My relationship with food

I have always loved food, for as long as I can remember. To this day it is still one of the things that brings me most joy. But the relationship is a very complicated one. The complications began when I became aware that women who looked a certain way were praised and women who didn’t look this way were regarded as ‘ugly’. Skinny is good – that’s what everything around me seemed to be saying. I learnt this very quickly. I can’t remember the exact age I was when it started affecting the way I ate. I guess around 10 years old, but when I really think about it, it was probably even younger than this.

All of a sudden I was being bombarded with pictures of celebrities I should look like and the diets I should be following to achieve this look. I started to see food differently – it was no longer something to simply enjoy, it was my enemy. Full of these things called ‘calories’ that were going to make me ‘fat’. I started to restrict myself – cutting down on carbs and trying to find foods with the least amount of calories in them. I tried every single diet under the sun from the ‘grapefruit cleanse’ to ‘eating keto’ to trying to survive on diet coke and cups of tea alone. It got to a point where every meal aroused a sense of anxiety and guilt. Weighing myself became a daily ritual – one that I would beat myself up about all day if my weight was even a pound or two different to the previous day – and I found myself constantly comparing myself to other women. If they were skinnier than me I would automatically feel like I was worth less than them.

The problem escalated after I started university. I found myself consuming A LOT of sugary alcoholic drinks (anyone who went to uni will understand!), ending almost every night out with a ‘cheeky Maccies’ and spending way too much time watching Netflix in bed. So naturally, I gained a few extra pounds. In an effort to ‘shake off’ this extra weight, I started missing meals and exercising more. Of course, trying to starve myself resulted in huge binges of fast food and sugary snacks when I couldn’t take the hunger anymore. The guilt I would feel after a binge was so intense I would sometimes make myself sick. This vicious cycle repeated itself for years.

I also continued to experiment with different diets. I jumped on the ‘MyFitnessPal’ bandwagon at one point and I honestly believe this is one of the most unhealthy things I have ever done. This app calculates the number of calories you should consume in order to lose weight – it told me I had to eat 1200 calories or less. Have you ever tried to survive on less than 1200 calories a day? It’s not a lot, trust me. I became obsessed with everything I was consuming, it was the only thing I thought about. I found myself hungry, distant and miserable. I remember one time I went to the gym after a long day of trying not to eat. I was running on a treadmill that was directly in front of a mirror (I usually tried to avoid these ones so I didn’t have to look at myself but it was the only one available). I was looking at myself and just HATING myself. I wanted to change everything about the way I looked – why wasn’t I skinny enough? And would I ever be? Luckily, I eventually realised what the app was doing to my mental state and decided to delete it and take a break from the gym for a while. The feeling of relief I felt after deleting that app was incredible.

It has been a slow process but since leaving home and going travelling 2 years ago, I have started learning to love myself. I realised that I was making myself miserable by trying not to eat and have been educating myself on what is actually healthy. I have switched from a ‘trying to be skinny’ mindset to one of just trying to look after my body and be as healthy as I can possibly be. Now, I try to listen to my body and simply eat when I’m hungry – but years of trying to starve myself has messed up my natural hunger signals and I find it difficult to know when I’m still hungry and when enough is enough. I now also know that I cannot change the way that my body is made, this is how I’m meant to be and it is enough. I still have days where I don’t like the way I look but those days are getting less and less now.

I know that so many people will relate to this experience. I can’t speak for men, but pretty much every single one of my female friends has felt the same at some point in their lives. I’m lucky that I have managed to (almost) overcome this problem by myself, but many cannot say the same. The pressure on women to look a certain way in today’s society is immense and it needs to change. I hope this blog will encourage others to speak out about their own experiences and realise that they are not alone as there is still such a stigma around eating disorders. Again, I feel like it’s something that people try to hide on social media- posting a picture of their perfectly toned (and often edited) ‘bikini body’ but not admitting how they really attained this ‘ideal’ look. It’s time that realistic bodies are normalised so we aren’t all striving for something that is unachievable and ultimately unhealthy. Here’s to enjoying our food and being comfortable in our bodies as they should be!