Now before you make up your mind to what I mean by “healthy”… please note that I do believe I am eating healthily. In our country we are obsessed with “eating healthy foods” and to different people that means so many different things. Every year the “expert advice” changes. I think next year we may shame protein and vow to cut it out of our diets for good. Sounds crazy, but who would have thought in the 90’s that fat would be praised and carbs be put to the curb? Not me! I was all about avoiding fat and the lower the better… until my hair started thinning.
Maybe our problem is not with WHAT we eat so much… maybe it has to do more with not being able to trust our own bodies. I think intuitive eating has gone out the window and we don’t even know how to actually listen to our bodies anymore. Since when did a bag of Doritos have to take total control of my life? I remember liking them as a kid, but I didn’t feel the need to eat gobs of them until I was stuffed. How come certain foods are now being touted as “addicting” like sugar? Oh yeah, because we demonize certain foods and make them off limits… making us want them even more! We listen to what everyone else is saying and if you give into those bag of chips… well you just have no self control. On top of that, all that MSG will kill you and you’re better off starving yourself instead. Unfortunately I was a part of this for so long and took great pride in all the dieting and exercise I could muster up. My first exercise program was at the age of 9. At age 11 I started restricting my calories.
Why at a young age of 11 did I think I needed to go on a diet at all?
The answer is I let a bully tell me my self worth was only found in how “fat” or thin I was. This is a rare pic of me at age 11! This was the worst year of my life because I was constantly made fun of by a bully in my class. I started to even hate pictures of myself at that time. I was at a healthy weight but I let his mean words alter how I perceived myself. From that point on I started dieting. As a teenager, I had friends make comments about my curvy body features (even though I was a small size 5/6) which caused me to exercise obsessively on top of dieting obsessively. Many have called the obsessive dieting I have done my whole life “orthorexia nervosa”.
This is me as a teen. I’m the one on the far left in the Goofy pic. I hated this pic because of the way my pants looked at the top. In the pic to the right… that dress was a size 3 and I still nitpicked my body.
Luckily I started learning to love myself more in college- thanks to a lot of Bible reading and finding good friends. The problem was that I still kept going from diet to diet and only gaining more and more weight in the process. I still had an arbitrary number in my head on what I wanted to weigh. This caused me to be in a constant cycle of dieting. I was at a comfortable and healthy weight when I was married, but because I had very little metabolism at that point, my normal eating in pregnancy caused a big weight gain. I lost all that weight eventually by dieting again. Then pregnancy 2,3,4 and now 5 caused more gains and losses. I never lost all the weight after the 3rd baby by dieting and exercising. There were days I would only be eating about 900 calories (feeling full) and yet the scale never budged. My body has been telling me that enough is enough and constant diets and excessive exercise have caused my body to go into starvation mode.
If you are still reading up to this point…well this is just to say that for the past few weeks I have been praying God would show me his truth and I really believe the answer he’s giving me is that I shouldn’t diet anymore. I don’t believe anything should be off limits either. I need to trust that I can make smart choices about food on my own without a “diet” to tell me what I need at the time. I used to be so proud to be able to stick to a diet or “lifestyle” change for any amount of time. The results were sometimes astounding to the scale. I would get so many compliments on how thin I was looking. Believe it or not, before I had the blog I run now, I had a food blog all about natural foods and “eating clean” BEFORE it was all the rage (this was around 2007 or 2008). The truth was that the clean eating was still bondage to me because I still had to avoid so many “toxins” in foods and restrict my diet to eating only the healthiest foods.
I know, at least for myself, it probably wasn’t anything that I was eating that was making me fat. I was making myself gain weight over and over by going on all these diets to begin with. I just didn’t see it. I know people go on diets for all different reasons and if they are working for you.. then great! I know there are many medical reasons that people go on diets, but that’s not what I am talking about here. I just know for me that the diets I was on WERE and ARE and WILL BE the problem if I don’t quit soon. Oh, and since I’ve been intuitively eating for the past week, I unintentionally lost 2 pounds. 😉 I don’t WANT to be losing weight right now being pregnant, but I think it just goes to show that my body was holding on to some pounds because I wouldn’t let dieting go and just listen to what I really needed. I just need to trust that the body God gave me knows intuitively how much and WHAT I should eat. There is so much power and freedom in that… don’t you think?
In my next post I will share how encouraging food freedom with my kids has caused them to prefer fruits over things like candy. My littlest girl’s favorite food is beans. Luckily my food bondage has not affected them because I adopted a better way to teach them to eat from early on. Why has it taken me until now to realize that I should be practicing what I preach? It just goes to show how strong my dieting addiction is!
Melaina
Saturday 6th of June 2015
Rachel, thank you so much for sharing your heart with us. Awesome advice! God gave you truth and I do believe He will set you free.:) Thank you!
Mrs. Sarah Coller
Wednesday 3rd of June 2015
Wow! Talk about some freeing words! Thank you so much for this! I'm so tired of being obsessed by food...surely this is a huge distraction that has contributed a LOT to my weight problem. I love this.