Trigger warning: This article contains personal experience of disordered eating. It may be distressing for some readers.
In September 2012, the school year after the Olympics and my first trip to Reading Festival, I became obsessed with numbers.
What started as a desire to be healthier after a summer filled with too many takeaways and vodka mixers, became a compulsion to check the back of supermarket packaging and an ever lowering self set calorific boundary that I never allowed myself to pass. I started weighing myself. Once a day. Twice a day. Three times a day. Until I could predict the total; I’d see below me based on how much water I’d drunk or how many slices of bread I’d eaten, before I’d even stepped on the scales.
Everything in my life was valued. My self worth decreased down to a single, amounted sum.
It’s not surprising that I got there. Going to an all girls school, calories were thrown around classrooms like confetti. We’d write the values of the food we’d eaten on the back of our hands, wearing the lowest numbers with pride. Each week a different diet was tried, dropped, then swapped. In my home life too, weight was a conversation starter. At family weddings, my distant South Asian relatives would comment openly as my figure fluctuated as a teen.
I heard cousins of cousins discuss if I’d grown bigger since our last meeting, the shame of their taunts enough for me to push aside the carefully selected celebratory meal.
Then, as I started to shrink, the positive reviews came in, free-flowing. I got stopped in the corridors by teachers. Congratulated, with a pat on the back and the encouragement to keep on going. The praise became addictive. I exercised compulsively. Ignored my stomach rumbles. Made a scene in restaurants with my family if they ever commented on my food.
I never realised I had a problem. But that’s the thing – it creeps up on you. It’s natural to want to fit in as a teenager. To be able to share clothes with friends, and be the same as the people you see around you, celebrated.
But my obsession with numbers was short sighted. Girls are taught that it’s healthier and better to be smaller. Told by our friends, families, the media, and in education, that more people will like us and we’ll be more successful, if we shrink ourselves down.
But counting calories and weighing myself so I could be, never made me feel any good.
I’m much happier now I eat what I want when I want. Now I exercise only when I actually feel like it and I no longer obsess over how much I weigh each day. I was lucky to realise how much damage I was causing myself before it was too late.
Even though there are times when I feel myself slipping back into old, bad habits. When I download the fitness apps without thinking, or start to add up the calories of foods forever etched into my memory, in my head – I know now, that this can be destructive.
I speak to friends instead, come off Instagram for a while, and take the time to step away from online fitness bloggers and focus on myself.
So, what advice would I give my younger self now? Just that it’s not worth it.
That no matter how much weight you lose, how many meals you spend eating around the carbs on your plate, or exercising even though your body wants to stop, It’ll never make you satisfied. There will always be someone to compare yourself to; more you could do, other people to impress.
At a low point, a close friend told me that I should stop weighing myself. That I needed to think about other things that mattered more than changing scale numbers and calories, and that the worth of my life should be based on more than a weighted, valued, score. And it’s true. There is so much more that makes up a person.
So, I’d tell my younger self that numbers do not define her, and she should look for other, more meaningful ways to measure her self worth.