The mirror. Oh the mirror. Back in my ED days, there were times I actually really liked what I saw. But more times than not, I was looking for something wrong. What was wrong with what I saw so that I could point it out and feel bad about whatever it was I found that day. There is a saying in the recovery community that goes something like this…..”Did you ever have a day when you hated your body or what you saw in the mirror when you were deep into your eating disorder? If so, then it was never about your body. It was always about the disorder because even at your smallest or skinniest, you still didn’t like what you saw”. This of course, makes sense for me because I remember when I was the lowest weight I’d even been, I was still finding flaws. But I’m going to push back here for a minute to just give you some insight on what I feel now when I look in the mirror.
Back in my ED days, as I mentioned above, there were days when I actually liked what I saw. My breasts looked great in a certain top, my butt looked fantastic in certain pair of jeans, my thighs looked really skinny when I put on my spanx and they did the job. There were times I was ok with the size of stomach and I looked smoking hot in a certain dress or outfit. Since gaining my recovery weight there has not been ONE SINGLE TIME that I have felt ANY of the feelings I felt when I was smaller. NOT ONCE. And I was waiting so hard…..waiting patiently for me to look at my body one day and just say, yeah, you’re breasts, butt, thighs, stomach, etc. look great in your outfit. Because no, they don’t. I didn’t think it looked good at all! The clothing I wore just accentuated the very thing I wanted to hide. And my face shape changed. Gaining the amount of weight I did changed the shape of my jawline, cheeks and nose. You wouldn’t think so, but it DOES. I look in the mirror now and I don’t not recognize myself.
I feel like body dysmorphia doesn’t really capture what’s going on here…. I’m not just focusing on something that isn’t there, I have physical proof that I am the size that I am (clothing, scale, pictures) and I don’t recognize myself. I’m going to say that there is definitely some trauma there. I mean my entire body changed in a matter of 4 months, 4 MONTHS! I nearly doubled my size. It’s like those characters in a sci-fi movie who wake up after a surgery joining them to an alien form and they freak out when they look in the mirror because they don’t recognize themselves. It’s how I feel everyday. Like someone else is in my body. When I walk around the house, I feel like I’m normal sized. I don’t see myself as the person that looks back at me in the mirror or whose reflections I see in the windows of store fronts. I’m not the person in the pictures I see taken of me or that of the videos. When I see myself in the mirror, in pictures or videos – my brain still can not comprehend that it’s actually me. I’ll say to myself “That’s not really what you look like, you look like the image you have in your head of what you really look like”. I don’t know if these feelings are coming across in this blog post, it’s hard to describe and I’m doing the best I can. All this to say if you feel like you don’t even know who you are anymore after gaining weight in recovery, I understand you 1000000% my friend.
So how did I deal with this, or how to I speak to myself about this now? I tried positive affirmations daily, for about 8 months. Nothing was changing. I couldn’t understand why because in my mind I was a certain size and it was only when I looked in the mirror that I got confused. Something clicked when I read something that a very popular self-help guru posted – she said that sometimes positive affirmations don’t work because what you look like now and how you want to look are SO FAR APART that your brain basically shuts it down and makes sure to tell you that what you are saying and trying to affirm is NEVER going to happen. It made SO MUCH sense to me! I had tried speaking to 2 different motivational coaches (at a high cost) who weren’t able to help me change this mindset. I tired, boy did I try! In the end I ended up adopting body neutrality instead of body positivity.
Body positivity, in a nutshell basically tells us to love your body NO MATTER what! That’s what I was trying to do! No matter how large, how fat, how disgusting I felt, how much pain I was in, how little I could move, how tired and heavy and exhausted I felt – I was supposed to love it no matter what! And I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was lying to myself and my body and she knew it. Something had to change, but how? Cue body neutrality. It was first time I actually felt ok saying to myself – I don’t like the way you look body. Right now, I don’t find your fat attractive, I don’t find your foupa sexy, I don’t think your back fat is stunning, I’m not ok with how your ass looks. I don’t like the acne on your face, I don’t like the way your stomach looks 6 months pregnant. I don’t like any of it. There are very few things that I like about how you look. I do not think you are attractive. I felt terrible saying those things to her, but it was the first time I was actually truthful to myself. I wasn’t trying to gaslight myself! I hope to get to the point of body positivity some day, but that day is not now.
So what do I say to myself when I look in the mirror and know how I feel about how I look? I tell myself that it doesn’t matter. That this body that I have is merely a vessel that carries me through life and that how it looks is irrelevant. What matters is what I do with it. So I use her to carry me through life knowing that I may not like how she looks, but that my appearance has absolutely no bearing on what I can do on a daily basis with my thought patterns. You hate your ass? Ok, you hate it. I doesn’t mean you can’t finally write that email back to your old friend. Your stomach hangs over your pants when you’re trying to work (as long as you’re comfortable!)? So what. You can still turn in that project on time. You think your thighs look like torpedoes? Whatever; go write your next blog post. I also acknowledge what she is doing for me. This is a really important part. You may not like the way she choose to recover. You may not like how much weight she chose to gain. You may not like that she’s is finally calling the shots on staying alive and you don’t like the way she has gone about doing it. Tough.
I’ll also admit that I know it takes time to dismantle these thoughts. For example, I’ll take the first harmful comment I made to my body above; “I hate my ass”. OK, let’s unpack this – first of all WHY do I hate my ass? Is it the shape, the size, the color, the texture, etc. Point out exactly what you hate about it. For me, It’s the lumpiness (possible cellulite?) and how large it is. The next step is to figure out WHY I feel this way about my ass. Where did I learn that a lumpy ass is something I have to hate? Did I learn it from my mother? From watching TV shows as a young child when an actor commented on how ugly someone’s ass was because it was lumpy? Was someone made fun of because they had a lumpy ass? Did I see it on the cover of a magazine “how to get rid of your lumpy ass”. DIG DEEP. Really try to figure out the first time you ever heard someone make the comment that you now believe to be your truth.
The next step is to challenge that belief. For me, it was my mother (unfortunately) who taught me a large and lumpy ass is NOT attractive. I remember her trying on dresses for weddings throughout the years and she always asked me how her ass (well she said butt) looked. I don’t know, it looks like an ass. What does it mean to look good or bad – I would ask my 10 year old self. She would then tell me that a lumpy ass or a large ass would not be a good thing to be seen in at a wedding. It was such a SMALL seed that was planted that carried my belief as a grew up. Any articles talking about the subject would just cement that belief. And trust me when I say the ENTIRE world agreed with my mother. A lumpy and large ass was NOT attractive. Now that I know the source of WHY I feel like a lumpy and large ass is NOT ok, I can challenge it. This is HARD work. You are basically going against a core belief you’ve had for decades. Your brain DOES NOT want to change this core belief. Your brain is happy cementing the belief because challenging it creates anxiety and confusion which your brain tries to avoid at all costs (to keep you alive in times of fight or flight).
But the only way to learn to accept your body (remember let’s aim for neutrality here) is that your lumpy and large ass is neither gorgeous or ugly. It’s neutral. The more you practice dismantling your core beliefs with how you think your body should look, the easier your road to recovery will be. Eventually, you’ll just stop caring about your lumpy and large ass and go out into the world doing what you want to do because your ass has absolutely no power on who you are as a person and what you want to accomplish in life.
I know that my body has healed my heart, my liver, my kidneys, my thyroid, my digestive track, my heartburn, my hormones and thousands of other small (or large) things that I couldn’t see. I feel horrible that I don’t like her. That I think she’s not attractive anymore (and neither does anyone else in my life for that matter- more on that soon) it’s not easy. Our world rewards beauty and our world says skinny is beautiful. I with all those messages around me, loving what I look like is going to be a life-long journey of peace and acceptance of what is. I wish I had a magic pill or the answers you seek to put your mind at ease – I don’t. Body work is SO challenging and I give you all my support, guidance and understanding for the journey you are on.