I Wasn't Practicing What I Preached
*Triggering talk about disordered eating, shaming and insulting myself, and weight loss
This time last summer, I was in a very very bad headspace. I had slid back into a negative frame of mind about my body, weight, and looks. I was in comparison mode, and my mental health was suffering greatly because of it.
Healing isn’t linear. I say it all of the time folks, and I am here to remind of you of how true it is through my own vulnerable account. If you’ve been reading my stuff for awhile, then you know I’ve been a self-love, body positivity, and acceptance journey for quite a long time. I have written and posted about my struggles with this and how I overcame a lot of it. If you haven’t read those pieces or need a refresher, here are some essentials:
The first piece I ever wrote on it - Please Don’t Comment On Anyone’s Weight. Ever.
A much shorter and highly edited version of the above mentioned piece published on Insider, if you want a quick read - I tried hating myself to lose weight, but shaming myself wasn't the answer.
Where things are at with this now - This is a newer Substack post of mine that includes a link to a newer Insider article of mine about being on a medical weight loss program.
This blog post is mostly about where things were at between #2 and #3 above. The period of time between publishing my journey of body acceptance, and publishing my journey of medical weight loss. Specifically, summer of 2023.
If you don’t want to read any of the above articles, and need the abridged version, basically—I grew up learning how to hate my body (like most other women and a lot of men, too). There were many things that influenced that. I learned a ton of unhealthy coping mechanisms. I had a really unhealthy relationship with food and exercise. I had many disordered eating habits. As an adult, this reared its ugly head in many ways. And, eventually, I found an incredible therapist and I worked really hard with her for a very long time to love and accept myself and my body. I made great strides. I got to a point where I was able to start writing about it and sharing on social media and speaking up to help others. Ok, that was it in a nutshell.
During the period of time where I was writing and posting a lot about my self-love and body positivity expedition, a lot of people reached out to me about how much I helped them with the personal stories I shared. I felt good about helping them. I continued to work on myself and had my ups and downs but on the whole continued to see progress in loving myself and my body, no matter what size it was.
Now, I want to talk about where I landed after that. I also want to offer some new background info that I recently realized has some relevance to my healing process and what happened last summer. There seems to be a component for me in regards to the culture I am immersed in, and how my personality and history interact with that culture.
Living in Chicago was a bit of a mixed bag with this body acceptance journey. On the one hand, there were lots of guys in the dating pool who were super snobby about dating bigger women. However, there were soooo many guys in the dating pool that there were also plenty of guys who didn’t care or liked it. There were a lot of gym rats and extreme dieters, of all genders, who made a big deal about their routines and regimes, but it was such a big city that it was pretty easy to avoid people that were annoying about it. Essentially, when you are surrounded by so many people, you can find your people.
If you don’t want to hang out with people who talk about dieting and the gym all the time, you don’t have to ever be in contact with anyone like that. Even at work, your company can be so big that it can fairly easy to avoid that kind of interaction, most of the time (not all of the time). Plus, after Covid my job was mostly remote so it was pretty easy for me to avoid triggering conversations about people’s extreme dieting habits. Also, I found it much easier to be blunt in the city so it was easier for me to directly tell people I wasn’t up for talking about extreme diets and work-out regimes.
When I was out in public, it was rare I ran into anyone I knew, so therefore people didn’t really pay me any mind or talk to me. There is a real anonymity to living in a big city. If I did run into someone I knew, the topic of my outfit might come up, but other than that my looks weren’t discussed.
To my recollection, the only rude comments I recall receiving about my body when I lived in Chicago, were sometimes strangers would make comments and ask questions about the scar on my arm. And, I felt perfectly comfortable bluntly telling them it was none of their business.
I also don’t recall very many of my Chicago acquaintances doing lots of weight loss posts, or weight gain shame/making fun of weight/feeling bad about their weight/etc types of posts on social media. Not to say none of them did. It is just when I think back on people I remember doing lots of any of these kinds of posts, very few of them were in Chicago. Some of them may do a lot of gym posts, but not the body shame/weight-related ones.
All of this to say, that when I was living in Chicago and having body image problems, I believe it had a lot to do with my past issues and not the people I was around at that time. I had a lifetime of unhealthy patterns to unlearn. I was going through some really rough things in Chicago (divorce, bankruptcy, etc) that were causing me to turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms. And I was being really hard on myself. People around me weren’t making me feel bad about me, for the most part. My Chicago friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and strangers weren’t saying passive aggressive, rude, or triggering things in regards to body shame and weight. I was still just coping with the previous 30+ years of learned behavior that I needed to heal. In fact, when I would make very self-deprecating comments about my body and weight to the all of the above-mentioned people around me, they would get VERY uncomfortable with me body shaming myself.
This is not to say that there weren’t people who said awful things to me that triggered body issues in Chicago. Some doctors I saw up there were insensitive about weight. And a handful of the guys in the dating pool were shitty about it. Doctors and dating is nothing to scoff at. That is enough to understandably make someone feel bad. However, the point I want to emphasize is that I moved there with a lifetime of issues built up that needed to be addressed. And in my day-to-day universe, I wasn’t encountering many people that talked about weight all the much—besides me.
From 2017-2021 I spent a lot of time in therapy working on my lifetime of weight shame, and came leaps and bounds with it. In 2019 is when I was really seeing a lot of progress, and 2020 is when I wrote the first piece I shared above about it. In 2020 and 2021 I was posting and speaking out a lot trying to challenge some of the toxic behaviors that we have accepted as normal behavior.
Well, as many (if not all) of my readers know, my Long Covid got so bad at the end of 2021 that I had to leave my job and Chicago, and move back home with my parents. This changed my trajectory in soooooo many ways. I became a lot more quiet about body positivity for a few reasons. I still wrote and posted about it a little bit, but not nearly as much. The reasons are:
Most of my energy and advocacy started going towards Long Covid
I didn’t feel like I had much new stuff to say on the subject
My physical and mental health were deteriorating in more ways than one, and for more reasons than one—and that is what I want to share with you now
I started doing some serious backsliding on my self-love and body positivity progress. I moved home at the end of 2021, and for all of 2022 I was pretty focused on other issues. I was dealing with the grief of the new quality of my life with the chronic illness, all of the symptoms, giving up so many things I had worked so hard for, and just general shit that came up due to the illness and moving home. My weight wasn’t factoring in, but I also wasn’t really in a headspace to come up with any new content or essays about it.
In early 2023, I was able to get a version of my 2020 essay about it professionally published, and I was so happy and excited about that. And, I launched my workshop, Love and Accept the Sh*t Outta Yourself. I was still feeling good about my mission and excited to help other people learn what I had learned.
However later that year, towards the beginning of the summer, I was at the doctor’s office and weighed in at the highest weight I have ever been. At this point I was in a doctor’s office every few days, and every single time I got on the scale I was a couple pounds heavier. This time, I hit a number that I just wasn’t comfortable with. Not because of fat phobia, self-hate, societal pressure, shame or anything like that. But, because I knew this wasn’t a healthy weight for me. And, because I checked in and was honest with myself about the fact that, for the past several months, I had started my disordered eating habits again to cope with my depression. I was really depressed with this illness, and I was coping by eating a lot of unhealthy food.
Not only was my weight at an all-time high, but I now had high blood pressure and a few other alarming side effects. These symptoms are also part of having Long Covid, but they can also be attributed to gaining weight. I wasn’t going to try to split hairs over what caused it. I knew that I physically was uncomfortable and feeling unhealthy. I knew I had fallen back into behaviors that were a problem for me and my health, and so I started working on it in therapy again.
From May 2023 to Jan 2024 I managed to lose a minimal amount of weight on my own. Regardless of how hard I tried and how much I worked on it in therapy, I’ve had an insatiable appetite for most of my adult life that has always made it incredibly hard to lose weight. My therapist will be the first to tell you that I have seen very little progress in terms of losing weight when I have worked very hard at diet and exercise in the past. So that is part of why I worked so hard on acceptance. As long as I am being healthy and feeling healthy, I am not going to concern myself with the scale. Because the very frustrating lack of progress I make on the scale when I diet and exercise is what causes me to fall back into unhealthy patterns. Self-love and acceptance is what keeps me making healthy decisions.
However, when I couldn’t accept my chronic illness and my new limitations with it, I fell into unhealthy decisions again. When I was mad at my body for not getting over Long Covid, I started coping by eating unhealthy food.
I know it may seem like I am using the word “unhealthy” a lot, and from a writing perspective it might be nice to not be so repetitive. However, it is a conscious decision because food is not moral and, therefore, I will not be ascribing words with moral and judgmental connotations to food and diet. Unhealthy may feel negative, however that is because we have ascribed that connotation to it. I have learned to take the moral judgement out of that word. There is just healthy and unhealthy. I am just making a healthy or unhealthy decision. And I am not going to place judgment on “unhealthy”. It is what it is. But words like “good” vs “bad” or “junk food”, etc very much have moral and judgmental connotations to them and I don’t use them when talking about food, etc. So that is why I will repetitively use the words healthy and unhealthy, and my writer brain that wants to use a synonym will have to just get over it. Because all of the synonyms I found are incredibly negative words.
Ok, back to the story. I had gained weight, and I wasn’t comfortable with where my health was at. And that was the start of the back slide into feeling bad about myself. It wasn’t just that, though. That alone would have been manageable. It was what I was encountering on top of the weight gain that threw me through a loop.
I was encountering passive aggressive, small-town, rude comments about my appearance. Here and there, when I would be out and about, I would see people I knew or was just acquainted with. Most of the time, when I run out on errands and whatnot, I don’t wear make-up. One day I ran into someone who, underhandedly, mentioned to me how different I looked without make-up on every time they saw me out running errands versus when they would see my “dressed-up” pictures on Facebook with my friends. And how good I looked with make-up on so I should wear it more often. Under normal circumstances, in Chicago, I would have bluntly pointed out how rude this was. But here, something about it here, I just really struggle to do this. Because people really don’t operate my way here. And every time I have tried to it doesn’t go well for me. Because people do it in such a passive aggressive way that if you call them on it they can usually claim they weren’t saying it how you took it, even though they were.
And, under normal circumstances, this probably wouldn’t have hurt so much, but there were a few things going on here. 1 - it was said in front of a handful of other people we knew and it was embarrassing, 2 - I have always been INSANELY insecure about my skin because I have always had such bad acne, and 3 - I am going through SUCH a hard time with my illness, where I am at in my life because of it, and all of the weight gain. It was just really bad timing for me to let a comment like this roll off my shoulders.
If that comment wasn’t bad enough, a few minutes later another acquaintance in this public space brought up some of these Facebook pictures and spent the next 5 minutes telling me how pretty my other friends in them looked and how pretty they thought these friends were. Not mentioning me even once. I was just sitting there with no make-up on, being told how much better I look with make-up, and how pretty my friends look in the pictures I take with them. Cool cool.
Let’s get this out of the way right now. I think my friends are absolutely beautiful. I entirely agree with that assessment. There is no hate or jealousy here. That isn’t what this is. Both things can exist at once. You can love your friends and think they are beautiful and not be jealous or resentful of them, and still feel like shit when people go out of their way to tell you for several minutes how hot your friends are in the pictures you take with them and not say a single word about you. And, ok, now I am starting to realize where a lot of my personal self-confidence, look-obsessed issues came from. My hometown.
In my experience, more of the rural, small-town women are focused on talking about people’s looks—make-up, weight, skin tone, etc—than other places I have been. I don’t mean to offend anyone from rural areas who are reading this. Because, first and foremost—not everyone in a small town does this by ANY stretch of the imagination. Also, there are a million other places in this superficial country (and world) where people are obsessed with this shit (Kardashians anyone). And, this is just my experience of where I currently live. I’m only speaking for me.
So, this is all really giving Steel Magnolias right now. Which, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love that movie. But, if you are putting yourself in that movie in real life, there are a lot of conversations between women who go to the beauty shop every week, and often talk about how other women dress, wear their hair, and gossip about the things they do. And, to me, that seems like a Southern small-town trait. And it feels like where I am currently living.
I would one thousand times rather a friend/acquaintance walk up to me and directly say “bitch, your hair is so greasy it looks like you washed it at McDonalds” than to be passive aggressive and give some sort of underhanded comment and then talk shit about me to other people. (I cannot come up with a funny example of what the passive aggressive comment would be because that is just not how my brain works). But, in all honesty, my true preference would be someone who just didn’t give a fuck about my hair at all. OR, if they did, it was more like, “Hey babe, I noticed you haven’t washed your hair in a long time and I noticed you have seemed really down lately. What is going on? Are you ok? Are you taking care of yourself? Is there anything I can do?”
Ok. So the comments about how I look without make-up and how great the other people in my pics look was one way I was kicked while I was down. Another was an onslaught of messages I received from various dudes talking to me about how hot my friends were in the pictures I posted. Another was having a guy try to use me to get to my friend because of a picture of us. And a whole lot of other little things along these lines that I won’t get into here because they are private. Again, I cannot stress this enough, I do not blame or resent my friends for this. I just want to explain the barrage of events that happened in quick succession last summer that brought me to a bad place.
On top of my insecurities about my acne (which is why I grew up wearing a shit ton of make-up and it took me YEARS to be able to leave my house without it) and my weight (which took me YEARS of therapy and doing stand-up comedy about)—I also became incredibly insecure about how pale I am in my hometown region. In high school so many of the girls were allowed to go to the tanning beds and they would get soooooo dark. They would have those Playboy bunny sticker tan lines on their lower abdomens peeking out the top of their low-rise silky thongs in the gym locker room. Meanwhile I am Irish, English, and German (The Albino Trifecta), my parents wouldn’t let me tan (and even if they did I literally don’t tan so it wouldn’t have mattered), and my underwear was cotton high-waisted briefs that bordered on granny panties.
Every summer I would lay out on the back porch as many days as I possibly could and try so hard to get a tan that I hoped would last into at least part of the school year. And every summer I would burn, then the burn would peel and I would go right back to the original shade of white. And I would go back to school with zero tan line. It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago that I literally stopped caring about being tan AT ALL. I absolutely relished putting on a shit ton of SPF 50 and my goal was ALWAYS to come home the same color I left. Because, that meant I didn’t get burned. I finally understood my skin is capable of two colors. White and red. And the red fades to white. There is no in between. So, if I come home the same color, it means I didn’t get burned and that is a success. I spent about 13 years in Chicago not caring about being tan. It was glorious.
That was all undone less than a year after moving home. But it really grew to be a pain point for me last summer when all of this other stuff was going on. Because I was also getting comments about how pale I was, and how funny it was that I was at the pool almost every day and was still so pale. Again, normally, I will just clap back, but sometimes the people I know who are saying this stuff to me are other people’s parents, or neighbors, or clerks at shops, or just people in places where I really don’t feel comfortable sassing back.
Plus, they always do it in a way that they can claim they were just joking. But, like, dude, aren’t jokes are supposed to be funny? Why are we constantly commenting and “joking” on people’s appearance? Maybe I have selective amnesia, but I just cannot recall this being the case anywhere else I have gone or lived, or with anyone I am acquainted with that live in other places. And, like, if and when we do joke about me being pale (which I actually am usually ok with and joke about myself) it is always done in a way that is very loving and fun and sweet. That usually isn’t the vibe here—it comes off more like unnecessary commentary spoken through a fake laugh.
So let’s add it all up here, last summer I weigh in at the highest I have ever weighed, I start receiving messages and comments from guys about how hot my friends are, I receive in-person comments about how I look without make-up and how pretty the other people are in my pictures, and I’m frequently told how pale I am and how funny it is that I have laid out all summer and won’t tan. Thusly, I start spending my days scrutinizing these pictures. What is it about them that makes people say these things to me? What can I do about it?
I look at these pictures and go so hard on myself. I detest how tall I am and think, “I am a towering ogre over every single person I know. I look like Andre the Giant compared to everyone. And I am SO pale. Everyone looks so tan next to me. I would look so much better if I was tan. Maybe I could start going and getting spray tans or buying that nice expensive self-tanner? I know I am chronically-ill, disabled, unemployed, no income, and have a million doctors’ appointments—but this seems like a really important use of my time and limited funds. Ok, I can’t afford that. So, instead, how about I go to the pool every day this summer without sunscreen on and see if I can change my genetics and risk skin cancer? Also, I am so so so so much heavier than everyone. I have to lose weight. I just have to. Everyone looks at these pictures and thinks I look so bad next to everyone else. I need to start wearing make-up every time I leave my house again. When people see me without make-up they notice how rough I look and how bad my skin is. It just adds to this whole messy picture that I am right now.”
Ah, and there we go again. Welcome home, Krista. I have just spent the last 5 years undoing this shit in therapy and in one summer I feel like an ugly loser again. I will say it again—healing isn’t linear. There are ups and downs. You can fall off the wagon. Many times. This is like an addiction. There are triggers just like with anything.
Another thing I hear so much more of is an exorbitant amount of talk about diets and weight loss. Or how they need to lose so much weight, and how good this person looks because they have lost weight, or how bad they look because they have gained weight. It feels like a game of Whack-a-Mole. I am constantly trying to smack down or side step these conversations out in public and on social media and avert my eyes and ears so it doesn’t pile up in my brain again as a constant nagging voice of my entire worth as a female being how I look and how much I weigh.
I want to make it clear that I do not judge, begrudge, or mean to insult anyone who uses self-tanner, diets and goes to the gym, wears lots of make-up, etc etc. I diet and exercise, and I wear make-up for certain occasions. If it wouldn’t turn me orange, I would maybe try tanner. There is nothing wrong with looking how you want to look and taking care of yourself and being healthy. Just ask yourself, who are you doing it for? Why are you doing it? Who are you trying to impress?
Last summer, I was doing it for acquaintances who’s rude comments made me feel bad about myself. I was doing it because my insecurities were ramped up due to my guard being down. And I was trying to impress people who don’t impress me. All of my answers to the questions in the paragraph above were not good answers.
As such, I got back to work on myself. I hunkered down on this in therapy again. We talked through all the scenarios and how to approach them going forward. I started sending clear messages back to people about why I was not ok with their messages. I figured out polite, but firm and direct ways to respond to people in the in-person moments where they made comments about my looks. I also had vulnerable chats with my close friends in which I shared what I was going through so they could support me and show me love (and to be clear, they were never part of the problem, but I asked them to help be part of the solution). And I cut some toxic people and places out completely.
That took care of the external. As for the internal, I got back up on the horse in therapy and we worked through it all again. Even though healing isn’t linear, and we do have these ups and downs where we have to pick ourselves back up, the good news is that it never takes as long as the first time. I have all the tools and mechanisms from the first time I did this. I just need a little help polishing them up and getting them in use again. So, after a couple of months, I was in a better headspace about all this undue pressure I was putting on myself to be a 5ft tall, 100 lb, Ms. Australian Gold.
That will never be me. I am 6ft tall, as pale as the guy in the movie Powder, and the last time I weighed 100 lbs was in 5th grade. I also still love granny panties and prefer them over the silky thongs. I no longer wish for a Playboy bunny tan line. I will never stop asking people to consider if the way they are talking and posting about their body and weight is unhealthy and harmful. And I am doing pretty ok with it all right now.
After spending the Fall and Winter getting my mental state back in order in terms of my self-love and body positivity/body neutrality—I felt I was in a good mental place to handle the idea of working on a healthy way to lose the weight I was concerned about for my health. The weight I had been gaining since getting sick. I spent some time finding the right nutritionist and doctor who understand how careful they have to be with our discussions in terms of my disordered eating triggers. The ones I found are sooooooo great and wonderful about it. They are perfectly trained on how to talk about this stuff and deal with it.
Now, as I am in the process of slowly losing a healthy amount of weight, I am noticing old patterns trying to sneak back in. Even as I start to feel better about the progress I am making, I notice I slip into unhealthy thoughts. The weight loss brings about old disordered eating habits, too. I catch my brain trying to trick me into skipping meals to lose more, and scrutinizing the parts of my body that aren’t slimming as much as the rest. However, with the help of an incredible therapist, nutritionist, and doctor who all specialize in this sort of thing, plus several years of practice that I have with this, I am able to remove those unhealthy thoughts pretty quickly and successfully. Some days are better than others though. So, I talk about it in therapy, and I keep doing the work on myself.
My goal in writing this is to help anyone who struggles with any of this, and is at any stage in the healing process. Because I don’t want to be someone who publishes articles and posts about how great I am at loving myself, and then secretly hides the backslides I have. That isn’t helpful to anyone. No matter where you are in the journey of loving yourself, it does get better…and it does get worse. It goes up and down. We have bad days and good days. I have days where I love my body. Days where I am neutral towards it. And days where no matter how hard I try, I hate it. I have been a lot of different weights and found ways to hate myself at each one of them.
I hope that you do what is best for you and your body. I hope you love and accept yourself. I hope more days are body positive or neutral than not. I hope that when you do have bad days that you are gentle with yourself. And I hope you have people, tools, resources and support in your life to work towards healing any difficulties you may be having with your body. And I hope that sharing my truth can help someone feel better about what they may be privately dealing with.
Lots of love!
