…and the garlic bread, too!
In 2009, a reporter asked model and actress Kate Moss what her life-mantra was. She replied, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I was 18 when I read this, a highly impressionable teen, and this mantra stuck with me.
It inspired a core belief that lasted almost a decade: to be happy, I had to be skinny.
Over the years, I went on countless diets: Weight Watchers, Atkins, Keto, High Protein, Intermittent Fasting, The Apple and Water Diet, The Master Cleanse…if you’ve heard about it on Doctor Oz, I’ve tried it. Often, when I didn’t find results in dieting, my efforts turned into disordered eating.
I would opt for calorie restriction or over-exercising, sometimes both. At very desperate times, I turned to more unhealthy and often dangerous methods on my quest to be smaller.
When I entered my twenties, I avoided social events where I knew people would be drinking alcohol, because I was threatened by the consequences of consuming liquid calories.
If I absolutely couldn’t miss an event like a wedding or a birthday party, I’d make sure I didn’t eat anything leading up to it, or I’d choose to either eat or drink my calories that evening- and you guessed it, this often ended up in monstrous hangovers, drunk ugly-crying, and me punishing myself on the treadmill the next day for ‘losing control.’
In my mid-twenties, I moved in with my then boyfriend (now husband) and these patterns weren’t my little secret anymore. My friends and boyfriend started to notice my unhealthy behavior and self-deprecating comments about my weight, and they were quick to call me out on it. Yet, none of it seemed to phase me or deter me from my behavior.
I still jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn every morning to do a spin workout while my husband, seeing the bags under my eyes, would beg me to slow down. I still continued on, even when a friend expressed her concern and frustration that I was reprioritizing dinner plans with her for a double session at the gym.
