Two years ago, in a session with my therapist, I suddenly found myself saying, “I want to talk about my relationship to my body sometime.” Just saying that one sentence out loud was all I could muster that day, and had taken me decades to get to that point.
My first real awareness of my body started when I was around eight years old in the hallways of my grammar school in suburban Boston. As I cycled my bike over mounds of dirt in the woods behind my house, and flew around the corners of a roller rink on a Thursday night as Michael Jackson tunes blared, I was blissfully unaware that my body was being judged and seen as wrong.
That all changed when a boy in my third-grade class shouted down the crowded corridor at me, “Your ass is so fat!” My fat body, bigger than any others in our grade, defined me at school for the next eight years. I can still hear my peers’ singsong chant of “Fatty-fatty two by four, can’t fit through the bathroom door”. I know by heart the opening words of an essay another boy wrote about me and read to the whole class: “I know a boy, he’s kind of chubby”. I easily recall the “boom boom” noises the worst bully made when I crossed the room to sharpen my pencil.
At home, fat meant nothing: I loved the warmth of my fat mother’s hand in mine, my fat older sister’s cackle of delight at sinking a hole-in-one at mini golf. But by the time I was 15, I was exhausted by the years of harassment and assaults and had become convinced my bullies were right – my body was wrong.
I asked my GP to help me lose weight, triggering what would become a 30-year relationship with diet culture. Over the summer before my 16th birthday, I walked miles each day and adhered to a bland diet of endless tins of dry tuna upturned over beds of lettuce. My body shrank. And by September, I was thin, merging into near invisibility among the boys who had targeted me the year before.
Staying thin required constant vigilance, a daily meeting with my scales to keep my weight in check, and 190lbs on my six-ft frame became the goal. If I slipped, meaning if I ate what I felt like or didn’t exercise five times a week, I instantly regained the weight. When I told people I was on a diet, they’d say: “You? Why?” When occasionally my weight would hit 205, 210, people noticed: “Oh, what are you doing to lose weight?” This confirmed to me that I needed to continue cutting sugar, eating meals no bigger than my fist, fasting for 16 hours a day, running to the gym and back, or sticking to whatever diet was being pushed at the time: anything to get back to 190lbs, to be acceptable.
My efforts were encouraged by 1980s and 90s diet culture – an entire industry that supported the message that thin was good and fat was bad. That my skinnier frame was what success looked like, regardless of how hungry I was or how disordered my eating had become.
By the time I reached 45, I was utterly exhausted by my 30-year quest to stay small. For the first time in my adult life, I started to wonder: what if I was just fat? Shortly after I broached the topic of my body with my therapist, I found a nutritionist who specialised in intuitive eating and the radical idea that my body knows what it needs. Diet culture demands that calories are counted, that the number on the scales is recorded, that success or failure is based on measurable progress. Intuitive eating rejects that, and instead asks you to simply listen to what your body is asking for. But when I began trying to listen to my body, it was silent, as if to say: “NOW you want my input?”
It’s been nearly two years since I started trying to reject diet culture, and I’m standing wobbly on that first step. My body and I are still learning to communicate, but I no longer speak to myself like the bullies of my childhood spoke to me. I’m not cruel or shaming. I don’t demand its silence.
After 30 years, I am fat again and can say the word about myself – in therapy and elsewhere – and hear it as a description, not a determinant of worth. I stand outside a world I once knew best, unwilling to go back, listening instead for what else my body has to say.
Jason Prokowiew is a writer and author of War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir
In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
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