My Health at Every Size Approach to Fitness
It’s January, and I’m five years into recovery with my eating disorder, Carl. I call it Carl because it’s easier to see how toxic and controlling my ED is when it sounds like a person.
Carl said I can only have one soda.
Carl hates it when I go a size up in jeans.
Carl says the maximum number of eggs you can have a day is three, and if you eat more than that you’ll probably die.
I love introducing Carl in a group of people who don’t know who he is. Then I get to say, “Oh, Carl’s my eating disorder” and I know immediately who my people are—the people who sidle up beside me like “I named my Imposter Syndrome Svetlana, maybe she could hang out with Carl”—vs. the people who are like “Oh…. how… interesting.”
January 2019 was the last January I ever made a weight loss resolution for the new year. I remember creating spreads in my bullet journal. Workout schedules and lists of snacks that were only a hundred calories and trackers for my measurements and fit tests.
In the years since, I have rested. I have not worked out at a gym. I have occasionally forayed back into the realm of fitness—a hundred days straight of daily yoga, weekly sessions with a personal trainer—and then panicked and went back into rest and hibernation mode.
My journey to ED recovery started with a book: The Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner. Inside this book I learned about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in which 36 healthy white guys between 22-33 years old volunteered to be starved and then rehabilitated. After a 12 week baseline phase, the men entered six months of lab-monitored starvation, followed by a rehabilitation period.
The starvation diet was around 1600 calories a day, for six months.
It is absolutely normal in the United States for people to diet at 1200-1600 calories a day. A level that turned healthy, mentally well men into depressed hypochondriacs with fucked up metabolisms.
No wonder I was such a bitch when I didn’t eat carbs. No wonder I had meltdowns and panic attacks when my partner brought home off-brand frozen waffles that were made with GMOs. No wonder I was going literally fucking insane the deeper and more restrictive my eating disorder went.
After six months of starvation, the men in the experiment entered the rehabilitation phase and researchers discovered that hungry people need to eat a lot to recover from the physical and mental effects of famine—up to 4,000 calories a day.
This astonished me. I had been limiting my calories to anywhere between 1,800 to 2,400 depending on my weight—a level I now understood as starving. Suddenly, some physical symptoms made sense.
When I was at the height of my eating disorder, my skin was constantly breaking out with bad acne. I was always cold (especially my fingers and toes) and my waking temperature was below average. I only had a bowel movement once every few days, if I didn’t use coffee for its laxative effects to force myself to poop on a daily basis. My anxiety and depression symptoms were extreme. I wasn’t getting enough sleep because if I hadn’t worked out on any given day I would make myself do it before bed, and I tended to wake up before dawn to get a workout or a run in.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment opened my eyes to what I had really done to my body—literally starved it.
I learned that I would need lots and lots and LOTS of rest in my recovery. But resting felt like agony. I was the type of athlete who joked on scheduled rest days, “Where’s my rest muscle and how do I train it?” But I stopped going to the gym, I stopped sticking to any kind of exercise routine.
Three weeks into this no longer restricting myself thing, my partner at the time said I was getting too fat for him. Like I really needed a big neon sign from the universe asking me “You sure you wanna reject diet culture?”
Yes. I was sure.
As my home life disintegrated around me (he apologized, but then checked out as a boyfriend and picked fights until I was the one to launch inevitable breakup, SUPER RAD OF HIM), I absolutely inhaled more books to help me understand that being fat was okay. To help me embrace my identity as a fat girl, a fat woman, a fat person.
The Body is Not An Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor
Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls, by Jes M. Baker
Health At Every Size, by Lindo Bacon
I learned that higher BMI doesn’t actually mean higher risk of death due to size alone. I remember calling my sister on the phone and practically SHRIEKING about this when I heard it in the audiobook of HAES. All the shame and pain and torture I had endured—not only endured but self-inflicted—didn’t even have a medical payoff, and indeed had created medical damage.
Medical fatphobia and the tendency to ignore fat patients’ complaints about their health, along with weight cycling and years—even decades—of yo-yo dieting, impact health outcomes and increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and death too.
Why don’t we talk about that?
Why is it only “Stop being so fat” and never “let’s make sure you are doing things to promote health, regardless of your size”?
I know that my fat body can be healthy. Indeed, my body getting fatter is actually a testament to my recovery. I learned that recovery tends to involve belly weight gain because the body is surrounding all my organs with fat to help them heal from all the shit I put them through. It made me appreciate my belly in a way I never had before.
I was always a good, hourglass body kind of fat. The kind of fat that looks attractive, with the right clothes on, to most people. In my recovery, I have become round fat. And it has highlighted the ways that I’ve still got a lot to work on as I embrace my body at its basest levels. Because I always thought that even if I was fat/heavy, I was pretty, I was sexy, I was well-shaped.
The fuck is well-shaped? I am a divine human being! WHO CARES ABOUT SHAPE??
There’s an image you can find online of some type of scan/image of the inside of a body—maybe an MRI?—with a thin person and a fat person. The fat person obviously has fat around their organs and beneath their skin in amounts that starkly contrast with the thin person.
This image was motivation for me during my eating disorder. I didn’t want all that fat around my organs. I didn’t want that fat under my skin. I didn’t want any of that fat.
Now, I remember that image and I wonder if those organs had been starved, wounded, hurt. If the fat surrounding them was also protecting them. If the fat body had been forced through horrendous, decades-long experiences of shame and stress and starvation and was stockpiling resources to survive the famine, the battle, the war.
This year I do have fitness goals. Not a weight loss resolution, but some small improvements to keep my body mobile as I age, to maintain the ability I have as a disabled person, to stay mentally and physically well.
And I can achieve them while fat.