CW: eating disorders, body dysmorphia, body-shaming, fat-shaming
This piece also includes language some may find offensive.
I have an unhealthy relationship with my body.
It started just as I was becoming a woman. At least, as much as I recall, though maybe there were other signs before I can remember. I would be surprised if there weren't.
But the first instances that come to mind of my unhealthy relationship with my body were around 11 years old. Definitely by the time I finished primary school.
It started with a combination of examples set out for me, some from family, some from glossy magazines. You know, the way most of us learn and internalise these things from a young age. Not all are intentionally put there to harm us, but others are seemingly as old as time.
I first remember discussing healthy weight ranges with my Mum. I don't know how it came up. I don't even remember weighing myself much at that age. I had to go into my parents' ensuite to do so. I don't recall a scale in the main bathroom when my brothers and I were kids. At some point, maybe I asked my Mum how much I should weigh. Perhaps she looked it up to see what was healthy for my height and age.
I wasn't overweight; I was slim. I was active in the school playground. I played sports: netball, Newcomb ball and softball. And I was one of the few girls in my grade five and six classes who would go in to catch the ball when we played Kanga cricket. I usually tried out for various athletic events for interschool sports: the 100m, 400m and 800m races, relays and, hilariously, looking back, high jump. At the time, I was around the second or third tallest girl in my year, though I never grew any taller after I turned eleven.
But I remember my Mum taking a magazine out of the bottom drawer of her bedside cabinet to show me a graph. I was near the bottom of the healthy weight range for my height.
I never asked my Mum why she kept her Slimming magazines tucked away where she did. It was the kind of place someone might hide away pornographic magazines, not health magazines. So, to this day, I don't know if she kept them there because it was handy for her to read the articles.
Or if she was ashamed of buying them and reading them because she felt shamed by her weight issues.
Or if she kept them there to avoid setting an example of body-shaming to her daughter. Maybe she didn't want me to be obsessed with weight loss and body shapes and sizes and fixate on such things as an impressionable pre-teen.
If it was the latter, unfortunately, it didn't work.
I didn't become obsessive about weighing myself straight away. I still don't recall weighing myself every day at that point.
But I know I regularly went to her drawer to pull out that magazine to check where I fit on the graph whenever my weight wavered. I checked and re-checked it to reassure myself. Eventually, all I needed to remember was to stay as close to eight stone as possible. Then all would be okay.
My discovery of that graph would have coincided with a friend introducing me to Dolly magazine.
Though we were only about 11 and 12, her sister was a couple of years older and already deep in the world of glossy teen and fashion magazines.
I was still crushing on teen heartthrobs in the pages of Smash Hits, Bop and The Big Bopper and reading magazines that were supposedly more healthy for young women, like Girlfriend.
My friend introduced me to Dolly, Teen Vogue, I think, and other magazines handed down from her sister. Magazines to ease young girls into the constant mixed messages they would become accustomed to as they grew older. Glossy pages full of articles about loving yourself whilst simultaneously working out which parts (physical, emotional and mental) of yourself to hate this week/month/year and what the best ways of covering up those shortcomings were: makeup, creams, tablets, fashion.
Like most teenage girls, I internalised all of these expectations pretty quickly. And what the magazines taught me was rapidly reinforced in the halls of my high school.
In year eight, when a boy I fancied told me I had a "fat arse" as I walked up the stairs into the building in front of him, it played over and over in my mind. For most of the following three years, I wore oversize t-shirts over my jeans to cover my "fat arse". I don't know what I weighed then, but it was unlikely to be much over 55kg, but likely less.
At 16 or 17 years old - the earliest I would have been allowed to use a public gym - my younger brother and I signed up at a gym in the small town where we had moved.
By the time I was in year 12 and allowed to wear casual clothing to school every day, I realised I had a flat stomach. And my arse wasn't fat. So I finally gained the confidence to wear midriff tops and my jeans down on my hips.
For the three years I was at college, I spent almost as many hours per week dancing in nightclubs as in the classroom. I spent three to five hours a night, three to five nights a week, dancing to indie, alternative, retro and disco hits with friends.
When I finished college, I managed to get a much-reduced price on a gym membership. I got back into exercising regularly there as well as on the dancefloor.
By the time I was 18, I had internalised an image of how women should look. So much so that I didn't flinch when a guy I regularly went out dancing with would point at and ridicule other women around me for having "cunt-pots". All I thought at the time was how good it was that I didn't have one.
Another friend put up "pool rules" for his inflatable pool bought with his redundancy payment. The first rule was "No fat chicks", and the last rule was "Definitely no fat chicks". I still didn't flinch. I wasn't a "fat chick". Why should I?
When a guy I slept with bragged about how he'd never had a girl in his bed who weighed over 60kg, I was once again proud I didn't weigh over 60kg.
It was only later, when I got together with a woman I met through the last guy, that I thought about how fucked up his thinking was when she pointed out that she had been in his bed and she weighed over 60kg. She was taller than me, far from overweight and gorgeous. There was a shared sense of victory in her breaking his rule without him having a clue.
It wasn't until about 1998 that I realised how much interest I'd lost in food. Up until about 14 years old - with some exceptions - I enjoyed most food. My parents always served up hearty, delicious meals or took us to quality restaurants to sample a variety of world cuisines.
Sometime in my early teens, I switched to ordering entrees instead of main meals most of the time when we ate out. That may have given me space for desserts on some occasions, but, equally, I may have declined dessert. I claimed it was because my stomach wasn't that big. An entree-sized meal filled me up. And, arguably, it did. But it was ingrained in my mind to eat less; stay slim.
When my parents started running a motel and restaurant in country Victoria when I was in year 10, I lost more interest in food.
Most of what we ate the chefs prepared in the kitchen at the restaurant. By November 1993, I had become vegetarian. There were usually one or two vegetarian dishes on the menu at any one time, or the chefs would knock me up a quick and easy pasta. Or I'd have a bowl of fries. Or microwaved veggie burgers, sans bread or fillings.
If you have a limited range to choose from, even the most delicious meal becomes boring and repetitive. I loved snow peas until we lived there, then I just found them uninspiring. The only element I never tired of was Hasselback scalloped potatoes.
When I was at college and in my first year of working, I spent more time drinking Coke and cider and dancing than preparing food. I wasn't unhealthy. I still ate, but it was purely functional.
I rarely ate much before I went out for a night of dancing or before a session in the gym. I still won't on the occasions I do those things. Dancing or working out on a full stomach has always disagreed with me.
But between college, then work, and dancing and sleeping, there wasn't much time left for eating. At the time, I didn't see this as a problem.
However, while I completed a 365 Days project (a self-portrait a day for a year) in 2007, I looked back on a short video I made for college in 1996.
In retrospect, I think it's safe to say I was verging on anorexic. The video consisted of repeated loops of footage: me in the corner of my bedroom in a huddled position, the refrigerator door opening on an empty fridge, and the soundtrack of In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song) from David Lynch's film, Eraserhead.
Add a mild case of alcohol poisoning on a near-monthly basis, and I obviously wasn't in a good place at the time.
When I incorporated a still from the footage in my 365 Days project, I was reaching back across time to try to reassure my younger self; to attempt to help her. It took me those 10 to 11 years to see her as she was then.
Until I was about 22, I had never weighed over 53kg. And then he started feeding me.
In 1998, I started dating a partner who loved cooking. Who loved food. He'd had and has continued to have battles with food and his body, but he rekindled my taste for food after about six years. If I found a meal I enjoyed out and about, he'd figure out how to make it for us. He'd always make far more than we could eat, but somehow we would eat it all. He would make it in the belief any leftovers would be eaten the next day, but they never stayed in the dish that long.
We were both working and saving to move to the UK within six months of officially becoming a couple. We also spent three months housesitting for his parents on the outskirts of Melbourne. So our activity levels dropped dramatically. We hibernated a lot during the Australian winter, and we spent a lot of time in front of the television.
My weight went up, though not drastically so. I was simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable with that. I still didn't go above the upper ranges of the healthy weight range I'd memorised from my early teens throughout our relationship.
Between 2002 and 2007, various factors came into play that contributed to my weight gain. Depression, excess alcohol consumption, sedentary work, far less physical activity (only on rare occasions out dancing by the time I was 30), not enough sleep.
Sometime in 2007, I reached 72kg for the first time. By June 2008, I dropped again to 61kg. By November that year, I was within about 5kg of my ideal weight. By March 2010, I managed to regain all I'd lost plus some to reach my new heaviest weight thus far of 74kg, in time for a road trip from Melbourne to Brisbane with my friend Phil. Somehow I still managed to take self-portraits during that trip that I don't hate, and some are arguably my best work.
Soon after my return from the road trip, I joined a gym again, and by the time I departed for the UK in January 2011, I'd managed to drop to 67kg. I somehow lost another 2kg in transit to arrive in London, weighing 65kg. I steadily whittled that weight back down to 53kg, one kilo above my ideal weight, by February 2012.
Late in 2010, I'd met a partner when I weighed about 68kg. We decided to try out a long-distance relationship when I moved back to London.
He had been on a weight loss journey before we met, with much more baggage to shake.
We both continued to lose more weight between January 2011, when I left Australia, and February 2012, when we reunited in person for the first time in London.
Although he was proud of my achievements, that visit left me perplexed. I had reached within 1kg of my ideal weight, which had made me happier about my body, and yet, somehow, he seemed less attracted to the new "tiny" me. Although there were other factors at play, I'm not going to lie that his reduced attraction to me didn't play at least some small part in my regaining weight.
Meanwhile, to drop to that weight and maintain it (or near enough), I realised my mind had had to shift a lot. Some of it was a healthy shift. But some of it was seriously unhealthy. Not the same type of 'unhealthy' as during my late teens and early twenties, but still not healthy.
I was obsessively counting calories and weighing myself. I spent at least five hours in the gym every week in 2011. In 2012, and until I sustained a foot injury that curtailed my gym-going for a while, I often spent over seven hours in the gym per week, taking part in lots of Les Mills classes and caning myself on a stationary bike.
Whilst seven hours per week in a gym isn't unhealthy in and of itself, the internal dialogue I was having with myself was anything but healthy. The time I was in the gym was penance or payment for poor choices made in my eating and drinking habits or my lack of activity in my daily life.
When I wasn't overtly punishing myself, I was trading calories out for calories I would subsequently be able to take in. If I burned 600 calories on the bike and 450 calories in a Body Pump class, I could eat that pizza or drink that cider, and everything would be okay.
Whilst reducing my weight to my ideal in 2011/2012, even the MyFitnessPal app ceased telling me how much I could expect to lose in five weeks "if every day were like today". I was regularly achieving a deficit in calories in/calories out that was deemed unhealthy. I consumed fewer than 1,200 calories and often burned more than 1,000 calories. Even fitness apps have a conscience.
By January 2013, I'd developed what a GP believed to be Morton's neuroma in my left foot. It was subsequently successfully treated as rheumatoid arthritis in one of the toe joints. The pain in my toe was so severe that it forced me to cut down and then stop exercising entirely.
After cortisone injections, I was discouraged from any impact exercise - running, jogging, jumping - for a while, at least, but possibly permanently. I was also warned not to wear high heels - even low ones - for any period. They would place more pressure on the ball of my foot and potentially rekindle the issue.
With my exercise options and time at the gym somewhat limited, I still spent a lot of time on the stationary bike. I was still keeping my weight within a reasonable range, but it crept up again over time, much of it caused by a lack of exercise and an excess of alcohol. But also through continuing to consume large quantities of food. That quantity of food was acceptable while I was exercising to excess. But, without the exercise to trade the "calories out" against the "calories in", there was a gradual weight increase.
Mixed in there, though not directly related to my weight, my relationship broke down. That contributed to more poor decisions on eating, drinking and exercise as well as depression, anxiety and poor sleep.
Since then, I've hit new highs and had lows again, though not as low as 53kg.
I've tried to be kinder to myself. More gentle.
I've tried to see myself the way I see other women now. Not the way I used to see other women, which was in an internalised misogynistic fat-shaming way. I see other women in a way where I don't think, "She would be beautiful if she lost some weight". I think "She is beautiful". And her weight - whichever end of the spectrum it is, or in the middle - doesn't influence why I see her that way.
It takes a lot of work. I can more easily see others as beautiful irrespective of their weight than I can look at myself in the mirror. Or look at photos others have taken of me when I'm overweight. Or that I'd taken of myself years ago when I was 70kg+.
It's still hard. I still have to re-train myself every time I look at photos of myself. It contributes heavily to why I don't take self-portraits anymore, though I want to.
But, even without being overweight, when I weighed in the low to mid-50s, I could pick apart every inch of my body to tell you what still needed work. What still made me "less than".
I've also grown up in a culture where to be desired is everything, even when I can see past a relationship being a measure of my worth. If I'm 100% honest, desire is still something I use to measure my self-worth. Lack of desire within a relationship is probably an even harder pill for me to swallow.
And it's so easy - when a former lover admits they find me less attractive due to my weight gain - to fall back into unhealthy behaviours, to punish myself. Because maybe my weight gain led to me being less desirable and to our break-up. But that doesn't fix anything that wasn't already broken. And it won't help me be who I want and need to be going forward.
Depending on the day of the week or the hour of the day. How many hours since my last meal and how much or how little I ate the day before. I weigh about 10kg less than I weighed at the new heaviest weight I reached a year ago.
I'm not "happy" with my current weight. I'm not "happy" with how I look, how my clothes fit me and how I look naked. And I know I have a lot of unhealthy habits.
But I also know many of my previous tactics that kept me at or helped me back to around 52kg aren't healthy.
I have to regularly remind myself that those who've never had an issue with weight will rarely understand or empathise. Whether blessed with a fast metabolism or never experienced an eating disorder, addiction or mental health issue.
I need to find a healthier way to get back to being strong and fit and resolve issues I have with my lower back strength. Not to mention regaining strength and confidence with my left ankle after the fracture I sustained in October 2019.
I need to continue to seek a healthier relationship with my body. I've been trying for so long. You would think it would become easier over time, but it doesn't.