A restriction free zone...

Sourdough bread - who wants to restrict this?! 

 I’ve made some interesting discoveries on my path of trying to improve my relationship with food. The first thing to say is that I have never - thank goodness - suffered from an eating disorder. I’ve got huge sympathy for those who have, or do - I can’t even imagine how hard recovery must be in these days of so much “nutribollocks” being spouted on social media and a print media that seems to prize the “slim ideal” above all else.

When I first heard the phrase “disordered eating” I presumed that it was the same as an ED - but that’s not the case at all. Disordered eating can cover anything from refusing to allow certain foods in the house because you know you’ll eat them in larger quantity than you feel “acceptable”, to repeated to-yo dieting, to feeling guilt around eating certain foods because society deems them to be less worthy. Disordered eating though - it definitely seemed that it was something that would affect other people, not me, right?

My first dieting effort was probably in my mid-late teens when I decided that I needed to be smaller. At the time saturated fat was the particular villain of the piece getting coverage, so I decided I needed to eat as little of it as possible. Quite sensible in some ways, but it did lead to my first venture into obsessively reading food labels and classing foods as “good” and “bad”. I lost some weight, came off the diet, and of course had learned nothing so returned to my old eating habits and promptly put the weight back on...along with a bit more. 

Fast forward a few years and Weight Watchers were running their first points-based plan. At the time I had a close friend who was obsessive about her weight, constantly telling me how much she weighed and how “awful” it was - at the time she weighed about 4 stone less than I did. Disregarding both the fact that we were VERY different builds, and that she was almost certainly borderline underweight at the time, this triggered me to feel that I needed to change my body shape. WW taught me lots of things - that exercise is something you do to earn your food, that it’s all about numbers, that food isn’t protein, fats and carbohydrates, but instead a number of points that means you can either stuff yourself silly on it, or pretty much never even think about eating it, and that a binge immediately after being weighed is what everyone does...WW also set you a goal weight. They told me mine was 7stone 9lbs - which I now know would have been at the very lowest end of the healthy range of weight for my height. Allowing that I’m naturally quite a solid build, this was wholly unrealistic. This lead to probably the most important thing I learned from WW - that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get “thin enough” - at 8 stone 2lbs I looked dreadful - drawn and ill, and my poor Mum was worried to the extent that she begged me to stop. I admitted defeat (while secretly feeling I had failed),  stopped trying to lose more weight, realised that a lifetime of counting points and restricting food seemed rather joyless and dull, of course had learned nothing about actually eating a balanced diet so returned to my old eating habits and promptly put the weight back on...along with a bit more...

Another few years and a spiteful comment from a fatphobic colleague lead to me renewing my acquaintance with WW - more points. Well, it had worked last time, no? (Spoiler alert - no) Same again really - lose weight, learn nothing about the principles of healthy eating, stop the diet, find the maintenance unsustainable, put the weight back on again blah blah blah. 

Of course now I know that the likes of WW, Slimming World etc work on an unsustainable model - by forcing people to use their own system to keep track of what they eat even in maintenance, they can be quietly confident that the majority of people will put weight back on as over time it just becomes impossible for most people, who then put weight back on and so end up as return Customers - the rhetoric being that the plan works, because, look, you lost weight! You just went wrong afterwards, so do the plan again, but better. The fault is always with the customer, never with the plan. 

It was beginning to register by this stage - diets simply teach you about restricting various foods that are deemed “bad” or “naughty”. The rhetoric sinks in though - guilt, shame, you mustn’t eat this, eating that is disgusting, and so by extension YOU are disgusting for eating the wrong foods... I had a  brief skirmish with avoiding refined sugar - blame Chris Evans and his food-demonising for that one, but it had no discernible affect aside from making me quite grumpy so I gave that up. 

Finally, towards the end of 2016 I decided I simply wanted to get fitter and healthier. To introduce more movement into my life, not to earn my food, but because actually I’d learned to love it for its own sake. I started learning about portion sizes, and that actually, no foods needed to be off limits. I let myself buy peanut butter again - one of my favourite foods, but one which previously I almost never allowed myself. I learned that I didn’t need to skip lunch because I was going out for dinner, and most importantly I learned to listen to my body, to take its own cues as to whether I was hungry, or full. Most importantly I learned about disordered eating, and realised that ai never wanted to go back to it. My size has now naturally stabilised at a point that suits me - I get a bit bigger sometimes, and a bit smaller at others, but now mostly longer beat myself up for it. The last few months have been hard though - SO much focus on weight, SO much emphasis on making people feel that they “should” be running, or doing PE with Joe, or whatever. It’s incredibly difficult not to get caught up in feeling that you should be jumping on that weight-loss bandwagon. I’m as comfortable in my own skin as I have ever been now though - even if quite sad that it’s taken 30 years for me to reach this point. I’ve still got plenty of learning to do - finding ways of not getting triggered by friends who are still on the yo-yo dieting journey for a start, simply trying not to engage is a good start but not always easy - but then the most worthwhile things often aren’t easy, no?! 

Robyn