Eat the Damn Cake

This is Sarah. You can check out her blog here. I am hoping that the photos from my wedding come out somewhere in the vicinity of how nice hers did. But even if they don’t, I’ll still think she’s awesome. Thanks so much, Sarah!

I recently got married.

Getting married is like winning the lotto. Photo taken by the lovely Mish at Eating Journey.

As you can see, I was really happy about it.

Oddly enough, I recently wrote a post with a similar theme to Kate’s piece, I used to be a skinny person. I wrote it on my private blog, which has a whole six readers. This is a very personal post, and it gets pretty heavy at times. I never thought I would share it with strangers on the Internet when I wrote it. However, I thought I would share it with all of you magnificent Eat the Damn Cake readers, in the hopes that it will encourage someone reading it to appreciate their bodies, in the here and now.

If you read any ‘healthy living’ blogs, websites or magazines…or watch any television at all…or hell, just know someone who is getting married, you know that to be a bride means to be obsessed with “the way you will look on your ‘special day’”. The theory, from what I gather, is that you need to look your very best (read: thinnest) on your wedding day, or else you will be stuck with all of those photos where you will be unhappy with how you look. So brides are supposed to diet (and in some cases, starve) and work out until they get a perfectly flat stomach and arms that are perfect for their strapless dress. I hear that they even have bridal boot camps, pilfering brides out of some extra cash (which they certainly don’t have whilst planning a wedding), and I am sure if I did a Google search it would tell me about special diets for brides to ‘lose weight fast’.

Well, I am happy to report that I took part in none of that. I didn’t once diet, cut back on what I ate, increase the amount I exercised, post ‘inspirational’ (aka soul-crushing) photos of thin brides on my refrigerator, or any of that. The only time it even crossed my mind was when I would cook and eat a lot or go to friends’ houses for dinner and gorge myself on delicious food. Even then it was just as a joke….a “look, I’m eating vegan cookies. Must be my bridal diet!” I never once considered that I should lose weight or shape up in order to get married.

Maybe you think that’s not a big deal. Perhaps you look at my photos and you’d expect it. I mean, I think I do look happy and comfortable in my own skin, after all. But the fact is that it is a big deal…because I have always thought I should lose weight. At least I have since I was a little girl (maybe 6?), and I was first introduced to the idea that women should always be dissatisfied with their bodies, as I watched my mum diet her way through life. (But that’s another story for another time!)

Sure, I have moments where I think I look okay, but those moments are usually ruined by photos that tell me a different story than the mirror…or mirrors that tell me a different story than my brain. For the most part, this has led to decades of frustration with the skin I am in. I eat an incredibly healthy diet most of the time and exercise so much, yet I don’t have the body I have always envisioned I should have.

Perhaps this sounds grim, but I assure you that my body image has come a long way. When I was 14, I developed an eating disorder. I won’t go into much detail, but let’s just say that thanks to anorexia I was 30 lbs underweight, and I am very short. I later developed bulimia, and it wasn’t until I was 21 that these behaviours stopped. I didn’t have a period for years, but I was lucky enough to only be left with stomach troubles.

But the thing is…the thing that really does my head in…is that no one ever told me I looked too thin. Never once did someone say, “Wow, Sarah, you’re getting too thin” while it was happening. Most people told me I looked good, so imagine what that does to a young girl’s head: I was severely underweight and I was told I looked good, not sick. So when I became a healthy weight again (and then slightly overweight after that), I really thought I was huge. For years afterward I binged and purged….then just binged …and it took until I was 21 years old to stop most of that behaviour.

So my actions have changed. I no longer starve or binge and purge. My brain and body image are better than they ever have been, and I have no desire to go back to being that sick girl. But there’s still a lot there that hasn’t gone away. That includes those nasty voices in my head that tell me how I should look. That’s right. Even though I have been recovered from my eating disorders for years, I still fight those persistent voices that fight the form (and ultimately, the genetics) of the body I am in. The volume of those voices is much, much lower than it used to be…but despite the best efforts of my husband and everyone I am close to, they have never stopped entirely.

And another part of the vibrant chorus in my head is the voice that tells me the things Kate talked about. For example, that I should be upset that I am no longer the super skinny girl I once was.

Problem is… I’m actually not upset. Right now, I know that I am exactly the weight my body wants me to be. The fact is that I am now at what I like to call ‘a new normal’. Over several years, I’ve gained about 15 lbs from what used to be my normal, and I’ve stayed at my current weight for several years. As I said, I eat healthy, exercise daily and feel better than ever. My weight gain is not a result of poor lifestyle choices. The fact is, that I am at a new normal, and it’s heavier than my old normal.

So what does all this have to do with my wedding?

Well, I found myself saying to my husband the other day, “Why do women always want to lose weight for their weddings? I mean, why would I want to look like someone else on my wedding day? I want to look like me. It’s me you wanted to marry, not a thinner version of me. All it would achieve is that I’d look at our wedding photos and ‘miss’ my wedding body….”

The crazy thing is that I really believed that. My husband doesn’t realise it, but I say a lot of things to him that lead to epiphanies. This was one of those times.

This was my epiphany: I really didn’t want to look different than I normally do on my wedding day…well, other than that over the top dress, of course, but you know what I mean. I wanted to look like me, and so did James. It was in that moment that I realised that I am really happy with the body I have.

Maybe it doesn’t seem like it, but this is a big deal.

All of these years since I have stopped behaving as though I have an eating disorder, I have continued to hold on to the thoughts. This was part a psychological issue, but more than anything else it was a habit…and it was guilt. I have felt guilty when I feel good about myself, as though I don’t deserve it. Guilt is a sinister thing. You see, I have spent a lot of my life feeling that I have it too easy…too good. I am a middle class white girl from Michigan, who was offered a job in Australia with one of the most amazing mentors I have ever had. Here, I live a wonderful life, and I even met my wonderful husband. Though I feel fortunate, I also feel guilty that I have so much, when so many others do not. So perhaps a lot of this eating disorder business has been my way of compensating…of trying to make a good life not so good. Eating disorders are, after all, about control. And though I couldn’t control my life’s circumstances, I could try and create balance through sabotage. Deranged but true.

I’m not going to lie; there’s still work to do. In spite of the fact that I have found peace with the way I look today, I find myself saying things about the way I look to my husband all the time, without really believing what I am saying. It’s absolute insanity, but I can’t get myself to stop saying these things. I often commit to stopping all the negative talk, and I usually succeed for a while…but then I fall back. At this point in my life, it’s like trying to part with an old friend.
But when I said I don’t want to change anything about my body to fit into a wedding dress and look as I “should” on my wedding day, I really mean it. Even more than that, I mean it in general. I am at a place where I’m actually not unhappy with my body. In spite of my railing against it all the time verbally; I am very much at a place of internal peace with it.

So this raises a question: why do I have such trouble accepting the fact that both my body and my brain are happy with this body of mine? In part, I feel like I have walked away from a war that I am contractually obliged to continue. Worse yet, I’ve walked away when there are lots of things about my body that I am supposed to hate and want to change: arms and legs that are ‘too thick’…broad hips…chubby cheeks. I know I am supposed to dislike these things about myself, because my past experience and ‘society’ (sorry to use that massive umbrella term) tells me I should. Women in movies can be muscular, but they looked toned. They are usually either muscular or thin. I am muscular and curvy – two things that aren’t supposed to be together. If I am in the wrong light, my muscles don’t look like muscles at all. They look like fat. I look soft and feminine…so people often don’t believe me that I work out so much. That’s supposed to upset me, but really it pleases me. I love that I can be a beefcake in the gym but just a regular, curvy girl in the rest of my life. I love that I am at a place where maintaining my weight requires no effort at all, sending me a clear signal that I am very much at my ‘happy weight’.

We have no idea what we’re doing. I am mumbling, ‘is this what we do?’

So if I am feeling so good, why all the negative talk? Well, to continue with my war analogy, I am unsure what to do in the aftermath of the war with my body. And just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, rebuilding after the war may prove to be the toughest part yet. Especially when, after two decades of war, the fight is so wrapped up in my identity that I am not entirely certain who I’d be without it. I don’t know what to do when I weigh more than the old me would want, but the new me feels perfect healthy and happy with that. To keep with the analogy, I feel like I need a whole new system of self-governance to deal with my new psychological structure.

One thing I do know for certain though is that the wedding was a turning point for me. Under pressure I didn’t fall back on hating my body and trying to make it something it was not. I defied the conventional logic that part of wedding planning is planning the number on the scale and taking any action necessary to get there. As a result, I have hundreds of wedding photos preserving me….just how I am, and just how I was meant to be.

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Un-Roast: Today I love my hair. It’s about a million shades of red, and it’s so coarse and thick, yet very straight. I love that it defies any attempts I make to style it…because that means that I don’t have to take the time to style it very often. I love it even more because it took a while to love this hair, as it was the source of much teasing and cruel comments. Most of the men I have dated said things like, “I don’t usually like redheads, but you’re okay.” Or, “You’re pretty…for a redhead.” But my husband didn’t need to be convinced. He is a true redhead aficionado, and even loves the freckles. It’s heightened my appreciation for it.