The Voices

I know I've been writing a lot about my struggle with an eating disorder/disordered eating and my postpartum biz, but it's helping.
See...these evil voices that tell me I'm worthless until I feel dizzy and empty in my stomach, that I'm a failure if even an inch of belly rolls over the top of my leggings/shorts, that every mouthful I am chewing too quickly and forcing into an already full stomach at night, in front of the fridge, in the dark is making me a shittier person, an uglier person, a person undeserving of success or love, these voices have plagued me since I was 18 years old (which I know is late. Some girls start their horrific self loathing as early as 8 or 9 these days, and are battling full blown eds by the time they hit puberty, that doesn't make my journey less valid, just different. Everyone's journey is different).

Still, it's something a lot of people are talking about now. Which is wonderful. It's hard to let something that thrives on secrecy and shame take over your life if you are constantly talking about it with people and comparing your scars and building each other up and sympathizing with one another.
The body positive movement is really wonderful I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it is helping me a lot, because I am in a place I never thought I'd be.

I'm on the verge, the edge, the tippity tip tip of getting better. Really better, like well enough that I stop caring, stop assessing, stop weighing, balancing, comparing, and hating. I'm really close.

The thing that has helped me get here the most?
Pregnancy.
I know it's so crunchy and hippy and earthy, but truly it was. The need to take care of myself properly, as I hadn't done since I'd been a kid, had never been more important as when it was fostering a new life. Because I couldn't do it just for me. I had to do it for us. And once I started doing it for us, I realized I was also doing it for me, and IT ACTUALLY WASN'T EVEN THAT HARD.
Now, of course, the baby is on the outside, and he's wonderful obviously, but it means i am no longer directly caring for him when I eat, so it's trickier. The voices...they try.

I was doing pretty well for the first four months. My body bore the obvious signs of childbirth: a soft tummy with a pouch of extra skin, humungous, hard, sore boobs that leaked and sprayed and generally sought to embarrass me whenever I left the house, deep dark under eye circles, hair loss, and a few other tasteful things I shall not mention.
Because everything was a mess, I was okay with it looking a mess. I ate when I was hungry, and I ate what I wanted. I craved carbs a lot, so I ate a lot of bread and pastry. I also ate a lot of fruits and veggies and nuts and cheese. My body was gearing up for breastfeeding armageddon, I let it do what it needed to do.

Then colic came. Colic hit the babe so hard we started frantically trying to find the cause. The doctor said it was most likely something his undeveloped colon couldn't handle in my breastmilk, so I started trying to cut out things that could be making my baby scream and cry and writhe in agony at all hours.
See where the trouble began?
Where it always does.
Cutting things out.
When I first began my disorder, I had read an expose on factory farming and I went from comfortably omnivorous to vegan in the space of an afternoon.
This was in 2001, before almond milk, before Quorn, before kale and quinoa, gluten free, quest bars, Siggi's dairy and all the trendy trendy treaty ways to be healthy we have right now. I had a college meal plan, and the only thing that was vegan was the salad bar. I could eat tofu for protein. They didn't even have peanut butter at the toast station.
But you know that story.

So fast forward to colic times.
I'm healthily omnivorous again, but I have, like, a lot of baggage.
I cut coffee out of my diet first.
No change.
Then dairy.
Then peanuts.
Finally, in the last ditch effort before we started trying prescriptions, my pediatrician told me to cut out wheat.

So I cut wheat out of  my diet, and the colic went away.
Like magic.

And then, I started to lose weight.

It was the losing weight that first made the voices come back. They didn't even speak at first, just lurked, loitering in the shadows when I realized there was nothing at the potluck barbecue I could eat except naked hot dogs and watermelon. They skulked in my periphery when Bob ordered a pizza and I had to get another salad with chicken.
I replaced the cravings for toast with peanut butter and oats. I replaced the pastries with trail mix and yoghurt. I would see an eclair and I would reach for a banana.
Then, one day, I looked in the mirror and I just knew.
Between breastfeeding my little baby, and this new complete lack of wheat, I was losing weight.
And not in the slow way that my body had been shedding the baby pounds. I was losing it in the way that most people who are trying to lose weight do.
Then one day, the voices started whispering.
I got on the scale.
I saw a number there I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. A non-ed number, but the number that I had seen on the scale after a couple of weeks of being vegan that started me thinking maybe I liked this whole "structured eating lifestyle". It's my gateway number. This is the number that I see that makes my brain think..."Well shit, just start counting calories again and you could lose that extra ten pounds and look like a super model. It's not that hard. You've done it before."

Except I haven't heard those voices in a long ass time.
I swandove from restricting into BED really quickly. I was 20 years old at my lowest weight, the one at which I stopped menstruating for a year, tried this new fun activity called "passing out frequently", and had a large black scab on my spine from where I spent two hours every morning doing 1800 sit ups and crunches on a towel on my dorm room floor.
Then I fell off the wagon.
In the space of a year, I went from there to eating entire jars of peanut butter at 3am using frosted animal crackers as spoons. I went through a truly low phase where I stole food to binge on because I wouldn't buy it. I rationalized in the daytime that if I didn't buy the "trigger foods" then I wouldn't have them to binge on, but then I would see my friends with their care packages from loving parents full of sugar cookies and fudge, stuff I hadn't allowed myself to touch for ages, and those lovely friends would say, "oh sure, if you want some oreos just come by and grab a couple." In their minds they thought I'd stop in and chat to them in the afternoon and eat a couple of cookies (like a normal person). Instead I'd wait until my stomach, hollow and creaking from restricting all day, was so loud and insistent that I went into psychotic survival mode. With nothing to eat of my own, I would creep into these friends' rooms and steal first one handful then two, then the whole package came out into the hall with me, sometimes a bathroom stall, where I would stuff, tears running down my face, hatred coursing through my veins, the voices screaming in my ears, until there was nothing left.

It was such a slippery slope.
I could recuperate for months. I went on trips, lost ten, twenty pounds, then rapidly gained it back. I stole bulk packages of almonds and cashews from a family I stayed with in Australia. They were so kind as to let me sleep in their daughter's room while she was abroad, and I repaid them by binging in their kitchen until they actually started asking me where things were disappearing to. The shame I felt during that time period was unlike anything I've ever been able to describe.

I moved to this city and to that one, and then I got into a loving relationship, and the happiness I experienced spurred the longest period of restricting (because I thought restriction=happiness) I had since I was in college. At 25 I weighed my gateway weight, and then I lost ten more pounds without even trying. Instead of binging at night to make up for my restricting, I was having sex, which was so much better.

Then the newness of the relationship wore off. Life crept in around the edges, and before I knew it, we were living together in a new town, worried about money and jobs and saving up enough to get married. I was experiencing that mid-twenties let down that all liberal arts grads have.
(Wait, you mean nobody's just going to HAND me a book deal?)
And soon the voices were back.
I had a few blow up fights with my partner, when he discovered the empty peanut butter jars I hid under the bed.
He'd buy ice cream, which I'd finish and then scrambled to replace before he noticed it was gone. It was impossible. I was a bad liar. He was shocked, then concerned, then when I refused to talk to him about it, he was angry.

Then I started working at a bakery again, and it was easy to hide my disorder.
See, you don't have time to eat when you're working. You run run run and work work work, and the coffee is free and the camaraderie is satisfying so you don't even think about food for eight hours.
Then it's time to go home, and you've got a bag of day old pastry and bread that "you couldn't stand to see go to waste" or "will totally send to work with my fiancee", and you sit down at midnight, and you eat eat eat until you realize you can't breathe.

It took eight years for me to get to a place where I sort of ate normally.
I still fell into restrictive eating habits during the day and binge habits at night, but the big binges, the really bad ones, got fewer and further between, and I stopped cycling at badly as before.
Still, i had almost no self control around pastry and bread that I brought home from work because it was free, and being a poor kid, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste.
And if there were brownies in the house, I couldn't just eat one. I had to eat them all.
I gained weight.
I tried to be okay with it.
I called it giving up and giving in.

Then I got pregnant.

So here we are.
The gate-weight staring up at me from the scale, and I feel all the voices rushing at me.
Cheering me to lose more, to restrict more, to hide and shrink and wither.
And alongside them the others telling me to pig out blindly, eat until I can't breathe, nobody will judge me, I just had a baby, I've got wiggle room, I deserve to because I'm exhausted and I feel like shit all the time anyway...

Only, I've worked so hard to get here.
Not the weight here.
The brain here.
The health here.
I've worked so hard to make a healthy baby, to make a child who I want to grow up with absolutely no self consciousness about his body.
Already he's growing faster than lots of kids his age. He's 20lbs at 7 months and people remark about his rolls and his size. It's all positive, but it frightens me. I don't like that they're already saying this sort of thing.
What if I have a fat kid?
Do I want him to hate himself? Do I want him to judge his worth based solely on his waist size?
When I picture my baby hating any part of himself I want to burn cities to the ground.
I worked so hard to make him, and he's perfect. Nobody is allowed to make him feel anything less than perfect.

And there it is folks.
There's the voice that's louder than anything else in my head right now.
The voice I am clinging to for dear life.

Love.
The love voice.
The no nonsense, don't bullshit me, I know you voice that I couldn't tap into for fifteen years has finally set up a bullhorn and she is here to stay.

Get the fuck off the scale, she says.
Who gives a shit if your pants are too big this week, they're gonna be too small again and then too big again, just be glad they don't have spit up on them, she says.
Eat the fucking pudding, she says.
Eat the fucking fruit salad, she says.
Are you drinking enough water? she says.
Did you get enough sleep? she says.
Are you doing what's best for the baby? she says.

And I can answer her yes. Yes I am. Yes I will. Yes I know what's important now. Both of us. Yes him, but both of us. All of us.

Instead of shoo-ing the voices back into the shadows, I put them in a cage, out in the daylight, and we look at them, this love voice and I. We refuse to blink. We stare them down. We don't let them speak, but we refuse to pretend they don't exist, and then we eat anyway. We love anyway.
We put one foot in front of the other on this journey, and we keep talking about it, because that's how we keep them locked in place, and how we don't let them think they know me anymore.