My experiences sound sadly similar to much that has gone before. To focus on school days alone, I remember:
- My first day at a new school, I was eight, I walked into the classroom and it went quiet. Then one voice piped up “she’s so fat”. I felt such shame.
- A housemistress telling me “you could be pretty if you weren’t so <she puffed out her cheeks in lieu of a word>”
- One evening there were a lot of biscuits left over. Nobody was around so I picked up a few, maybe five. Just as I was about to make off with my booty the housemistress came in. She looked from my hand to my face and just said “My God” with such horror it has never left me.
- The adults watching me through meals because they had decided I had eating issues. There would be a huddle of two or three of them standing across the hall, constantly watching me and talking between themselves. It got to the point I would skip meals and hide under my bed. That only made the whole thing worse.
- An insipid drip of messages of repulsion and rejection. Things like notes left in my text books or in electronic files on my computer disk saying things like “You’re so fat. Everyone hates you. We wish you were dead.” They used to watch for me to discover them and then struggle to maintain my composure in the middle of class.
I think that’s enough to give you the gist. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ll ever reach a wholly healthy state around food and body image. However, I’ve found a few books have really helped me. One in particular,
Overcoming Overeating by Hirschmann and Munter, is one I’d recommend to anyone. It asks one particular question which I think about often. That was: “Imagine the atmosphere in the world suddenly changed and as a result nobody was ever able to gain or lose weight again. What would you do?” I couldn’t believe how freeing that was as a concept and by contrast it showed just how trapped I really was by my own thinking. Weight-wise I’m probably the heaviest I’ve ever been but actually, mental health-wise I am the strongest I’ve ever been. If it has to be one or the other then this is definitely the right thing for me.