Hello, it’s me your friendly content warning. The following will be on the topic of fitness, weightloss, and eating disorders. Please take care. Here’s Walter.
Kindergarten through high school I went to a small private Christian school. This came with pros and cons as with all things. One of the pros and cons was that I graduated with only 58 other people. Twenty-two of those people went to school with me from kindergarten to grade 12, which is remarkable. That is nearly 40% of us who went to school together for 13 years.
With that very small number of fellow classmates came a higher rate of girls to boys. Not drastically different, but near the 60/40 mark. Which also came with advantages and disadvantages. One of the many disadvantages was in sort of pressure cooker of self-esteem issues. Private schools, particularly Christian ones, have this tendency to let students (children) believe that perfection must be maintained. Not attained, maintained. It is assumed you will average in the high Bs or As. It is assumed that you will be a godly person. It is assumed that you will not make mistakes that a student (child) might make. Pour on top of that societal pressures to look a certain way or dress a certain way for young women (and men, but we’re talking about girls as you’ll soon see). And for fun throw on a dash of financial disparity.
According to NEDA, in a study of nearly 500 girls over 8 years, 5.2% of them suffered from a clinical eating disorder anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder. Doing my own very unscientific research, that is talking to people I know, this seems about average or even a little high for most high schools. Where I went this was incredibly low; it was much closer to what felt like 50, but was probably more like 15-18%. Let me tell you why.
Much like suicides, eating disorders can act as a psychological contagion. In evangelical circles, emotional responses can be perceived as the Spirit working, and this causes a sort of inspiration for replication. When I was in middle school a girl in my older brother’s class came forward in a chapel and told her story. (This is in no way the fault of that young woman, who was working hard to overcome something). She told of how she had an eating disorder and how through the support of her family she had overcome it. This young woman was incredibly popular, an athlete, and stereotypically pretty.
The following year there were murmurings of girls with more eating disorders. Including one who had spent some time in community theatre working with a woman she admired and who had taken her under her wing. This woman had anorexia and struggles with it to this day. That girl, between my age and the previous student’s age, unhappy with herself and seeing the success of her older friend became anorexic. Noticeably and severely.
One evening following a performance in my freshman year, she was driving me and several other girls in my class that she had taken under her wing to a cast party. She was telling us her story. How she had overcome anorexia. Girls asked questions and listened intently. One girl really heard it. And she told her friends. She lost over 150 pounds. She saw someone she admired and saw as successful, and followed suit. Soon her friends saw her “success” and began to do the same. It became known that many girls in my class were not allowed to go to the bathroom alone for fear of what they were doing.
Here’s where I come in. At 5′ 7″ I weighed, pretty consistently around 135/140 pounds. Right in a healthy BMI. I was athletic, though didn’t do much exercise if I didn’t have to. I loved playing hockey in gym. That was my favorite. I began to see changes in my friends. I began to feel the pressure. I baby-fatted, but not in anyway overweight 15-year-old, felt ashamed of my body. This is when I was regularly asked to follow girls to the bathroom, by teachers and parents. (not my parents). “Hayley seems fine” they clearly thought so I could not be at risk. I was made fun of by boys and girls alike for being fat. Not to mention a certain family member. Listen, I was still wearing boys’ large t-shirts. Not teen boys. Child sized boys t-shirts. I was wearing C-D bras, and still wearing children’s t-shirts. I was not fat. But I hated my body. I was incredibly ashamed.
But I was also incredibly loud and insensitive. I strut around that locker room in my bra and underwear like I was so confident with my body. I dressed stranger and stranger to let people know how much I didn’t care what I looked like (I cared so much). Let me tell you the truth. I laughed with an older girl who also thought the eating disorders were ridiculous. We made fun of the idea to each other. I’m not proud of myself. I’m incredibly ashamed now as an adult. Then I was only incredibly ashamed that I didn’t look like them.
Move forward a couple of years to college. Me eating marshmallow fluff right out of the jar with my roommate. Me feeling the shame of my body even then as costumes had to be resewn to fit my boobs. Not the rest of my body, just my not designed for theatre boobs. (boobs I’d also been taught to be ashamed of). I gained the freshman 15, and honestly that was about it. All the while I heard the echo of a certain family member and people from high school telling me how fat I was. All the while remembering what sickness looks like on a body, and how I knew I wasn’t supposed to become that. So I did the opposite. Depression set in my senior year of college, and I became so sad I couldn’t leave my dorm room that I shared with no one, but a dead cactus. Even if I wasn’t pretty, even if I was fat, like all of those people had said, at least I wasn’t sick. Never once considering that I might be sick in a different way.
Add ten years and nine assaults to a woman who has learned to eat her emotions rather than deal with them. I gained over 60 pounds from that average healthy weighted high school girl. Here I am on the cusp of 33, working hard. Working to overcome my mental blocks of what healthy means. That signs of an eating disorder are not indications of a healthy body or strong mental health. That eating my emotions is also a sign of an eating disorder, even if I thought I was stronger than them. That a specific body type, the private christian school body type my high school classmates had wanted to achieve, is not the only type of healthy body. That what is healthy for others is not healthy for me.
When we’re tiny I don’t think we think about our bodies. I didn’t. Outside playing tag with the neighbor boys, the only time I thought about my body was when I hurt it, which I did regularly. I am nearly 33 years old, and for the first time in possibly ever, I love my body. There are many things with my health that are not good, but the skin and bones and muscles that move me around the world and good and strong and I am so proud of them. And this is important for me to note to myself. There is not one thing wrong with being proud of your body.
A Broad Abroad 