ask lozza
on thinness, control, eating disorders and the game
Dear Lozza,
Like most people, I have a disordered relationship with food and my body. I spend about 60% of my life thinking about my body, calculating calories and comparing myself to other people. Intellectually I know that how I look is not my reason for living, but it’s so tempting to believe that if I was thin then everything would be easier sometimes. In the other 40% of my life I can accept my frame, height and proportions, but recently have been tempted to dive all the way into SkinnyTok, and am pretty ashamed that I’m wanting to buy into it, given my history of disordered eating/exercising and the work it took to move out of that place. I sometimes feel like accepting the body I have was a scam, and losing weight will always be the answer to feeling loved and accepted, I’m just too undisciplined to do it. You’ve talked about your eating disorder before, are you feeling the same way? How do you deal with it?
Thank you,
J.
I want to start by reassuring you that you’re not weak or impressionable for feeling the allure of SkinnyTok, and all the other influences at the moment that are pedestaling thinness as the ultimate goal. When I saw heroin chic inch its way back into the trend cycle I didn’t take it seriously, I thought what we learned from pro-ana, 2005 tumblr and hours of videos of people dissecting the sinister roots of beauty standards would dull its impact. Then I started seeing videos starting with ‘scroll away if this isn’t for you, we’re going to be talking about health and weight loss.’ Health and weight loss content isn’t destabilizing for me, I’ve been in eating disorder recovery for over a decade and finding out what health means to me is a part of that. I haven’t weighed myself in over five years and have no intention to start again. Weight loss (and gain) is now ordinary to me, I let it happen now as a natural reaction to how I am living my ordinary life. So out of curiosity I didn’t scroll away. Then I heard the lines. ‘You don’t need a treat, you are not a dog’ ‘imagine yourself at a pool party with your ex right now, put the fork down’ and the eternal ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’
“We’ve been here before," said my inner guidance system.
“Be quiet.” I replied. I was watching, wondering if I could cut anything to create a calorie deficit. I go to the gym regularly now, it would be easy, I could lose 20lbs (I am from the UK but came of age on largely American pro-ana sites where they talked in pounds, so I never learned stones or kilograms) maybe it would work this time - I’m older now, maybe it would make me happy this time. Maybe I could do it without betraying the recovery around food and my body this time. It’s that easy to find yourself in old thought patterns.
I genuinely thought my decade of eating disorder recovery was stronger, I genuinely thought I’d achieved an unshakeable state of aloof acceptance around what I think the world thinks of my body and my conditions of worth. Normally when I felt the urge to restrict or purge it was because I was in a situation that had spun so far out of control I had to feel like something was in my hands. When that happens I depend on trusted friends, remember who I am, and thank my body with loving treatment, before it goes too far and the voice of my disordered eating gets its hooks in me. Most humans have a hole in the soul we feel will be filled if we were better, different, smaller, hotter, happier or approved of. Rather than filling or starving it, we have to build a meaningful life around it so it doesn’t dominate our every thought, we find this out in recovery. I thought that because that void doesn’t speak to me much anymore that it wasn’t there anymore. It was humbling to realise I’m human, and I can still feel its call - if the tantalising offer of ‘this will make you happy’ is trendy, simplistic or self-destructive enough.