Finding value and purpose beyond weight

Despite promises of health, happiness, and success, weight loss brought me the opposite

Hello! I hope you’re doing well!

Losing weight isn’t just about vanity or how we look—for many of us it’s about being good. Keeping our bodies small can be an opportunity in our culture to achieve health, happiness and success. Weight loss provides us with an identity, purpose, and value system that is applauded by many.

Our culture equates thinness with goodness, intelligence, and worthiness, making losing weight an opportunity to achieve and succeed. But it’s a shallow path that leads many of us into eating disorders. There’s so much more to life and wellbeing than weight.

In my eating disorder I thought following diet culture rules—eat this, not that, watch your weight, and so on—made me a good girl. I was dedicated to doing things right and being right. I thought that was expected and required of me.

I was a chubby, sensitive kid. I don’t remember a time when I felt as if my body was okay. My earliest memories include comparing my body to my classmates’ bodies on the playground. The other girls’ dresses fell straight down, while mine popped out around my belly. I was five years old, and I already believed my body was wrong and that I had to change it to be accepted. I started sucking my belly in.

It was the 1980s, and diet culture was loud and proud. By seventh grade, I’d been restricting food for years, only to end up inevitably sneaking and binge eating. I attended aerobics classes at the YMCA, where I tried to sweat myself smaller with grown-up women. Our instructor, Eloise, wore a lilac leotard over turquoise tights with white tube socks scrunched down to hug the tops of her Reeboks. Her favorite saying was “no pain, no gain.”  

I was hooked. I believed that if I followed all the rules, I could make my dreams of acceptance, love, and success come true. I oriented my values and purpose around controlling the number on the scale to the detriment of my health and wellbeing.

Weight loss became my religion and weight loss my salvation. I pursued goodness, acceptance, and meaning through my body’s size, what I ate, and how much I exercised. I wasn’t alone. I was just another good girl doing what was expected of me. 

Then I hit 40 and realized that trying to be a good girl was ruining my life. In no other area was I shrinking myself. Professionally and intellectually, I was all about expansion and taking up space. I had an MBA. I was making million-dollar deals. I had a family. I was committed to a fulfilling marriage and building a secure attachment with my daughter.

But still, I wanted my body to be smaller. I thought controlling my body was an important value. I wasn’t alone, and it makes perfect sense why so many of us do this.