Remember how I pretty much started off every other blog post with “this is hardest thing”. Yeah, I wasn’t being totally honest. Well, yes, at the time I was writing it I was being truthful about how hard that particular issue was to navigate – that was true. But this topic right here – this lack of support and judgement torn me into a 1000’s pieces and I will never be the same. Let’s take a tally of how my life fell apart when I decided to recover from atypical anorexia.
My mother
She is still in the deep, DEEP world of diet culture and disordered eating. She does what I did before I developed anorexia. She started off with the Atkins diet, which changed into the LowCarb/LowFat diet which morphed into Keto. They are ALL the same. And she’s been on the roller coaster for 50+ years of her life. In fact, she was the person who introduced me to my very first low-carb diet when I was in my mid 20’s. So it should be no surprise that recovering BUT recovering into a plus-sized body was unacceptable to her. I should have been able to recover from anorexia without getting fat and “ruining myself”. She still eats low carb during the week and binges every weekend on carbs. When she comes to my house she’ll go through the snack cabinet and eat food and then pretend I don’t notice her bingeing on it. Because every Monday for the last 50 years and every Monday for as long as she lives she will start another diet. I tried to explain to her what was happening to my body and how I needed to gain weight to recover. She seemed ok with the medical explanation, but was NOT ok with me being fat.
She told her friends and family members that I “had a tough time during Covid” and that I’m working to “get myself back”. She shows new people she meets pictures of me on my wedding day and points out how beautiful I once was. Still makes me emotional typing this. These days I had to lay HARD boundaries on her to stop talking about my body, my weight, how much weight I’ve gained, what I’m eating, what foods I have in the house, when I’m going to “stop playing around” and lose the weight. It’s exhausting. She seems to understand the boundaries, but she has NO IDEA how damaging it was to know she was only really proud of me when I was “skinny and beautiful”. I feel like mothers are supposed to love their children unconditionally. But I found out through this process that she does not. She tells me God would not be proud of what I’ve done to my body and that eating sugary and fatty foods makes me a glutton. It’s heartbreaking that at the age of 43 my mother can still make me cry.
My Father
My father lives on the other side of the country from me so I don’t see him very often. When things started opening up after the restrictions, he was able to fly over and see me. Because my weight gain was so much (please read previous posts for that information) I decided to write a letter to him out-lining everything that had happened. I never told him (in fact I told NO ONE) about my diagnosis and subsequent recovery. Because I was still so very weak and vulnerable, my therapist suggested I write a letter to give him the information all at once so that he could digest it before he came. True to his word, he came, we had a great visit and he didn’t say a word about anything. I was so HAPPY! For the first time someone in my immediate family actually treated me with respect and decided that I was a pretty great person who was still the same, just in a larger body now. Well, it was short-lived. About a month after he got home he wrote me a horrific email telling me I was killing myself. That I was putting myself at risk for stoke, heart attack and diabetes. He also told me that it wasn’t fair to my children because I would increase the chance of leaving them motherless.
I tried to write back and explain to him that I was already dying. That I was already killing myself. That I was already at risk of dying from a heart attack each day I starved myself. But in his eyes, it was better for me to be SICK AND DYING than it was for me to be FAT AND ALIVE. How sad is that. How awful is that. How horrific is that. My Dad – the guy who was my hero for as long as I can remember basically shamed me into saving my life because being fat was not ok in his eyes. I never wrote back to him what I wanted to say. Instead I thanked him for his concern and that told him I would take it up with my doctor. Since I see him but twice a year, I figured that was the safest and easiest for me. Since that email, I distanced myself from him. It’s hard to do so because we used to be so close. But it’s hard for me to talk to someone who thinks so low of me. Why would I even want to talk to him anymore?
My brothers
I have 2. The older one is in the middle of one of the nastiest divorces in the entire world. He’s in his own world, taking care of his own needs (fair). He never talked to me about anything. Instead he told my mother (who so generously told me) that he thinks I’ve given up on life and that the way I look is disgusting and embarrassing. He told my mother he’s no longer going to invite me to hang out at family events when he invites his friends because he’s embarrassed of how I look. He has not spoken another word about this to me. I never discussed anything with him and frankly, never will.
My younger brother is no stranger to telling me what to do with my life. (This is important – remember this). When I told him what was going on; he never actually asked, but he happened to be at my mom’s house one day when she was gone and for some reason I decided it was a perfect time to confide in him what I had been going through. At the time, he told me that he was “sorry I was going through this” and that it must be “really hard”. And just like my father did, about 1 week later I got this horrific email from him telling me all kinds of shitty ass things. He told me I was ruining my marriage, that I was the epitome of a fat and ugly housewife. That I was lazy and didn’t exercise enough. That I had to stop eating junk food and throw it all away so I would stop eating it. His wife was in healthcare and never spoke to me about my anorexia, but he told me that she told him that how I recovered was NOT ok and that if she saw me in the ER she would have immediately put me on a diet for “my health”. (Remember guys – people who do not work in eating disorder recovery DO NOT KNOW HOW TO MEDICALLY TREAT YOU! Just because they are doctors does not mean that know how to help. Please keep this in mind when accessing health care!)
He also told me to get off my ass and find a job and to stop freeloading off my husband. He of course said this out of “love”, because he told me my husband now had grounds to leave me and if he did he would SIDE with him and tell me I deserved the end of my marriage for getting fat. FOR BEING FAT! It was not ok for me to be in a marriage with my husband where I was fat! He also told me that I was setting a horrible example for my children and that…..this is the kicker….. I was no longer in his will to become guardians of his children in the event of him and his wife’s unexpected passing. BECAUSE I WAS NOW FAT, I was incapable at being a good mother to his kids. I was shook.
My friends
I would say these days I have a group of about 6 close friends (2 groups of 3) that I still regularly see and speak too. During the lockdowns, these friends had zoom calls as a group and we all kept in touch. The first group are those from high school. The second group from college. They all know – they all saw me last summer after I reached my recovery weight. I wrote them an email before seeing them so they would know that I was aware I had gained a significant amount of weight and that I was in recovery from atypical anorexia. I’m not sure what I expected, but what I got was crickets. Maybe because I told them before hand that I knew I was fat? I don’t know the reasoning, but once they saw me, it was like the topic of my diagnosis and recovery was the elephant in the room. No one wanted to talk about it. I figured maybe they were not comfortable saying anything in front of my other friends. Maybe they didn’t know what to say (collectively, we didn’t know anyone who had an eating disorder). I guess with that information, I would have been ok. But what really bothered me, what really HURT LIKE HELL was that they continued to ignore me. No one reached out independently with a text, email or phone call to ask how I was. To ask how recovery was going. To ask how they could support me. NO ONE.
I had one friend who explored Intuitive Eating and said she supported the Health at every size (HAES) community, BUT she was still really deep into her own restrictive eating (demonizing gluten without celiac disease) and starting a company on how to help people avoid eating gluten for “health reasons”. So that was supposed to be my greatest ally? As you can probably guess, I feel alone, so very alone and unsupported. I can’t really say that they made me feel as bad as my father, mother and brothers, but still, not saying anything at all hurt just as much. If anything, it made me realize that I have friends who really don’t have the skills or capacity to help someone going through the physical and mental health crisis I was going through. That prompted me to seek out support in other ways. Yes, I follow every person possible on social media to help me in my journey, but at the end of the day, I did have to pay a professional HAES/ED coach to speak to on a bi-weekly basis just to have a “friend” to speak too. It felt horrible having to “buy” my friends, but that’s how things panned out for me.
The rest of my extended family reacted how I would have expected them too – the ones who were overweight all told me to accept that this was my fate and that I got the “fat” gene from my Italian side. The fat relatives also told me about overeaters anonymous (gag) and told me that I just had to accept I got handed the fat card in life. Other older relatives didn’t recognize me and asked my mother what happened to me and what was going on – as if gaining weight indicated there was some sort of emergency crisis going on.
I just stopped wanting to see everyone. I didn’t want to see my immediate family members because every time I saw them all I could think about was how cruel they were to me and I didn’t want to see my friends because it felt like NO ONE cared about anything. So I isolated myself, I become withdrawn and depressed (for other reasons as well – I’m going to tell you in the next post) and I was just sad. So sad that this was my life now – fat, uncomfortable, depressed, sad, unmotivated and knowing that all the fears and judgement I had about other people actually CAME TRUE. I was right about that fear all along – my fear of judgement and unacceptance for me in a fat body was a reality. It was now my life.
My husband – I know I’ve been teasing about telling this part of my story for a couple of months now. Read the next post to read my story about the biggest betrayal of my life.