In recent years, I’ve found myself being sick so much more often than usual. Any more than three pints and I throw up the next morning. Overeat and I find bile at the back of my throat. Even on the sesh, I sneak off for a tactical vom before continuing to get on it. I’ve become more than efficient at it, often reaching for the end of my toothbrush to help speed up my process and my boyfriend – bless his heart – has allocated me a sick bowl I am allowed to have in bed post-sesh, to save myself the undignified crawl to the bathroom.
These involuntary vomits listed above aren’t the whole truth however, and as of late, I’ve been sneaking to my ensuite at least once a week to purge. The act isn’t unfamiliar to me – I’ve had issues with disordered eating for over a decade – but the return of this horrible habit is not just upsetting to me, but my partner who has to listen and offer help from the adjoining room.
When battling disordered eating habits, the condition becomes all you can think about. As a fat woman who has embodied the frame that my teenage self felt I looked like through body dysmorphia tinted eyes, it’s harder still to exist like this. I am the sum of my parts and the total is a fat frame that for years, I thought of as the worst thing I could ever become. On good days I love my body, I love getting touched in my body, I love my boyfriend touching my body but on bad days, for my sanity’s sake, I need to pretend he has no idea what I look like.
Let me explain: Even if I am not purging or restricting, my poor body image means I cannot let my fellow plus size boyfriend near me. If I stand naked or semi-nude in our shared bedroom, I ask him to close his eyes. Often, he will try and reassure me he already knows what I look like. In these moments, I have to stop myself from crying: Because ideally, I wish he didn’t. With this bi-weekly requirement for him to not see me naked, sex is off the table completely on these days.
This predicament sounds ridiculous but that is because, at its core, my eating disorder brain – who feels like a separate entity to myself on most days – is ridiculous. Her rules make no sense but if I don’t abide by them, I suffer.
Any mirrors in my home may as well not exist on bad days, because I avoid them like the plague. The moments I catch myself in them, with this mindset, I torture myself mentally. And, as is the focus of this article, on these bad days I need to convince myself that my boyfriend doesn’t know what I look like because (and this is the most ridiculous bit) if I accepted that he sees my body as it is, I feel like he can’t possibly love me – because who would love somebody who looks like me.
As a fat liberation focused feminist, I feel the need to clarify there is nothing wrong with my body. In fact, most of the time I love my body. Being fat is in my blood – and I don’t mean cholesterol. I come from a long line of fat women and my frame is representative of all the women I’ve been, all the fat people I’ve dated and loved and of course, all the fat pioneers who paved the way for fat liberation to exist in the first place.
Even on the days my brain tells me that I am undeserving of love, of sex, of being seen even, I am. Reminding myself of that – and having my loved ones remind me of it also – is integral to breaking my disordered eating habits and embodying the body positivity I take to preaching online. And I hope that with the vulnerability of not just my disordered eating, but my disordered thinking in the words above, that a fellow sufferer of this illness can feel less alone in this slog against our own minds.
