This time last year, I’d really only just begun to accept the fact that I have an eating disorder. Not a “weird food thing,” not “disordered behaviors,” not a “strong dislike of food” — I have an eating disorder, and with it, a long road ahead to repair my relationship to food and to my body.
I spent the majority of the last 10 years convinced that my eating disorder was a thing of the past. In a culture that reinforces and even praises disordered eating behaviors, I thought my quasi-recovered state was the best I could hope for. After all, the rest of the world is engaging in restriction, “clean eating,” and vilifying entire food groups so it was hard to recognize my relationship with food as problematic when our culture encourages and reinforces disordered eating.
I teach teachers about the body image challenges children face in our culture, giving them tools to address the epidemic of body image problems kids suffer today. Many of these problems are attributed to the recent explosion of visual social media, like Instagram and Snapchat. In the seven years I’ve been researching, speaking, and writing about today’s body image issues, I’ve switched my focus from teaching kids how to cope with this culture, to actively changing the culture to accept all human shapes and sizes.
If someone would've told me ten years ago that I would no longer be in pursuit of weight loss today, I wouldn't have believed it.
