It’s happening again.
Inner turmoil.
Self loathing.
Feelings of failure and inadequacy.
All of it surrounding and encompassing my lifelong battle with self image.
Don’t roll your eyes. I’m serious. I’ve been struggling with a negative self image my whole life. And I run into people all the time who say how can you not like the way you look?
If only I knew the answer to that question.
In high school I was teeny tiny. Didn’t weigh a hundred pounds until my junior year. (Remember I’m five feet two). And I was a gymnast and a cheerleader and I ran track. Fit was not even the word to describe me. My senior year my gymnastics coach weighed us at the beginning of training. I was 113. You know what she told me? That I needed to lose weight. She wanted me around 108.
And that’s the first time I remember obsessing about my body.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming her. She had charts and graphs and literature obtained from the Federal Government about how much a person should weigh based on her height. She was simply following protocol.
The next year I went to college and naturally gained 15 pounds. Why? Because A) There was a lot of beer drinking and late night trips to Jack in the Box; and B) I was no longer working out 4 hours a day.
And this is when I began hating myself.
I struggled. I compared my body to all the other girls’ bodies. I ate boiled chicken. And ran until my body ached. Then would go with my roommates to our favorite pizza joint and eat a medium pepperoni pizza by myself. And go back to my house and take laxatives. (I was too afraid to make myself puke. I didn’t want to be one of *those* girls). I have no idea what I thought taking laxatives would accomplish but I felt like it was doing something to counter balance my calorie intake.
The routine would start again the next day. Eat boiled chicken. Exercise. Binge.
It’s hard to even write this stuff because I feel like I’m still in the middle of the routine, only the grown up version. And I wish I could stop obsessing and just be OK being ME.
It’s why I do these crazy diets and cleanses. I keep thinking OK, if I can lose ten pounds then I’ll be happy with the way I look. So it begins. I’m great out of the starting gate. I follow the diet plan to the letter, making sure I have all the right foods (and non-foods) to prove successful. Then something happens. A celebration. A bad day. A *fuck this I don’t care anymore* moment. This last one is my current state of mind.
Then I start binging again. And I lie awake at night and tell myself I’m weak, hideous, unworthy of love.
And the worst part?
I believe me.
Most days I’m happy. I can push away my thoughts of inadequacy and practice something I’ve become really good at. Avoiding full length mirrors.
God this makes me so mad! Why can’t I just be happy with the way I look?! Or better yet, why can’t I stop eating? I’m not even hungry most of the time I eat. It’s just that I have such a love affair with food it’s insane. I’m not even picky about it either. Gas station food tastes just as good as a gourmet meal.
So that’s it.
That’s my struggle.
And I know some of you won’t understand it, but I’m hoping that if you do then you’ll take comfort in knowing you’re not alone.
Please tell me I’m not either.
Shauna Glenn lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her four kids. She has a vast knowledge of things that a regular person might find completely useless and a waste of time. Her passion is designer handbags and Mexican food, and her favorite alcohol treat is a tall glass of Pinot Grigio. You can read more from Shauna on her blog.
Ýou are not alone. This site is proof! And god, love affair with food – I can so completely relate. Sometimes I wish I could deep-fry the entire world. Then I give myself a mental slap and go off to chew on a carrot or something (on my good days..carrot cake on my not so good days!). You are awesome and brave to write this and I dunno about everyone else but i’m impressed by everyone on here for sharing the things that takes up so much space in my mind, yet never finds an outlet. Amazing! Bravo! Cudos!
Thats me, now. I made it through college, which was supposed to be the hard part. But I was swimming then, i was in the water 4 hours a day and you cant swim fast if you dont eat semi healthy. This isnt to say i didnt gain weight, but it was manageable. But now, im out of college, I pinch the parts of my body I wish would go away. I plan how im going to make my stomach flat, and my my butt smaller and so that my arms dont jiggle. I just want it to be like that. I want to feel sexy and confident, and I want to know that being a size two isnt going to be the answer to feeling that way.
My gymnastics coach chewed me out the day I broke 100 pounds. Crazy, isn’t it, that whole scene. Of course now I look back and gape at my former self. I swear I have heavier backpacks than that now, wtf, and I still at that time felt so self-conscious and paranoid about sucking in my stomach. Of course I still have that, but now there’s a stomach to suck in. But you know what, Old Gymnastics Coach? I didn’t have these awesome boobs back then, either. So go sit on it!
Hmm. I like this post. Because I get it.
I’m doing a thing at the gym right now and even my trainer is telling me to balance it out, because I always overdo it out of the gate too. Hate to see what I’ll be like in a few weeks when I hit the fuck it stage.
Chin up. You’re gorgeous. No matter what you weigh.
OMG– this is so me right now. I’m a few years from 40, have had three kids and still wear a size 4… so why do I examine my body for every possible flaw every time I get dressed? Except I go from thinking I need to lose 10 pounds to thinking I need to gain 10 pounds… cause you know, I’m bigger than the teen/20 somethings I compare myself to in the mall but smaller than the average PTA mom in my area.
It sucks.
I just wanna love ME. The way I am. If someone figures out how to do that, will you email me?
Wow. I am sitting here with tears literally rolling down my face. You are not alone. I remember getting into my size 4 wedding dress and obsessing about a fat roll. Twelve years, four kids, and fifty pounds later, I hate myself. I avoid mirrors liek the plague, I hate to get dressed. I used to love make up and jewerly, but I do not want to look in the mirror to put it on. And every day as I tell myself how fat I am, I have two little girls watching. And it breaks my heart. Daily my husband tells me how beautiful he thinks I am and in my heart I feel like it is a lie. And food, oh, I love food as well. And I hate that I love it.
You are not alone, and thank you for making sure I know that I am not alone either.
Oh, BOY do I hear you.
I’m 40 now. I’ve been struggling with my body image since I was SIX, and someone near and dear to me said something about my “tummy”. Can you imagine telling a SIX YEAR OLD that they’re getting a belly? It didn’t help that my dad is a fitness freak who, at the age of 77, is still running a couple miles a day, and is the same size he was when he married my mom in the ’50′s.
I’m healthy, I’m pretty from the neck up. But I cannot get myself to like my body, and I can’t stop liking food. I binge like you do, and I don’t know why. I try fad diets (right now, it’s weight watchers), lose ten-ish pounds, and freak out and start eating everything in sight. It’s like, if I lose the weight, I will never-ever-be-able-to-eat-that-food-again-in-life. And I know that’s just not true. But it happens. Every damn time, I start bingeing after trying to control it for a little while.
Very frustrating. I’m with you, girl.
“And I lie awake at night and tell myself I’m weak, hideous, unworthy of love.
And the worst part?
I believe me.
Most days I’m happy. I can push away my thoughts of inadequacy and practice something I’ve become really good at. Avoiding full length mirrors.”
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Most of the time, it’s something I can avoid thinking about altogether. However, on one of *those* days, the things I say to myself inside my head damn near shock me with their vileness and hurtfulness – I would never in a million years DREAM of saying garbage like that to my worst enemy, yet I say it to myself (and believe it) on a regular basis. It makes me feel ashamed of myself.
I am worse to myself then any bully I’ve ever met (and I’ve encountered a lot of them in grade school as an overweight child and even more as an overweight teen in an all girls high school). When I have one of those days, I’m not just berating myself, I’m doing that on top of replaying every comment a bully ever made to me, every talk I’ve ever had with a family member about my weight, every failed attempt at losing it, and I convince myself that I deserve it all and I’m so weak and such a failure because I just can’t lose it. I’m so sick of this pattern of thought because obviously making myself feel bad isn’t helping me lose the weight or change the patterns that are hindering me.
I am 5’9 and weigh 129..I am a size 4…I want to weigh 128…be a size 2 and be nothing but muscle…lean beautiful muscle…which is exactly how I looked 3 years ago…but I fell in love…got married…could no longer workout 4 hours a day….now I am so frustrated with myself…I hate the flab…but I cannot..will not??..cannot find time to workout like I did….so I don’t eat…then I do eat…then I don’t eat…it is insane. We have five kids (3 mine..2 his)…he loves me…our home is beautiful..but still…nothing is perfect unless my body is…and I know know that is soooo wrong. I should be so much more thankful and happy with myself than I am. I have no idea of why I do this…but I have been doing it since high school…IN THE EIGHTIES!!!
I totally feel ya, girl. It is like you are reading my mind word for word. It is nice to know that I am not alone. Perhaps in finding others like us we will find the support we need to stop. eating. everything.
Im 5ft 6 and I weigh over 200 pounds…I disgust myself and yet I go through the same routine over and over again. You’re not alone, and you are definitely not the worst out there.
I think we are all bullying ourselves. Im glad I found your website, now I don’t feel so alone
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