Happy Friday! I'm sending happy thoughts for everyone from the world of midterms. I'm grateful to be feeling much better today than I was earlier this week, but now that the fatigue of the flu is gone, my anxiety is beginning to ramp up a bit. Anxiety likes to take whatever energy we have and channel it into running through worry trails. My worry trails include thoughts like:
"Move more!"
"Wait--what's in that? Is that too much?!"
"Plan. Plan. Plan."
"You need to earn your food!"
"How many calories is that? Is it too many?"
"Should you have x if you're planning on having y later? Both are fruits. Fruits have sugar!"
UGH.
I wish that I could say that I were far enough on my own recovery journey to have released these thoughts, but the truth is that I'm not. Yoga has been immensely helpful for me in terms of learning to work with my body as opposed to against it, and I recently began using EFT tapping to deal with moments of acute anxiety. (I'll write more about EFT later--it's really cool and wonderful!)
But I still have some limiting beliefs surrounding food and movement. A major issue lately has been my belief that I need to "earn" my food through movement (i.e. lots of walking, standing, etc.). The idea that you need to burn x calories in order to be "allowed" to eat something is pretty ridiculous, but it's one of the diet culture myths that has been the hardest for me to separate myself from.
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| empoweredeatingrd.com |
I was raised in a home where I was fortunate enough to have access to a variety of nourishing foods that came from sustainable sources. I enjoyed Nanny's homemade almond butter bars and scrambled eggs and feta without hesitation, and making apple crisp or gluten-free brownies (family with Celiac) was a highlight of every Friday night. Helping mum make Thanksgiving dinner never freaked me out, and the few weekends we splurged by getting Whole Foods hot bar takeout were so exciting because they had yummy chicken and salad and OMG gluten-free cookies!
I was a healthy child. I knew I got a rash when I ate dairy or gluten and that certain chemicals made me feel bad, but I didn't have to analyze these reactions or "label" my diet as "plant-based" or anything else. I ate things that made my body feel cared for without having to think about it too much, I played outside, I sometimes did yoga with my mum, and I read a lot.
Something I didn't read? Calories. Sure, I'd look sometimes to see if an ingredient list had a food sensitivity in it, and I avoided things that came from factory farms, but I never looked at calories or serving sizes and used those numbers as guides for how to eat something.
Obsessing over whether or not I'd eaten more than one ounce of Terra chips would've ruined all of my childhood Terra chip-eating experiences. Back then, I looked at a bag of Terra chips with a) gratitude and b) the hope that my brother wouldn't take all of the sweet potato ones.
Calories didn't really start to "matter" to me (read: dictate my life) until I was in my freshman year of high school. I was stressed, lonely, and seeking a way to cope with anxiety. Sadly, the coping mechanism I ended up choosing was the online calorie tracking app we were told to use during health class.
I'm not criticizing health class, but I think some of diet culture's convoluted messaging definitely seeps into a lot of what people are taught about wellness. We aren't taught about the antibiotics used in factory farming or about mindfulness or about the chemicals in Febreeze. And all of the good things we learn about--vegetables, fruits, fun recipes--is largely overshadowed by the calorie.
Even on my healthy diet--the one that my body had been trusting since childhood--my calorie intake was "too high" than my expenditure. I'm very petite, so the BMR that my calorie tracker calculated for me was pretty low, and I remember doing my health homework and discovering the horrifying fact that I was consuming way more calories than I "needed."
Oh, no!
The next part of the assignment--multiplying my excess intake by 365 days and then converting that to pounds--freaked me out even more. I was left feeling like a total failure, and from that point forward, I entered the caloric value of everything I ate into my tracker. I also upped my movement to "compensate" for my intake--just to be safe.
I did everything that I felt was necessary to get an "A." And I ended up getting Anorexia.
#fail
My story (which of course involves more factors than just that health assignment) aside, what I'm trying to get at here is that our brains are very susceptible to the language we expose them to. If we keep telling our brains something, they're going to start to believe us, and then we're going to end up being controlled by whatever it is we told ourselves. Our thoughts are very powerful. If we keep ingesting diet culture-inspired thoughts, then those are the thoughts we're going to have.
I'm proof of this. Diet messaging very easily "sticks" with me. I read somewhere a few years ago that meals MUST be spaced three hours apart. This, apparently, is vital for survival, and I incorporated this rule into my innermost being. As a result, I still struggle with what to do when I'm experiencing low blood sugar. If it's only been two hours since breakfast, I question whether or not I can eat a snack--even if I'm lightheaded or really hungry.
As a child, I definitely would've had a snack. And then I would've moved on. One of Nanny's nut butter bars and I'd be set. But now--just because I read a silly post on a health blog--I'm caught in a limbo of low blood sugar = worrying = waiting (and then still not eating enough) = anxiety.
PLEASE, don't let yourself be controlled by your limiting beliefs! Limiting beliefs lead to limited lives. A best friend of mine once asked me to go to yoga class with her. I panicked. I couldn't go to yoga . . . I had to run so that I could eat dinner.
Don't make that same mistake. Skip the run. Do the yoga. Eat ice cream at your brother's birthday. Dance. Watch a movie. Paint a picture. LIVE.
Don't live limited.
<3 <3 <3
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