Content Warning: Eating Disorder Discussion
When our new Marketing Coordinator joined our team last week we asked her to try and get some b-roll of a cooking class we had for a corporate client. We had no idea when we asked her to do that that she would capture this incredible moment for me and for our team.
I found my way to wellness as a way to hide my eating disorder. When my eating disorder was most active I would skip meals for days, work out, and sometimes purge. Eventually, that behavior was found out and I was sent to therapy. I went to Christian family therapy and they were not equipped to handle my ED––which is a conversation we all need to be having. One of the ways my ED presented as a soul-crushing fear of eating in front of people. I was terrified they would see me eating and make judgments about me, and my body, and my lack of self-control. I literally would cut the inside of my sandwiches out before school, throw it away, then take the crust and put it on the table at lunch so people would think I had eaten and they would leave me alone. My first therapy experience in therapy was group therapy. They took us out to dinner. I still remember everything about it. It was humiliating.
I realized I would have to take charge of my own “healing” so I could trick my parents into not sending me back to therapy (note: I do not recommend this). So. I found wellness. No one judged me if I was eating carrots and lettuce and drinking smoothies all day. It made it easy for me to hide in plain sight. My relationship with food was still massively disordered, it was just massively disordered in a socially acceptable way.
My journey from not eating, to maniacally controlling what I eat, to intuitive eating, and finally to this place now that I don't have a name for has been long (Kate Moore recently posted about empowered eating which she learned from Jess Walker and that sounds right to me as well). I eventually got a better therapist. I started to understand my thin / straight-bodied privilege and work to advocate for a world that cares more about who we are and less about what we weigh. I found my way out of the "wellderness”––as much as one can in a society that moralizes wellness and equates it with thinness at literally every turn.
And now we're here. At this video. In my lifetime I have gone from pulling the guts out of my sandwich before lunch to eating on camera. Thank you to my team and to Kirbee of Kinimi Kitchen for celebrating this win and this realization with me. Thank you to Ashley for being as excited about this as I am. You are so special. I love you all. - Elizabeth