Who’s ready to troll the Internet? Well, you’re here, so you’ve already got a head start, don’t you? And what better place to start than FBDC?
Here are some fun things I found on the webbernets this week. It’s not an extensive list, but quality over quantity y’all! Enjoy, and have a great weekend! I’ll see all you lovers on Tuesday!
Herrroooo friends! Hope your past two weeks have been splendid. Not being able to post a TILT list last week was weird! I really missed it. I look forward to Thursdays every week now because of TILT, but last week I was off the Internet, doing wonderfully awesome things with some of my favorite people. The past two weeks have definitely been full of blessings for me, despite a torn ACL. (Did I not tell you that? I forget. The MRI results came back. I tore my ACL. Anyway…) Let’s get to it!
the rexia series
liarexia
I stumbled across the term “liarexia” while perusing (what else?) a celebrity gossip magazine. The term was used to describe the eating habits of celebrities photographed eating fatty foods. Cheeseburgers, fries, bagels, milkshakes, you know, the stuff normal people eat every freaking day. So, why is it such a big deal when celebrities do it?
Well, quite frankly, it’s because they’re usually stick thin, and if they were eating that way every meal of every day, they wouldn’t look like that. Ergo, the idea is that they’re “lying” about what they eat throughout the day.
Um, duh. They also all probably have personal trainers that work out with them at their homes 7 days a week. But that’s another blog post entirely.
“Liarexia” is something that I find to be a bit of a redundancy; people who struggle with eating disorders tend to lie a lot because, hello, their eating habits are not normal. Even ED sufferers know this. It’s really rare to find someone placing an order at Starbucks saying, “Please give me a small cup of black coffee. Yes, that’s it. No cream or sugar, please. I’m trying to keep my daily caloric intake under 300 because I’m irrationally fearful of weight gain. Thanks.”
No. That’s not normal, and when people do things like that, it raises red flags. Red flags, by the way, are the eternal enemy of all eating disorders. Red flags demand explanations, which can sometimes lead to something awful. Like therapy or (gasp!) recovery.
Heads up: this is one of those blog posts that is more for me than it is for you. If it helps you, great. But honestly, I just need to blog because, like I’ve said a thousand times, I blog because I can’t afford therapy.
Three weeks ago I tore my ACL at my dance class. I landed wrong after a jump and, well, my knee decided to rip in half or something. I’m going to see an orthopedist on Thursday and I’ll most likely have to undergo surgery at some point in the coming weeks. Ha. Wow. I just typed that, flippantly, as if it’s something that people just do. Just like that.
“Oh hey, what’d you do today?” — “Nothing really, just had some knee surgery and then swung by Starbucks, whatevs.”
At any rate, the past three weeks have been challenging for several legitimate reasons (I can’t move my knee certain ways, I have to wear a brace every waking hour, I have to let people wait on me, etc.) But, they’ve also been challenging for a big, stupid, dumb, not-legitimate-at-all reason: I can’t exercise and it’s giving me anxiety.
i haven’t been able to exercise since tearing my ACL three weeks ago and i feel disgusting and fat. my jeans are tighter and my belly is squishier and it’s giving me a lot of anxiety. *breathe in, breathe out*
but. hey. it’s okay. i’ll get surgery (soon i hope?) and then i’ll be recovered in a month or so and then i can start training for the disney princess half marathon and i’ll lose like a hundred pounds and everything will be okay. RIGHT? right.
(oh and i know there’s that whole “i am not my body” thing but seriously right now i’m having a hard time focusing on that since it seems as though my body is taking over my life.)
okay. there. i said it once. and i don’t have to say it again.
carry on with life, y’all!
[see also: this post didn’t happen.]
F. Scott Fitzgerald
[via emphasisadded goodeggs:skeletales]
(via one-twenty-five)
I didn’t realize how much the rexia series was going to affect me until I started looking through old pictures me knee deep in my eating disorder. Ew. I feel so sick looking at these pictures and knowing that behind the smiles and goofy faces, I was a zombie. Even though I was the textbook definition of “alive,” I felt dead inside. I was a slave to the calories I consumed — nothing else mattered to me. Perfection and thinness were my whole life.
Here’s a picture of me from the fall of 2007. I look pretty good, right? Happy, healthy… normal. To someone who doesn’t know my story, this picture seems pretty typical for a college-aged American woman studying abroad. But let me reveal to you the reality underneath.
When this picture was taken I was studying in London and had actually just been diagnosed with EDNOS about six months prior. I’d gone through nutritional counseling, gained some weight, and was trying to learn how to live a normal life. I didn’t know my weight at the time (because I wasn’t allowed to know) but I did know that it was higher than it was a few months before and that it was hard for me to be comfortable knowing that.
I was also aware that alcohol has a crap load of calories in it, and I was living in a foreign country amongst people who knew nothing about me or my past or, most importantly, my eating disorder. So, the day this picture was snapped, I did something that I did countless times before I went through therapy: I severely limited my food intake throughout the day. Since I knew I would be going out to the bars that night, I concluded that I couldn’t “afford” to have both the calories in food and the calories in alcohol in the same day. I had to pick one and, for the sake of not being the one awkwardly sober person at the bar, I chose alcohol. I barely knew the people I was studying with so, in my mind, I was in the clear. I felt relieved to know that, unlike when I was in counseling, no one in London was monitoring my meals, so it could be my little secret. Besides, I’d been eating way more since my therapy ended, so I figured it wouldn’t matter much. It wasn’t really “relapsing” right? It was only me “making a smart choice” about my daily calorie intake.
Fewer statements have been made that are truer than this for me. Words and ideas have constructed and reconstructed the paradigms on which I base my entire life. Words like “diet” and “thin” and ideas like “eating disorders” and “perfection” and “never good enough” were so powerful to me that they quite literally changed my world. Over the span of the 10 years I had a destructive relationship with food, I wasn’t the only one affected. My friends’ and family’s lives had changed, too. We were all in this crappy world together, drowning in self-loathing and despair. Relationships were broken. Tears were shed. Fights were had. All because I was convinced that with this body in this world, I would never be good enough to be loved.
But the good news is that wasn’t the end of the story. As backwards and scary as these ideas made the world for me, I made a conscious decision that I didn’t want it to stay that way. I was determined to create a whole new existence for myself — one that was governed by love instead of hate and joy instead of sorrow and hope instead of failure. Without much direction or know-how, I turned to the only tool I could fathom utilizing in a battle against self-hate — the weapon that changed my world in the first place: words.
At first, knowing full well that the only ideas in my head were dangerous and unhealthy, I sought out other people’s words — the bible, books on inner beauty, self-love blogs. Then, I took those words and actually wrote them down in my journal with my own hand as if they were pouring out of my own consciousness. I won’t lie to you — at first, it felt really awkward. It felt wrong. It felt stupid, pointless, and borderline pathetic. But I persisted, knowing that the alternative wasn’t an option anymore.
After several (I’m talking several, people) months of this, I started following a different pattern. Instead of reading these encouraging words about my body and feeling uncomfortable and doubtful, I started to believe them. I even found myself thinking them while I was looking in the mirror without even trying. Instead of looking at my body as “fat” and “unlovable” and “disgusting,” I found myself referring to it as “lovely” and “curvy” and “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
So. All that to say…
TODAY’S SELF-LOVE TIP: SEEK OUT, SAY, THINK, AND WRITE DOWN ENCOURAGING WORDS.
