I have to confess to being one of those girls. Aged 17, I looked like this:
Not slim, but what I would consider curvy, slim(ish) legs, I was a little bit overweight (we're talking pounds, not stones) and definitely not what I would have called a "large" teenager. So, why is it that at that point in my life I encountered roughly three or four people of the male species that would call me fat or told me that I should lose weight?
It's funny because I've always believed that girls are incredibly nasty to each other, but at that part of my life, it was actually boys, which at such a young age was absolutely soul destroying.
I will never deny to being an emotional eater, and I fear that since those naive days, I have gotten myself firmly in this trap of a Catch-22 situation where food is what makes me fat, but being fat makes me sad, so I eat to quell that sadness. Unfortunately, weight isn't the only thing that has the power to make a person sad. I think it has gotten beyond emotional eating, whereby I now eat chocolate because something in my body is just craving it...
For people like me, food has become like an addiction, very similar to smoking cigarettes. We know that we shouldn't consume it, we know that we're doing ourselves harm, but it becomes like a compulsion that even though our bodies do not want it, we crave it until we cave in.
I've gotten to a stage where I don't think that I have any willpower left, and I'm not really sure what to do to stop myself. I want to lose the weight so badly, for the sake of my own health, and because I might want to start having kids when I reach 30. Am I too weak to help myself?
I honestly wish that I could fly back to ten years ago, slap myself and tell myself to ignore those idiots who are not nice people. I was not fat then, I was curvy and I was beautiful.
By the way, for any haters that might jump on this post, this is not a self-pitying post and it is not a "feel sorry for me" post either. We always see the struggles of people with eating disorders in the other direction, but I can't help feeling that us larger women get ignored. Because obsessive eating in any fashion, whether you're eating too much or throwing it back up IS an eating disorder, no matter how you try to mask it.
And telling people to "stop eating" is NOT the solution, because that might be easy for you to do, but it's exactly the same as asking a smoker to quit smoking, they probably can't do it that easily. Why? Because they're addicted!
I'm just sick and tired of yes, let's say it, fat people, just like me, being put down for the way we look, when if we could learn how to handle this illness we honestly would.
Food controls my life, and I hate it.
