WHEN HEALTHY ISN’T

This is the one that has been staring me down for months. I’ve sat down to write this one multiple times since I’ve started this blog, only to end up closing out the screen after staring at it for a long time with the words refusing to come. I would start a sentence, determined to get it out…and backspace it away. I’ve resolved to write it, only to resolve to never write it the very next day. This one scares me.But for some reason, I know I have to do it. I know it won’t let me go until it’s written.

I’ve talked a lot about beauty and comparison and the battles that we as women feel and face in those aspects, so maybe this will come as no surprise to anyone. I can’t decide if I want it to be shocking or if I want it to be totally unsurprising. In any case, I’m doing this because I feel I need to and because I hope that it will perhaps save someone else from going down the same path to the same prison I’ve been set free from.

I’m not trying to be melodramatic here, truly. It’s just the way I feel and it’s just the battle I’ve faced.

I have struggled with feeling beautiful for years. I have struggled, battled, and agonized over my body and how I look for what feels like forever…I can hardly remember what it felt like to not be self-conscious…to not always be judging myself or comparing myself to others.

I didn’t always struggle with that in such a vivid way. As a teenager, I was pretty ok with who I was and the way I looked, and I don’t remember ever really being overly consciously aware of my body or how I looked, besides just the average bad-hair-days and don’t-know-what-to-wear-days and it’d-be-cool-to-look-like-her-days. But it was just average, nothing debilitating to my sense of worth. I was healthy, strong, had a good appetite, and was fairly active with the normal school sports and activities.

When I was eighteen, I spent a year working at an orphanage in Ghana, Africa. It was an amazing experience, and I will never regret my time there. During that year, I gained some weight, due mostly to stress, poor diet, and little physical activity.  I wasn’t that aware of the weight gain or even that overly concerned once I did start noticing my clothes fitting tighter or people making comments about me being “oh-bell-oh,” which is the native word for “fat.” There was one day that I did step on the scale and was a little shocked at the number staring back at me, and did make a conscious effort to eat better and especially drink more water. I did lose some weight before I came home, but I was still noticeably heavier then I was when I had left one year earlier.

I cared about it, but it was just average. I wasn’t interested in dieting or extreme exercising or anything like that…I just ate normally and stayed moderately active and that was my healthy. I may have a lost a few pounds during the next few months after I got home, but I don’t remember even stepping on the scale. It just wasn’t a big deal.

During the next year, things started shifting inside of me regarding my body and looks. Life and it’s circumstances led me to believe that I had to be a certain way and reach a certain ideal in order to be found beautiful or attractive. I started to be even more careful about how I ate and started running and exercising more consistently, although at this point I would say it was still on a mostly healthy scale. I wasn’t seriously restricting my diet or over-exercising, and I did lose a little but nothing extreme. At this point, I would have been at a perfectly healthy weight for my height, and even towards the low end of the healthy weight spectrum.

But even though I was back to my normal size and weight, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t perfect enough. During the next few years, I pushed myself into a self-imposed prison of exercise, weight loss, and diet restriction. I became obsessed with health and food and eating right, and eventually went vegetarian and then vegan for a few months. I exercised a lot…multiple times a day…as much as possible really. And while it was (and is) something I enjoy doing, it became something I had to do. I lost a lot of weight during this period, and looking back now, I see how sad I looked. I had very little energy, even though I forced myself to exercise as much as I could. At one point, I weighed just a little over a hundred pounds, which for my five-foot-eight-inches height is far too low. I remember thinking how incredible it would be to actually get down to a hundred pounds…maybe then I could be good enough.

I don’t know how much I was actually eating at this point, because I was never a rigid calorie counter. I mostly just kept my meals as small as possible. I didn’t usually skip meals, but would never-ever-ever eat enough to feel full or satisfied. Hunger was like my friend. It meant I was getting smaller.

What everyone else would call an eating disorder, I just called healthy. In my mind, eating very little and exercising as much as possible was the healthiest thing to do, even though I definitely wasn’t feeling healthy. I honestly didn’t think I had a problem, and even if someone had approached me with the idea that it was a problem, I know I would have just laughed and said that I was healthy, not starving myself. But I was, and my body wasn’t getting nearly enough of what it needed to function properly.

Besides losing my energy and mental freedom and the ability to live without being controlled by food or exercise, I also lost my period for over four years. Menstruation isn’t essential to life (another words, you won’t die from not menstruating), so it’s a process that the body can and will shut down when it doesn’t have enough energy to fully function. My cycle shut down even before I got really thin, which just goes to show that every body is different and even if someone doesn’t look unhealthy, if you’re not getting enough energy for your own personal needs, than things can get messed up inside.

I wasn’t overly concerned about not getting a period at first…it was actually pretty nice for a while! But eventually I came to see that having a regular period is a natural and healthy thing for a woman and that clearly something wasn’t working properly.

It wasn’t until I starting dating Ben and began to look seriously at getting married and starting a family one day that I felt that I needed some answers. I did visit a doctor at one point, who didn’t show too much concern actually. She didn’t feel that not having a period was that detrimental to my overall health, but also said that as far as fertility and the ability to have children goes, it was almost impossible to say how this would affect me in that aspect. Since then, I’ve learned that this is definitely something to be concerned about, and I feel that this doctor wasn’t very informed about the risks associated with not menstruating. She did mention that I was underweight, but also didn’t make a big deal of this either.

The mention of infertility scared me though. I wanted to be a mom one day, to experience the magic of carrying a child in my belly. I wanted my body to function properly and be healthy.

But I still wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to face myself or believe that all of this was because of my “healthy” diet and exercise. I didn’t even think I was perfect enough as it was…how could I even think about letting go of what I did have in order to be healthy again. I remember being at a service where a speaker asked the crowd to think of the thing they feared the most, and in all honesty the thing I feared more than anything was gaining weight. It was like this giant thing that I dared not entertain, something that could never-ever-ever happen to me. My thinness, my body, had become my identity. It was where I received my validation and my feeling of beauty. Because I was thin, than I could be beautiful. Than I could be good enough. If I dared to lose my thinness, the world would then see that I was fake, that I truly wasn’t beautiful enough.

It was an identity crisis. I didn’t know who I was outside of the way that I looked. The scale and the numbers defined me…I let them tell me if I was good enough or beautiful enough.

It took losing all that I had worked so hard for in order for me to see this…to see that I was receiving beauty from the wrong place. It took months of battling lies and accusations so intense that some days I could hear nothing else to see that there is more to life and more to beauty than being or looking perfect. It took God reaching down into my place of fear for me to see that He wanted me to walk in freedom.

This is my journey.
This has been my place of battle.
This has been where I have lost ground, but more importantly, where I am winning ground.

I share this with you because I know I am not alone in these experiences. I know that I am not alone in feeling the pressures from our world that tell us as women what we need to be, what we have to be in order to inhabit this thing called beauty. My idea of beauty is being redeemed, and it is glorious and full of freedom and full of life.