My Body is Not the Enemy

On Living with Disordered Eating

I didn’t love the words I heard her say.

“I think you have an eating disorder,” she told me.

After pouring my heart out to her, I did not expect those words. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but those words were not the ones.

“Based on the words you’re using and how you’re describing your experiences, you have a form of disordered eating,” she continued calmly.

I was paying her as an expert in her field - she’s my therapist - so I had to consider everything she said.

“I have…an eating disorder?” I asked her softly.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

~~~

First, let’s stare at the elephant in the room.

I’ve been a professional psychic medium since 2017. I’ve written on Substack for almost two years, if not more. I’ve written about various experiences, including the wisdom that Spirit passes through to me during readings, to document what I go through during live events.

Why am I here, now, talking about a session with my therapist where she diagnosed me with an eating disorder?

There are many reasons, the first being that I don’t want to ever come across as an all-knowing spiritual guru with all the answers in the world. Sure, I’ve got many answers and have years of spirit communication under my belt, but I’m still human.

I’m still human.

I have a troubled upbringing. I was born into a troubled world. I absorbed a lot of harmful concepts and ideologies from the people who raised me, and the world that raised us all.

I have a family, I have a spouse, and I have emotions.

I have history, I have trauma, and I have baggage.

No human moves through this world without picking up wounds along the way, and I’m just like any other person making my way through the world. For all that, I have a platform of a specific size and am a public figure. To a certain degree, what I say is important to many people, and that’s not a responsibility I take lightly.

That’s why, primarily, I need to normalize human struggles. I need to talk about having a therapist, and why having one isn’t anything to be ashamed of. So many people find a stigma placed on getting mental health help, but I don’t want to be one of them.

It’s a complex world, and we need help along the way.

There’s no shame in seeking help for mental health struggles, just like there’s no shame in going to the gym or having a personal trainer. We have somehow become a culture that idolizes a strong and fit body, but turns a shameful eye on the process of building a strong and healthy mind.

I don’t want to be one of those people.

I grew up gay in a world where I had to hide that, and because of that, I have had to dismantle my internalized homophobia. For far too many years I hated myself, and I’m not the only one, whether you’re gay or not. Many people walk through this world hating themselves for many reasons, all of which they picked up along the way.

No one is born into this world hating themselves. We learn it along the way; we pick up that self-hatred and are never born with it.

And if we pick it up, we can set it down.

That’s why we call it baggage.

~~~

I graduated from 8th grade at 6’3” tall.

I can remember when the school nurse called my mom, telling her something must be wrong with me and that she needed to take me to the doctor. In 7th grade, I measured out at 5’8” tall, and when she measured me in 8th grade, I was 6’2.5” tall - I had grown 6 ½ inches in a single year, and she’d never seen anything like it.

I remember standing on the scale in 2nd grade, seeing it say 100 lbs, and feeling deep shame. I can remember spending the first few years of middle school with my shoulders hunched over, trying to hide my large breasts under poor posture.

I’ve always been big, and I come from big people. My dad is 6’3” tall, my mom is 5’10”. The difference between them and me is that, while they grew up in the 50s and 60s, I grew up in the 80s and 90s.

While we were poor growing up, we were never without food. My mom would make spaghetti and garlic bread, macaroni & cheese, and hot dogs. There were Ding Dongs and other snacky desserts in the house. I never went hungry, but I’m unsure I could access the healthiest foods.

My parents, and their parents, and their parents - well, they were all farmers. They had to get up early in the morning and get to work doing chores. Knowing this fact, and understanding what kind of excess the decade of the 80s provided most of us, I refer to myself as the first “Soft Born” Simonds - I was the first kid in my family to have access to such abundant calories, and didn’t have to work for them.

I liked to eat as a kid. I can think of two dishes my mom would make for me that I would turn my nose up at: corn chowder and chipped beef gravy. Other than that, I always cleared my plate, and knowing the growth spurts I would go through, it was probably a good idea that I did so. I remember sitting in the car for long car rides and crying because my legs hurt so much.

I’ve always tended to be heavy-set. I don’t think I developed any sort of actual disordered eating until I came out of the closet.

~~~

Oh, how our self-image is tied to sexuality. The desire to be desired, the want to be wanted.

I can remember as a young child being shown male beauty standards, and as a closeted little gay kid, found them enticing in ways that disgusted me. Of course, I was what the world told me at the time: an abomination.

It wouldn’t be years, even after coming out of the closet, that I would be able to disentangle the mess of internalized homophobia that lay within me. Coming out of the closet when I was 27 or so helped me express the inherent sexuality I was born with, yet doing so in a capitalistic, industrialized society tells us all that maybe it’s Maybelline, or maybe he/she’s born with it…

Well, I think it’s a fair assessment that most of us are walking around in a living hell.

Those programs we pick up along the way, from movies to television to magazines, hurt us all. Beauty standards are tied to the beauty industry, which is most definitely tied to the diet industry.

At 46 years old, and out of the closet for almost 20 years, I am only now taking stock of what I’ve done to my body along the way. When we hear the term “eating disorder,” most of us think of anorexia, bulimia, bingeing & purging. When I think back on all the processes I put my body through, I would never have considered them disordered eating.

After all, I thought I was helping my body.

I thought I was helping myself.

~~~

Low fat. Low sugar. Low carb. High protein.

Weight Watchers. Atkins. Paleo. The Mediterranean Diet.

Exercise. Eating right. The USDA Food Pyramid. BMI. “Calories in, calories out.”

Twiggy. Farrah Fawcett. Brook Shields. Cindy Crawford. Naomi Campbell. Kate Moss.

Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Brad Pitt. Johnny Depp. George Clooney.

On and on and on, image after image, message after message.

Living in a world that tells us we’ll never be enough or too much. Constantly telling us that if we want to fit the perfect standards, we’ll have to look and dress a certain way.

As a medium, I think of the beautiful people, mostly women, who live 60, 70, 80 years hating their body because of what the world told them, only to die and look back on their lives - and bodies - realizing they were bamboozled.

How we’re all bamboozled.

~~~

I’ve never stuck my finger down my throat.

I’ve only ever starved myself.

I guess that’s what one would call it, when we get right down to it.

When I came out of the closet, Paleo & Atkins seemed to work for me. I remember working for a software company that hosted a “Biggest Loser” challenge and losing 8 pounds a week when I went strictly on fats and proteins.

I eventually gained all that weight back.

A few years ago, I worked with a personal trainer who hosted another “Biggest Loser” challenge. I also won that competition - just like the one at the software company - but just like that last challenge, I gained that weight back.

A few years ago, I lost a lot of weight by doing the “Every Other Day Diet.” I wouldn’t eat for an entire day, then allow myself one meal the following day. I wouldn’t eat the next day, and I allowed myself one meal the day after.

That worked, as far as losing weight. I was lethargic, light-headed, and gaunt in the face.

I gained that weight back.

Last year, I spent AN ENTIRE YEAR working with a dietitian who had me track my portions and calories on a spreadsheet, and that drove me insane.

Or it drove a part of me insane.

All the weight I’ve lost, I just gained it back, time and again. I wasn’t “Fasting,” or even “Intermittently Fasting” - I was starving myself.

What’s wild to me is that I’ve had a husband for 15 years, we’ve been together for 17 years, and he’s loved me wholeheartedly at all my sizes. My mistreatment of my body - my holy vessel - wasn’t because I was “on the market,” or had to measure up to my husband’s expectations.

No, it was only because I’ve been bamboozled by our society and culture for far too long.

~~~

I came to, standing in the kitchen, eating ice cream.

I woke up standing, shoveling ice cream into my mouth. I don’t remember getting out of bed, I don’t remember pulling the ice cream out of the fridge, or finding a spoon. I was shocked to wake up, though, standing there eating.

I used to sleepwalk as a child. As an adult, who’d taken to starving myself, I was sleep-eating.

Earlier this year, I fasted for three days during the Spring Equinox. Having gained weight, I wanted to lose it again, and the only process that had ever worked for me up to this point was fasting - or starving myself.

I decided to do that until I got sick. I mean, sick. I haven’t been ill for years, and this past spring I came down with a respiratory illness that no one else in my house got, and it stayed with me for 18 days.

That’s when I decided I had to eat.

Maybe there’s something to the “feed a cold, starve a fever” adage, but I found out the hard way that I needed to feed my body, that my immune system requires nutrients to help keep me healthy.

I tried fasting again while sick with the respiratory illness, but it only made it worse. Having read that fasting can help reset the immune system, I thought there might be something to it.

I was incorrect, and knew that to be the case when I found myself standing in the kitchen, coming to while eating ice cream.

Something was wrong.

~~~

Ultimately, though, something wasn’t wrong with me.

When I sat with my therapist, telling her about the sleep-eating, and using language like “I feel so out of control,” she told me straight up that I have an eating disorder. She spent a few sessions educating me on primal hunger and how our bodies have a mind of their own. From our body’s perspective, being overweight is far better than starving, and when we restrict ourselves from food for long periods, the body will do what it can to find high-fat, high-sugar foods.

I’ve often referred to our body/soul complex as that of being a horse and a rider, and sure enough, the horse will do strange things when it’s not fed appropriately.

But through this whole journey of eating every other day, or eating once a day, or only eating proteins and fats - nothing was wrong with me. I realize that now, and I am currently on what dieticians and nutritionists call a “reverse diet.”

No restrictions. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t allow myself to get hungry at all, and don’t want to send my body the signal that it’s hungry.

Nothing has been wrong with me, but so much has been wrong with the world I live in.

Celebrity and fitness culture. Diet fads. Conflicting information about ways to eat. Should I eat low-fat, or should I eat high-fat? Should I have carbs, or should I limit them? Should I take that supplement or drink that shake?

I’ve spent so long not knowing where to turn, and not knowing how to eat, that I’ve done a lot of damage to my body. I’ve let the world tell me I’m less than for having a fluffy body. If I were around 10,000 years ago, I’d want to have fluff on my body to deal with food scarcity. I’d also be too busy pulling fish out of the river to feed my family to worry about what my reflection was in it.

I’ve spent far too long believing my body was my enemy, that it was somehow betraying me, that it was “bad” for just wanting to survive in the way that my genetics and heritage have provided for it.

My body is not the enemy, though.

This society is. This broken culture that teaches us to hate our body so we can spend more money on products and programs to fit the mold, this society that would get us addicted to diet pills and protein shakes.

I’ve denied my body for far too long. I’ve looked at this horse and bemoaned how it’s betrayed me, when it’s doing anything but. It’s kept me alive for 46 years. No matter what I’ve done to it, it’s been the holy vessel that’s helped me love my husband and care for my child, dance in the streets, and climb mountains.

My body has never been my enemy, and I’m disappointed I’ve spent so long treating it like it has been. I’m all done with that now, and any anger I feel won’t be directed at my body, but at the society that would teach me improper ways to care for myself, or to outright hate myself. I wasn’t born hating my body and believing it to be the enemy.

This broken world taught me to hate myself, and writing all of this is a small step in reclaiming my birthright that is peace and self-acceptance, and a significant step in rejecting the ills of our broken, consumeristic society.

I no longer want to treat my body like an enemy to be hated. I want to treat it like a loved one.

I want to treat it like a friend.