Tatum Savage

I was a different person the last time I shared my life online. I was young, in my early twenties, writing about how caring for your mental health was so important, and that the best way to action that care was with weight loss.

At the time I had no idea that this need to be smaller than I was, different than I was, or to have a different body, deeply affected my mental health. Not just during my early twenties either, I was suffering for the majority of my life. I was convinced that my unhappiness and stress were because of my weight, and my “sedentary” lifestyle. I was unaware of my severe eating disorder that was not only thriving on my obsession, but feeding my anxiety and depression with guilt and shame, too.

My depression and anxiety were named and somewhat treated early on, but my eating disorder would go undiagnosed for another two years. I spent those years regularly seeing a therapist. She listened to how I spoke about food, my body, my relationship to it all, and never once said this is unhealthy, obsessive, or dangerous.

She heard me saying that the thing I wanted most in the world was to be thin so I would finally be loved, and accepted. She heard me, and suggested I try yoga.

She wasn’t the only one, either. I was never told how dangerous that goal was. Grown ups, parents, friends, therapists, doctors, teachers; each one echoed this faulty sentiment back to me. Keep trying to lose weight and one day you’ll lose enough to be loved.

Looking back now it’s crystal clear that everything I was doing was hurting me more than losing weight could ever help me.

My entire world was food.

I tracked calories obsessively, and got upset when I couldn’t properly track an ingredient, or a meal. I weighed out ounces of protein, and measured oils, fats, and carbs precisely when cooking. I used not one, not two, but three separate apps to track food and exercise. I weighed myself 10 times a day, with clothes and without, before and after using the bathroom; I was desperate to see a lower number than I had before. I was going to the gym for 90 minutes, 5 days a week, and on the days I wasn’t, I was still getting my 10,000 steps a day.

I was convinced that a diet of 1400 calories, with that much exercise, would make me look how I had always dreamed of looking. I would finally look normal, be normal, be accepted.

I had even found a community on Instagram that was full of like minded people. We all believed we were healing ourselves; it wasn’t a harsh diet, it was a fun meal plan! The FitGirlsGuide community was an echo chamber that reinforced all that I had been wrongly doing in the name of health. My eating disorder ate up all the weight loss posts, all the encouraging comments and DM’s. You’ll get there, they said, keep working. You’ll be thin and lovable one day, just keep cutting calories, keep working out.

I followed that plan extremely closely and lost a lot of weight, fast. After that, I plateaued for months and months. I remember feeling agony, wondering what I had done wrong. I was exercising all the time. I was eating next to nothing. So why did I feel terrible? Why wasn’t I losing more weight? Why didn’t I feel better about myself? I further restricted, cutting out every bit of joy. No salty snacks, no sweets or baked goods. No popcorn at the movies, no ice cream dates.

I kept this up for almost a year, only giving myself a cheat day every couple weeks. It took until I was laid off from my first ever full time job for my restriction dam to really break. The next few months were spent binging on everything I had restricted, gaining back more than what I’d lost in the process.

By the time I started my next, horribly toxic job, that cycle was much more frequent. I would restrict myself with bizarre food rules, followed by binging after bad days at work. I would “break down” and order take out, usually a pizza, sometimes two. I’d finish everything off the same evening, eating well past fullness into discomfort and sickness.

These binges would sometimes go on for just one night, sometimes a week or two; I would “give in” to every craving that I had suppressed. And each day, riddled with guilt and shame over eating “bad food” the night before, I would promise myself I would never do it again. I’d go right back to restricting, barely eating anything for days before my guilt and shame led me right back to those “bad foods”. It was a vicious cycle that would take me years to escape.

Now, more than 8 years later, I am a different version of myself. I no longer look at my body as something that needs to be changed. I am valuable not because of my size, or my health, but because of who I am.

I have found freedom from diet culture and fatphobia, and although I still struggle, I’m confident I will never fall back into its dark, painful clutches. I know now that my body, my weight, my appearance; these are the least interesting things about me. I am no longer contained by the opinions of others.

I give myself all the space, strength, love and kindness I need to continue healing. I protect myself now, and I will protect others, in ways I never was.

I am so much more than diet culture lead me to believe, and You are too. It’s okay if you don’t believe it yet; I’ll keep sharing my stories until you do.