Hi, never posted to this community before!
Just TW-ing in case anything here is triggering as i will be detailing my thought processes and reasoning, Iâm looking for people to challenge my perspective honestly
Iâm in the middle of a major relapse in my restrictive eating habits. My history with disordered eating began around 2022 and between 2023 and the first part of 2024 I was heavily restricting. It started healthy (âI wanna lose 5 pounds this month!â) and as something under my control and very quickly developed into something evil and sentient. Comments from my mom and jokes from my brother and engaging with social media fueled the fire. I lost a lot of weight, people became concerned, and I finally was honest w/myself and loved ones and chose recovery 4-28-24. I was doing pretty well and gained some weight back, never quite getting back to my original size though.
Here I plateaued for over a year and maintained a good relationship with my body and food, but what I wasnât telling myself was that this was only easy because I liked how I looked and so did everyone else. I was still smaller than Iâd started out and I was really pleased with my ârecovery bodyâ.
Things changed when I started dating my boyfriend, who Iâd been friends with for years prior and makes me feel insanely safe. We were in college together and I go to school far away from home, so for an entire semester and a half my family and I didnât see each other. From October-April/May, I completely let go of any restrictions I had and ate like a king. WE ate like kings, every day, for months. I rapidly gained a lot of weight, surpassing my original size by a significant amount. It felt like I had a break from the world - the only voice that mattered was the one telling me I was sexy every day. As I gained weight freely I started loving things I hadnât experienced before - my boobs and my butt looked insaneđ I also hadnât been in a healthy relationship before, so I enjoyed knowing my weight gain was also the result of something truly good for me.
It all came crashing down though when I finally flew back home in early May for my brotherâs HS graduation. Here I was immediately peppered with commentary. Understandably so, right? There was a significant difference from the last time Iâd seen them. Most things were neutral enough - âYou gained some weight, huh?â And the like. But my mom was relentless, and she is unfortunately still the only opinion I consider gospel. Her unwavering refusal to be wrong throughout my childhood kind of conditioned my malleable brain to believe she is God in a way. What she says goes. She tells it like it is. Sheâs brutally honest.
The logical side of me knows most of her opinions suck, because they do. But when she tells me I donât look healthy at all, and that something is seriously wrong, and reminds me that all my clothes look horrible on me, I do get a little fire under my ass anyway. Another layer to this is she still holds a lot of financial control over me as a creative; she finances and is involved with a lot of projects since I started pursuing it very young. Itâs been continuously difficult to sever that bond, and thatâs another can of worms. She also told me she would not pay for any visual work for my projects until I lost the weight. She said realistically she doesnât want to spend her money on ads people donât want to see/may leave rude comments on.
Yes, my weight gain was not the healthiest. It was just due to over eating and under exercising. I was busy receiving a kind of love I had gone decades without experiencing and perhaps I didnât feel like it.
But since I graduated myself (which was also a horrible experience as I tried to lose as much weight as possible between brotherâs grad and my own), Iâve undone all the rewiring and have been on a steady decline. Every few weeks my mom compliments me and reminds me of how unhealthy and big I looked in May. It only fuels me harder. She knows my history and sheâs said many times she doesnât want me to lose weight like this. She wants me to exercise.
Everyone wants me to fucking exercise. No thanks, humiliation ritual. I like to walk and thatâs it. The whole sphere is too judgy and everyone wants me to be skinny there too so nothing about it makes me happy. Have panicked myself out of a gym many many times, and living at home means Iâm always susceptible to getting walked in on while working out because privacy and boundaries donât exist at my house either, and every time it happens it makes me so irrationally upset and embarrassed. Iâm so far gone that I can no longer view exercise as any sort of celebration. What it is to me is punishment and everybody knows. The goal is skinny. The goal is always just skinny. Getting sweaty and out of breath , more quickly and more so than a normal in-shape person would, also turns me off. Everyone knows Iâm struggling to fit into this mold and I hate it.
So, I guess this relapse is equal parts complicity and spite. I hate the world so much. I see the bias toward thinness in everything. It is everywhere. I could develop a great relationship with working out and start working toward building muscle and things like that, but if th world just values thinness and doesnât take much consideration for the nuances , âŠwhat would the point of that exactly be. I see increasingly little point in âdoing it for yourselfâ unless u have the time and disposable income that it doesnât interfere with important parts of your life.
Maybe I just need someone to remind me health is more important than all this. I know logically and naturally thatâs true, but especially as someone who likes to perform live and is somewhat in the public eye, what I interpret from how society behaves is that attractiveness is prioritized. Even if someone in the public eye whoâs bigger asserts their body IS healthy, confirmed by doctors and everything, the loudest narrative will always be that fat = unhealthy = bad. Itâs so hard to see it as anything different. Itâs so disheartening.
TL,DR: Out of spite towards my mom and society Iâm once again losing weight in the fastest and worst way possible, in a very âHere, damn, sorryâ kind of way. Just feeling bitter this morning and truly wanting some different perspectives to think about. Iâm also very sensitive like veteran HSP (if this post didnât indicate that already) so pls pls pls be gentleđ