I've Been on Diets Since Age 11, and I Regret Every Single One of Them
I was 11 the first time I went on a diet. I remember it vividly, but the specific diet doesn’t matter because I was far too young to be punishing my body simply for existing. I remember thinking that adults dieted, and by dieting, too, I was being mature. Three days in, I caved at a birthday party where there was cake — tres leches, a cake I have always hated because the concept of intentionally wet cake is gross to me — but it was birthday cake, so I wasn’t going to say no. Afterward, I was very upset with myself, feeling that I'd let myself down. I remember, above all, telling myself I would do better the next day.
I remember this moment in particular because it was the beginning of the rest of my life. So far, that life has included many regrets, most of them related to diets. It’s an ongoing issue for me. It is so easy to slip back into old habits, and I have to remind myself that foods are neither good nor bad — they just are.
The Pressures of a Fatphobic Society
Food isn’t supposed to be a buzzword. It's fuel that everybody needs. And yet, I have missed dinners with friends because I was afraid of the unknowns on menus, and have passed up parties and catch-up sessions to go to the gym. I’ve missed out on so many things because I felt I should focus on dieting above all else — above my friendships, relationships, above myself. And I'm not alone.
A survey of young women in Australia ages 18 to 25 found that being on Instagram for just half an hour can torpedo your body image. Everywhere we look, the same harmful, hateful lie is reinforced: that being fat is the enemy, and that our bodies are traitors for having even an ounce of it.
But I’ve learned that is not the case. Fatphobia is the enemy, and causes people to be overlooked in everything from dating to seeking medical attention. It's a fact that we are conditioned to be afraid of fat because of the way society treats fat people. When I was dieting, I was attempting to mold myself into a shape that my body just isn’t. I was apologizing for taking up my share of space, and trying to fix what didn’t need fixing. I wanted to change, but only in ways that tore me down.
In the U.S., tens of millions of people develop an eating disorder at some point in their life, and many are teenagers at the time of its onset.
The success of the $66 billion weight loss market (as of December 2017) relies on fatphobia running rampant. Other industries — including fashion and beauty — benefit, too. We are the people who lose.
A Life of Dieting
That dieting became part of who I was at age 11 is not so surprising. In 2015, a report compiled by the non-profit child and teen advocacy group Common Sense, noted a 2003 study found that one in four children had engaged in some type of dieting behavior by the age of seven. A 2016 survey of childcare workers in the U.K. by the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years found that girls as young as three years old struggle with body image and express a sense of unhappiness with how they look.
That I developed a full-blown eating disorder by the time I was 13 is also not surprising. In the U.S., tens of millions of people develop an eating disorder at some point in their life, and many of those people are teenagers at the time of its onset.
That I sought treatment, however, not once but twice, is surprising: According to the eating disorder support organization, Mirror Mirror, it's estimated that only around one in 10 people with an eating disorder ever receive treatment. And the National Eating Disorders Association notes that people of color are less likely to receive help than their white peers. It is also surprising that, for the most part, I consider myself recovered, due in equal measure to the fact that people can fight eating disorders for their entire lives, and because I hadn't really been interested in being recovered. I had binge-eating disorder, but for a very long time, I just thought I was bad at dieting, and getting sicker only signified that I was getting better at it.
The process of recovering was not interesting to me. It still isn’t, really, mainly because there is no one cure or method or trick. It’s just a lot of work, and it’s something I work at every single day; something that’s constantly at the top of my mind. I have dual voices in my head, hashing out what I should or should not eat before I ever make a decision. But, as I've said, I learned over the years that there is nothing inherently good or evil about any particular food. Food just is. It’s the ways in which I have been conditioned to weaponize food before it even gets to the table that are bad.
Just as I was once a girl who dieted — a statistic, a girl with an eating disorder — now I am someone in recovery. There is always a part of me wrapped up in those labels, the easily identifiable things I can point to that explain why I do some of the things I do. But none of these things make up the whole of who I am. I regret every diet I’ve ever been on because for so long I thought diets defined me. Imagine the girl I could have been if I had known back then that they didn’t.
Read more about eating disorders:
Now, watch girls ages 6-18 talk body image:
