Why Being Thin Didn't Help Me Love My Body | Nourished With Tish

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Why Being Thin Isn’t Everything

If you’ve been following my story, you probably already know that I struggled with disordered eating. My issues with my weight started young: I remember being in the fifth grade doing 100 crunches before bed. This was a routine I kept until my first year of university. 100 crunches, every night.

While I wasn’t fat in high school, I felt thick. I didn’t know what to eat to be healthy (even though I was sure I was doing everything right: low-fat, whole grains) and so I was always starving. I felt insatiable. I remember coming home after school and trying to eat as much food as I could before I went off to work–at a grocery store, where I continued to eat. I was never full. And I was embarrassed.

I was a size 4, sometimes 6, and by no means fat. But I hated my body. I hated that none of my weight went to the “good places” (like my boobs). Instead I looked bulky and bloated. And so it became four years of binging and purging–always hungry, always embarrassed and looking for that reset. I was miserable.

When I finally learned what to eat to help me feel full (healthy fat, protein and fibre!), I stopped eating all the freaking time. I felt more in control. I started to lose weight. It would still be a few more years before I actually looked at healthy eating from a health supportive perspective, instead of vanity, and so at this point I was still smoking, still drinking 6-8 cups of coffee. But I was looking thin. People noticed.

And I thought to myself: finally I can be happy with myself. Finally I can love my body. Being thin would fix everything.

Why Being Thin Didn't Help Me Love My Body — Me in high school–years of disordered eating

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But–and you may have saw this coming–it turns out when you don’t fix the root of the problem, and simply bandaid it, other problems are quick to show up in its place. I may have solved my problem with weight, but I still didn’t love my body. So you better believe I found a laundry list of new things to hate about myself, including:

my scoliosis and visible curvature of my spine
my lisp
my ptosis
my bad eyesight
my teeth
my slanted nose
my big toes
the dimples on my butt
my flat chest
my thin lips
my pale skin

Guys, the list goes on and f*cking on. I hated almost every inch of my body. Except maybe my stomach (100 crunches every day–in this I found a sliver of control). So I made a plan. I made many plans. I priced it out, I made consultation appointments. I looked into changing every single thing about me. I’m talking laser eye surgery, eye lift, speech therapy, chiropractics, nose job, boob job, botox, lip fillers. I was going to do it all and go to the gym and eat less junk. I was going to be perfect.

And then one day, and I wish I could remember the moment, it dawned on me: I will never ever be perfect. I will never be good enough for these standards I’ve created.

So fuck it. I’m not doing it. I stopped doing the 100 crunches every day. I got off my restrictive diet and started eating bananas (that’s how bad it was–I refused to eat fruit!). I stopped putting this insane pressure on my body to be perfect.Because my body is a story, and I’ve learned to love it.

MY BODY / MY STORY

My ptosis is a trait that my brother, dad and grandfather have. It links me to my family.

My scoliosis (genetics aside) is because I thought I was too cool to wear my backpack straps on both shoulders when I went to school. I was lucky enough to go to school and get educated.

My lisp is because my parents paid the money for me to get braces and have straight teeth. (I’m forever grateful.)

And I’ve got nothing for my toes, but at least now I don’t care the way I used to (you can’t win em’ all!).

WE ARE TAUGHT WE ARE NOT ENOUGH

And we’re also taught we’re too much. And it’s bananas. And unrealistic. I wish I could say being thin, being at my “ideal” weight made me love my body. But it didn’t. It was a bandaid solution to a bigger problem: I needed to stop telling my body what to be, and letting it tell its story.

Because you know what? Your body will continue to change. Get bigger, get smaller, get stretch marks, get wrinkles. We need to stop chasing this unrealistic standard. Instead, we need to let our bodies speak. Stop silencing them with restrictive diets, and workouts that you absolutely hate, with instagram filters and angled poses.

We need to relearn our stories. We need to embrace them. The scars. The stretch marks. The proof that we are incredible, the proof that we have lived. We are not statues. We are experience.