Since before I was born my parents have struggled with their weight.
I don’t know every detail of their personal story and I don’t speak for them. I am simply going to talk about this from my perspective and the impact it had on me.
Pictures of my parents in their teenage years show them as very beautiful, classic, 70s looking people. I know because they’ve told me that when they were in their early twenties they both started trying to lose some weight with something called the rice diet together. The rice diet is a very old low calorie fad diet that focuses on eating mainly rice and fruit. Nowadays we can look at the rice diet as just another fad diet with easy to see short term benefits but detrimental long term disadvantages. It is very clear to me that from this point on my parents became trapped in a classic yo yo dieting cycle that they stayed in for over a decade.
They would successfully lose weight with restrictive, hard to maintain diets that they eventually could not sustain in real life. The weight would come back on every time but of course with additional weight gain because their body’s metabolisms were protecting themselves for when they did it all over again. We all know here that there is always going to be an overshoot when you gain back weight from an unsustainable diet but the problem was that my parents repeated these weight loss techniques over and over again, completely messing with their natural metabolisms and ultimately always gaining more weight and being unsatisfied with themselves.
My memories of food growing up revolve around weight watchers, Atkins, Nutrisystem, and more. I remember my mother had dozens of notebooks with every day’s food point calculations. I remember my dad getting sent boxes of pre-made meals and winning little teddy bears every time he lost weight. I remember having diet books sitting casually on the coffee table or in my dad’s bookshelf. I remember fat free yogurt, 90 calorie cookies, and diet sodas. I remember my dad buying and failing to follow through with exercise machines, DVD programs, and workout regimes. I remember my mom going to the gym so often that I was a regular at the daycare facility there. I remember weight loss goals being written in my parent’s bathroom, watching them take before pictures that never got after pictures – because despite diet culture existing in every facet of our lives, my parents never permanently lost the weight that seemed to haunt them.
I have no idea if my parents would be at the weights they were so unhappy with if they didn’t constantly force their body’s through diet after diet after diet. I often wonder now if they would be a little smaller had they never begun messing with their bodies at all. I don’t think they’d be super model thin – but who is? Certainly not anybody in my family – and we never will be, that’s just not in our genetics.
Now when it came to me, food was an entirely different story. I was able to eat whatever
I want, and I wanted cookies and candy and ice cream. My parents did not food shame in front of me. Occasionally at the start of one of their new diets all of the junk food had to be thrown away, but I knew it was about them and not about me. Despite calling themselves fat they never once called me fat. When I gained some weight in high school and complained they always assured me I was beautiful and didn’t need to change. I ate intuitively. I ate junk food and healthy food. I did not consider dieting until after I moved away from the unconditional love my parents surrounded me with.
Despite how wonderful they were, growing up with their attitudes internalized a lot of incorrect messages within my mind.
- It incorrectly taught me that being fat was wrong, ugly, and unhealthy.
- It incorrectly taught me that the only way to combat being fat was by restrictive and obsessive dieting
- It incorrectly taught me the only way to try and attain happiness was to lose weight quick
- It incorrectly taught me that junk food was bad food
I don’t blame my parents for my eating disorder. I don’t blame anybody – anorexia is a mental illness that is triggered and effected by the world around us. Media, entertainment, advertising, clothing stores, commercials for diets, fat shaming, and a general lack of respect and proper understanding of healthful nutrition are all reasons people get stuck the way I did. My ED was however, triggered by the first diet I ever attempted. Self-conscious about the weight I put on naturally in college I attempted my first diet much like my parents did in their twenties. My diet morphed in a way theirs never did though of course.
Now my parents and I have our shit way more figured out. We have all learned a lot through our own journeys about our weight and health. Set points are real and my family’s is a little bit higher than average. We cannot chase an ideal that our body’s will never be happy with because we will be chasing forever instead of enjoying where we are now. No food is scary, no food is bad. Food is food. If we eat what we love, when we love, while listening to our body instead of punishing it we will be right where we need to be. Eating full fat yogurt and fresh baked cookies won’t set our health goals back. Wherever we are in our journey is perfect because we are all good people and that is what makes us beautiful.
That’s what it was like growing up in a household with parent’s who yo-yo dieted my entire childhood. My parents are loving, hardworking, nurturing, hilarious, fun, intelligent people. That’s how I know that nobody is immune to diet culture, but that with a little bit of work – we can all fight it.
I discovered Minnie Maud over a year before I finally committed to it. The one predicament about this method is that you have to want recovery for yourself in order to successfully go through with it. When I found the program, it was still available on the original Youreatopia site. I haunted the site and forums for months as I unsuccessfully attempted to recover through quasi recovery. When I finally found a therapist who supported Minnie Maud and I committed at the beginning of 2015. My whole world began to change and by the end of that year I was finally in remission.
For me, recovery from my eating disorder took a long time and happened in several phases. Boiling the whole process down to a series of easy-to-follow steps just isn’t realistic because this disease is complicated and different for everyone who is affected by it. This is my recovery story and though it may not be exactly the “right” method, it is the one that set me free.
I saw therapists and went to doctors but the most impactful discovery for my recovery was online communities. It all started with my Tumblr recovery page. I discovered other girls who were recovering from anorexia and what that process looked like for them. I spent hours and hours reading posts from recovering girls and the articles they found interesting. The first step of course, was to increase my intake. It happened slowly over the course of a few months. I increased to 1200 a day then 1300 than 1500 and so on until I settled on 1700 a day for many months. I stopped all workouts that weren’t yoga. I made a list of all the food that scared me and I vowed to try and eat everything on the list at least once. I started photographing my meals and posting about my days on my tumblr. I was in this state, which I refer to as “quasi-recovery” for over a year. I went through several periods of relapse where I would return to my old ED behaviors before returning to quasi. I was still an unhealthy low weight, but I wasn’t losing anymore I was maintaining. At least I was eating I thought… sure, I was still cold all the time, afraid of certain foods, isolating myself, losing my hair, not menstruating, feeling depressed and suicidal, I sprained my ankle in my sleep because my bones were so weak, and sitting down still hurt because all my bones stuck out of my body… but for some reason I still felt like I was “recovered”. Just because I wasn’t eating only 500 calories a day and the fog in my head was dissipating I thought the battle was won. The problem was that numbers still ruled my life and I was not happy. I was not recovered.
The beginning of my salvation came upon the discovery of youreatopia.com and the Minnie Maud method of recovery. In summary, it is a system of recovering in which the 
In the end, I gained 40 pounds back. I experienced painful swelling, bloating, and stretch marks but I pushed forward anyway. I ended up at a weight that I could truly love myself at without hurting myself. The best part of recovery was feeling my personality return and grow into something more exciting than it had ever been before. I did stop gaining weight eventually despite not changing my eating habits. I was the same weight I had been before I became anorexic because set point is real. I haven’t obsessively counted calories in almost a year but I have to imagine I’m still eating near the minimums every day and my weight has stayed stable give or take a pound or two since the initial weight gain. I don’t usually weigh myself, I can just tell by my clothes. I felt truly recovered from the thoughts and the actions about 7 months into Minnie Maud. Today, I eat and eat and eat – not because I think I have to but because I live in an amazing city with delicious food. I eat because I work in an industry that feeds me decadent delicious free meals. I eat because it is an important way that I connect with the people I love. I eat because food is delicious. I eat because we need food to live. I eat because I remember what it’s like not to and I will never go back to that life again. I am recovered.
When I started writing my recipes I was newly discovering what life could be like again if I recovered from my eating disorder. I ended up abandoning the blog after a few months for bigger recovery goals like drinking, socializing, getting take out, and trying to forget about how difficult it once was to put a cookie down my throat. As I slowly recovered over the following year my fascination with food plummeted, as it should have, and maintaining a blog like this wasn’t good for my fragile newly recovered psyche.
I continued to use the power of the internet (coupled with external support) to conquer my illness and get myself into a full and robust remission from anorexia. The process was tough and challenging, and perhaps even more difficult than being sick was because I was fighting against the voice in my head instead of succumbing to it. However, I powered through and I am so grateful for the life I get to lead today because of it.
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