me, wondering why muscles won’t appear on my body, resenting them as they flex and brag about their delts or tris or whatever muscle group they were working on that day. While I repress the urge to yell in their bro faces for being more attractive, stronger, and cooler than me.
Only within the last few years have I figured out what’s been going on with my brain and body—it’s all about insecurity.
The only true way I’ve found to cope with my body image issues, outside of running, is to get tattooed. I have many tattoos—a full sleeve, and another in progress. But I consciously and unconsciously use these tattoos to give me SOMETHING to appreciate about my body. It sucks that it needs to be tattoos, but there aren’t many days when I feel good about my body.
Emotional self-harm is still self-harm.
And on the days I do feel good about myself, my confidence is untouchable. And when I look in the mirror, I think to myself, “I’m a badass.” The tattoos help me feel that. The tattoos help me feel anything. Even the action of being tattooed is enjoyable to me. The pain, the reality of it all, the experience—it’s all to capture a moment in my life and to add something new to my imperfect canvas.
Now that I am a health educator, I have really doubled-down on my wellness. I am the healthiest I have ever been, and I still don’t really like running (even though I’m marathon training again), but I do it to keep myself sane.
Running provides motivation to keep myself on the right path of mental and emotional wellness, as well as physical. Granted, I still find myself justifying the things I eat with how much I will need to run, but at least I am giving some sort of consideration to what I put into my body these days.
I’m not sure I will ever conquer this disorder, but I have plans to start seeing a therapist about it and I cannot wait to see how and if it helps me. So here goes nothing!
Finally, with this story, I also want to make a plug for a fantastic talk that my office will host on March 1 in Campus Center 2545 at 1 p.m. At this talk, we will be bringing in Dr. Ebrahimi from the Cambridge Eating Disorder Center to discuss how to recognize when you or a friend may be struggling with an eating disorder and how to support them.