Guest Bloggers

Guest Blogger: Big Tits and a Busted Raft By Toquegirl

Last modified on 2010-10-10 04:18:20 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Right now, I’m tipping the scales at about two hundred pounds. I’m somewhere in the region of seven months pregnant, and I have cankles, an ass that almost literally will not stop, and more than one chin. I also have giant boobs, which is okay, I guess, unless you take into account the fact that they’re so huge they make the necks of all my shirts gap in front. I can look down at any given moment and see the underwires of my bra. More importantly, crumbs from whatever I’m eating at the time fall into said gap and either get stuck under the bra or land on the baby bump, wedging themselves between the fabric of my t-shirt and my stretched-taut belly skin. It itches like a bitch until I reach under the shirt to brush the crumbs away, which I do, often and immodestly, regardless of where I am at the time. Big tits aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

There was a time, though, when I thought very differently. A time when I was willing to let a man pay for my boob job, because I thought if I had giant hooters, I would somehow be more worthy of his love and I wouldn’t have to live in fear of him leaving me anymore. I thought my body was all I had to offer anyone, and my C cups weren’t going to cut it. Thankfully the man faded into the background before the damage was done. But the body image problems persisted – for years.

I was, and still am, a curvy girl. When I look at photographs of myself when I was in my twenties, it is plain to see that I was fit and healthy – at least I looked that way on the outside. My compact, muscular frame allowed me to do all the stuff that was really important to me – snowboarding, mountain biking, BMX, dancing, working a trade. I was, and still am, physically strong. I could, and still can, eat like a horse. But I wasn’t, and will never be, a size two with long legs and giant boobs. And that killed me.

I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, grew up feeling that I wasn’t good enough for anything. I wasn’t good enough to keep my mother happy, to keep my brother from harm, to keep my family together. When I turned into an adolescent, not surprisingly, these feelings manifested themselves partly as body image problems. While I may have been intelligent and funny, I wasn’t tall and slim and feminine, and therefore I wasn’t worthy of love. So I dated losers – drug addicts, alcoholics, cheaters, and plain old psychos – people who were so far beneath me I thought maybe they would cling to me like a drowning man to a raft. Of course, the raft was fatally damaged, and this approach failed spectacularly. Every time my boy of the month abandoned me for meth or booze or some skank, my self-esteem took another hit.

I fought back by drinking and smoking and playing as hard as I could. I felt my best when my diet consisted of not much more than John Player’s Specials, lots of dark beer, and strong coffee. I kept riding and hiking and dancing and working my ass off, literally. I had to keep moving to stay ahead of my demons. I knew that it was killing me, but I lost weight. Wasn’t that success?

I won’t go into the details of how things have changed for me. Suffice it to say that many years have passed, and with the help of lots of counselling and an amazing network of family and friends, I’ve come to a happier place in my life. I’ve come to realize that I’m a pretty amazing woman with a lot to offer, and I’ve become pretty comfortable in my own skin. Last year I celebrated the birth of my first son – something that, for a long time, I never believed I would get to experience. Now I’m expecting my second, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m finally working towards the things I’ve always wanted, and for the first time that I can remember, my self-esteem isn’t standing in the way.

Now, when I look in the mirror, I can see the healthy, strong woman that has always been there looking back at me, and I think I’m beautiful. I can see that my smile lines are straight up wrinkles now and my skin has some sun damage. My hips have spread and my boobs ain’t never coming up for air, but I am happier now than I was when everything bounced instead of jiggled.

Stacey Woodward is the creative force behind Toquegirl. Most of the time you can find her frantically clearing her son’s wake of destruction, caring for her gramma, or wondering where the hell the dogs ran off to. She wastes her precious free time sitting in her basement lair, writing about life in Toquegirlworld.

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Guest Blogger: that you & I would dare to love ourselves & our bodies just the way we are By Sui at cynosure

Last modified on 2010-10-10 04:10:17 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

At the risk of sounding like a downer, I’m going to admit that I didn’t have the best past week. I didn’t walk or run or really do much at all. I felt sluggish and tired and sick every day. I didn’t even feel like I had enough energy to walk down the street, let alone prepare for a 10k AIDS run in a month. I didn’t feel hungry or full (which threw me into a confusion of how much and how often to eat). I ate. I slept. I didn’t move. My body felt weighed down by a nameless fatigue, and I became tired of sleeping. My body was in a funk. An immobile, overfed funk.

And I’m looking at that same body, my body, in that shiny hunk of glass we stare at every day, and I’m astounded. I’m astounded that we, as people with beating hearts & inquisitive minds, can hate ourselves so easily, just looking at our reflections, witnessing the day-to-day changes that serves as proof that we’re alive and whole and changing constantly like the winds. I’m astounded that we can so easily write ourselves off as worthless or ugly, just because of the flesh on our bones… the remarkable, wonderful flesh that sustains our life, that keeps our organs protected and covered. I’m astounded that we torture ourselves so much… and over what? Over a few more inches of warmth that cradles our ability to sing and dance and laugh?

I’m astounded that we find it so simple to condemn the vessels that hold our minds and our hearts. That we can do it so thoughtlessly. That we do it almost as if we’re expected to, as if it’s a perfunctory exercise in being just like everyone else who hates & tortures their bodies… but for what?

It’s not “fat” or “flesh”! It’s a PART of us. It’s what powers our bodies. It’s our livelihood, our enjoyment of what great things the universe has to offer.

I look at my body… my imperfect, scarred, dimpled, BEAUTIFUL body… with all of its playful rolls and purple-pink stretchmarks and clear-white cellulite… and I love it. I really do. My body is NOT me, all of me, does not represent my worth or my joy or struggles… but my body IS what blesses me with the ability to walk, to move. The ability to hug the ones I love, smile, burst into ridiculous laughter at the most inopportune times, flap my arms wildly in an attempt to fly…

And I’m no longer astonished… that you & I would dare to LOVE ourselves & our bodies just the way we are.

Sui Solitaire is a lover, writer, and photographer who writes at cynosure about happy, healthy living, especially loving yourself, body image, food and eating, loving others, & loving our planet. If you like short stories, poetry, or bittersweet love, her recently-released book, Pleiades, is just for you!

You can read more articles or get them by RSS, follow her on Twitter @rvxn or Facebook, and check out her photography.

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Wear and Tear by stark. raving. mad. mommy.

Last modified on 2010-09-27 14:34:39 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Really, shouldn’t I be past all this?  The looking in the mirror with critical eyes?  I don’t look at strangers this critically.  Okay, maybe sometimes I question a person’s judgment when I see a grown woman wearing sweatpants with “DIVA” stamped in rhinestones on the butt.  But I don’t care what the size of her butt is.

And I certainly don’t look at my friends this way.  When I look at my friends, I see kind eyes, warm smiles, bodies that have survived and sustained life.  I don’t look at my friends and think, gee, if she were a size smaller she would be even more awesome.

Why can’t I treat myself at least as well as I treat my friends?

Most of the time, I’m pretty nice to myself.  I brush my teeth, wash my hair, and use SPF 110 every day.  I can look in the mirror and think anything from “you look okay,” to “meh.” Sometimes, the stress piles up and I’m less kind to myself, even when I need kindness the most.  Then I feel worse because I realize how dysfunctional I still am.  I’d like to at least get to a point where I stop beating myself up for beating myself up.  When I’m stressed out, I slip into old though patterns.  “You’re getting out of control,” I think.

My first recollection of being aware of my weight is from around age 10, when my mother made some pointed comments that I was beginning to put on some weight.  My mother lived on cigarettes, coffee, vodka, and half a can of soup a day, so I guess that will keep you slim and trim.  As I became a teenager, she would make sarcastic comments if I had a second helping of chicken, but looked the other way when I went out drinking.  Clearly, my weight was of more interest to her than my behavior.

Food became an ongoing wedge in my relationship with my mother.  Despite the fact that my mother was functional enough to show up for work every day, her lack of planning meant sometimes there was not enough food in our house.  As my mother’s alcoholism spiraled, my need for control increased.

When I was fourteen, I was working enough to be able to buy my own groceries.  I bought very specific groceries.  I had a limited menu: frozen vegetable pizza, tofu, rice, and Granny Smith apples.  Eventually I decided the vegetable pizza was too crazy, and whittled the menu down to tofu, rice, and apples. Then even that seemed excessive, and I began purging the rice and tofu after I ate.  Soon, I was purging after most meals, whether it was a slice of pizza with co-workers or my tofu-and-rice dinners.

My eating disorder was more a manifestation of my depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive behavior.  We didn’t own a scale, so I don’t know if I lost weight or how much I did.  I definitely thought I was over-weight, and am still surprised to look at photos and see that I very clearly wasn’t.  I did eat some normal meals.  There were long stretches of time when I lived with another family, and I ate normally there.  At school, like many of my classmates, I often skipped lunch.  It’s a hazy memory, but I think we had a salad bar in our school cafeteria, and I think I ate that for lunch.  A salad bar in a high school cafeteria seems very fancy to me now, but it was the 80s, so I guess salad bars were the thing.  I do remember that the school store stocked Velamints, which I would munch constantly.

With stops and starts, it ended, eventually.  I would sit on my hands after eating to keep myself from jamming my finger down my throat. Once, after lunch with some co-workers, we were all commenting on how good the meal was.  I blurted out, “and I’m not even going to throw it up.”  Three jaws dropped.  “Oh,” I said.  “I thought everyone knew.”

That right there is testament to how deranged I was.  I assumed that everyone in my life knew what I was doing.  Did I think they were Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends?  Even more strangely, I believed that all my friends were fine with me jamming my finger down my throat and vomiting on purpose.

Most of the rest of it, though, I don’t remember.  It’s probably a good thing.

I try to be kinder to myself now.  My body is older and has some wear and tear. After having four babies in three pregnancies, I have stretch marks, which my husband sweetly calls my “racing stripes.”  My breasts are positively deflated.  I wear just about the same bra size as always, but I swear if there wasn’t so much stretched-out skin, I’d be a cup size smaller. I have scars on my abdomen from two c-sections, and some shaky-looking skin there that is never going to go back to normal, even if I do stomach crunches ‘til the cows come home.  I have lightly-etched lines around my eyes.  And I have a scar on my right hand where my teeth scraped my knuckle repeatedly.

stark. raving. mad. mommy. is the mother of four children, aged four to nine.  She writes about parenting, insanity, and the Lego obsession known as Asperger Syndrome at www.starkravingmadmommy.com.

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Guest Blogger: An Outsider Looking In by Jenn B.

Last modified on 2010-10-10 04:21:38 GMT. 9 comments. Top.

I’m Jenn B. I pretend to be a writer, and on some days I really feel like I’ve found my “thing”. I’ve seen first hand what negative body image and eating disorders can do to a family. Since June 20, 2009, I have made it a goal for myself to spread awareness in any way I can about the dangers, statistics and effects this disease can have on people. People you love. In the last year, working with the Austin Foundation for Eating Disorders, I’ve learned more about these things than I thought I would ever have to, but in each lesson, I’ve realized that I’ve been given the knowledge and tools to help other people. My blog is www.jennbsays.com

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Guest Blogger: Things That I Am Not by Cheryl from Woman at a Crossroad

Last modified on 2010-09-03 15:22:40 GMT. 20 comments. Top.

I am a lot of things.  Steeler fan, Rush fan, Penguins fan, animal rights activist, political progressive, Star Wars nerd, and some would say royal b*#ch.  One thing I am not any longer is the mother of Kelsey Nicole.  I suppose technically I am still her mother, but I have to use the term in the past tense.  Kelsey died on June 20, 2009 at 5:34 pm.  She spent 23 years. 23 days and 13 hours on this earth, the last nine years of which she struggled with both bulimia and anorexia.

She did not die from her eating disorder.  She had pills in her system that contributed to her heart stopping so the cause of death was finalized as an accidental overdose, but for those of us who knew her in her last days, that’s like saying if a zombie chases you to the edge of a cliff and the only way not to be his dinner is to jump off, then the zombie wasn’t the cause of death.  Sure it was.  Her heart was compromised from years of strain, and she was so weak she had to stop working a few weeks before.  She knew she was very sick, but she didn’t know what to do to get past it.  She couldn’t control it, and I think, looking back on it, she knew this was going to be her last bout with the disorder.  She didn’t have any chances left.  The disease was going to beat her or she was somehow going to beat it, but one way or the other, this was going to be the end of its road.

We called it The Beast.  We thought of it like a living creature that inhabited the house with us and controlled our daughter.  She was many things too:  artist, avid reader, lover of music, beautiful, bright, daughter, sister, cousin, niece and granddaughter.  But the thing that seemed to dominate her over the last nine years was her eating disorder, making it impossible for her to live with anything approaching normalcy.  The marvelous creature who was my daughter was lost somewhere deep inside, and all we saw was this horrible monster that literally devoured her until she was nothing.  Skin and bones, dejected, worn down, depressed and hopeless.  The Beast was a powerful demon indeed.

There were moments where things were less dark.  Kelsey was the veteran of two residential treatment facilities, encompassing three stays.  Her first stay did little more than teach my bulimic daughter how to be anorexic as well as an accomplished purger.  But her last enrollment in a different facility we thought was the ticket to true recovery.  And for a while it seemed as though our optimism would be rewarded.  She still struggled with all the issues that cause young women and men to choose this dark path, and she had many hard days.  But, she was a brave soldier and fought hard at first.  Somehow, though, about a year before that awful day, The Beast went on the counteroffensive and never let up again.

We were financially tapped out after residential treatments, specialists, therapists, nutritionists, paying her rent when we were told it was better that she didn’t live at home where it all began, and then dealing with the fallout her sister experienced as a result of having to live in the shadow of such an all encompassing disease.  As a result, we felt powerless and without any real option as we began to witness her final downward spiral.  Desperate to do something, her little sister contacted the show Intervention and they were interested.  If we could get her story accepted, we had a shot at them paying for another treatment center.  We began to prepare the first step, which is to document her on video without letting her know the real reason why.  Her boyfriend, himself a troubled young man, caught on to what we were truly up to and tipped her off.  In what was not an uncommon swing between accusing us we didn’t care and refusing any help offered, she went ballistic, The Beast, I am sure, pulling all the strings.  Our contacts at the show told us to hold off for a while, let the commotion die down, and when we were ready, they would help us come up with a new cover story.  We never got that far.

In the end, my daughter chose to throw herself off the cliff rather than allow her personal zombie to continue to devour her.  She tried to take it with her, but its ghost remains.  It shows itself in the sad eyes of her little sister, in the dejected shoulders of her father as he stares off into space, seemingly lost in nothingness, but I know who he’s thinking about.  I see it when I look at one of the last pictures of her, with my Mother on her 90th birthday.  I look at that picture and wonder which woman was more frail at that point.

I know The Beast is somehow basking in its triumph when I contemplate all the things we lost that day:  her bright smile, her wit and sometimes caustic, but always strong opinions on just about everything, her art, and her love of her family, friends and her cat Tum-Tum.  So the thing I can never be again is the mother of a living, breathing Kelsey.  She has to live in my heart and my memory now.  Which leads me to the thing I am the most:  heartbroken.

I am a middle-aged, transplanted liberal Yankee living in a conservative area of Texas.  I live with my husband, my college aged daughter, six dogs, two cats and a fish.  I began blogging under the name SteelerFanMom at Woman at a Crossroad when I was trying to concentrate on caring for my aging mother, who had Alzheimer’s and needed an outlet.  My stories centered on her and my adventures in learning to care for someone who could not accept her age and condition.  Then, a few months into the project, my oldest daughter died after nine years of fighting an eating disorder.  Since that time, my blog has taken my readers on a wild ride: grief, dealing with Mother, then the loss of Mother, who passed away in March 2010, memories and self-analysis, all with a little PGH sports talk mixed in.

Guest Blogger: Learning to Love My Grown Up Body By Mean Girl Garage

Last modified on 2010-09-03 15:17:45 GMT. 11 comments. Top.

Right now, I hate my body. I’m trying so hard not to. I know I shouldn’t. I don’t want to. I know I am more than how I look. But somehow, I feel as if my body has betrayed me. It put on 30 pounds over the past 10 years. How? When? Where was I when this was happening?

The thing is, even with these extra 30 pounds, I know I’m not really fat. Unless I’m on the Wii Fit. In that case, I’m obese. Obese. You heard me. I wear a size 12 and according to the Wii Fit, I’m obese. Sure, my size 12’s are getting a little tight, but still, obese?

And what gets me is that when I look at other people, I don’t see their size. I have obese friends, REALLY obese friends. I have super skinny friends too. And it doesn’t matter to me. I care more about how funny they are or if they can have intellectual conversations. But for some reason, when it comes to me, I have different standards. I’m not good enough unless I am a certain size, a certain weight. The logic in it is absurd. Yet I know thousands of women are probably the same way. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I’m a super successful person in my career, my relationship with my husband, my friendships, and doing all right financially. So why does this one thing about myself bug me so much?

I know it’s all about patterns we’ve gotten into. I’ve dieted since I was a child. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard my dad say, “Looks like we all need to lose a few, “ and the whole kitchen would be purged of all “bad” foods. And I always got praised for losing weight, not for getting good grades, but for losing weight. Obviously, growing up, that told me what was important to my father, looking good. So I began to seek out compliments for “being cute,” or “being skinny,” or “dressing nicely.” Although, thankfully, deep inside me, it was important for me to prove to everyone that I was very smart. And I have.

When I look back at the things I did to my body to keep it 30 pounds lighter, I think of how unhealthy I was, both physically and mentally. I had such strict rules about what I would eat, what I wouldn’t eat, how much I would eat, when I would eat, how much I would exercise. It was crazy. That’s not worth it. I know it’s not.

Yet, I really have a hard time knowing that I don’t look 30 pounds lighter. Catch 22? Breaking those mindsets is so difficult. Just when I think maybe I have, I’ll see a picture of myself and wonder, “Maybe I could go back to eating only before 5:00.” But then reality sets in. And I remember that I am a grown up. There is much more to me than my weight.

Jules is the creator of Mean Girl Garage where she writes about her daily life as a teacher, wife, mean girl, and bad singer. She’s also the co-founder of Studio 30 +, a blogging community for bloggers over the age of 30. She lives “somewhere in the middle” of the country with seven cats that her hubby made her rescue, her hyperactive musician hubby, and a possible tiger who lives in the garage.  Her Mean Girl and tiger lead comfortable lives together but periodically break out of the garage.  Consider youself warned.

Guest Blogger: Model Behaviour

Last modified on 2010-08-13 17:44:55 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

There is one thing no one ever really warns you about regarding motherhood, and that is that it will transform your body forever.

I know models and magazines nowadays will have you believe otherwise. But the truth is their bodies, apart for having been thoroughly pampered with massages and nutritionists, and distinctly tortured through ridiculous diets, harrowing gym sessions, and possibly some liposuction, even those bodies have forever been altered.

Remember the famous photos of Heidi Klum 6 weeks after birth on the Victoria Secret runaway? She looked gorgeous and spectacular, but she did look different, and frankly, I’m not too sure what she was trying to prove. Recently, I could not help but glee at a photo of Kate Moss (Kate Moss no less!) apparently even she gets her double potbelly when casually bending forward on a bikini.

Before you judge, let me first tell you that I have opposed dieting for the better part of my life. Initially I was skinny, as in 177 cm (5 ft 8 inches) high and about 45 kilos (99 pounds) wide. As I approached puberty the women around me began looking at their butts self-consciously. Even the skinny ones started eating salads and skipping lunch. All the while the guys, both in real life and the movies, kept ordering double meatball burgers with cheese.

Then puberty hit me. I still remember the echoing laughter when I asked my siblings if my butt was bigger. Back then the mere thought was hilarious. Well, let me tell you, it was, and it continued getting bigger, and it brought along the thighs to prove a point. My South American genes caught up with me, providing me with a round, perky and rather large butt. I also inherited crap circulation, which translated into cellulite, bruises and spider veins. My model days were over at fifteen.

But to me the matter was simple: society was trying to make us believe that we were all meant to look a certain way. I’m a feminist, and this was not acceptable. Reading Naomi Wolf’s book, On Beauty, (a must read) further strengthened my position; it was ok to exercise and eat healthy, but diet? Never. I equated my skinny friend’s proud remarks of “I never have dessert” to “I never smile so I won’t get wrinkles.” Food was a joy of life that was to be relished.

Then I got pregnant. During the pregnancy I ate healthy and did my yoga, while working full time and catching up on sleep at weekends. My daughter was born and we moved to Cambodia. I was stressed, shocked and lonely, but still managed to go back to yoga and take her on long river walks. Within 6 months I was back to my old not entirely perfect body.

Big sigh as the second unexpected and joyous pregnancy hit me nine months after first one.

I was working again. Running back and forth in an effort to make up for it to my little baby. No diet, no exercise, no sleep. After my son was born I was also for the most part not speaking to my husband, who was too enthralled with his new job to notice I had not slept for more than 4 consecutive hours in over a year. I slept when I could, and the rest of the time survived on chocolate.

It was around my son’s second birthday, and 23 years after my butt initially went all samba on me, that I decided to accept reality: In spite of all my feminist objections, I was not happy with my body. Two years of breastfeeding had done away with my last remaining bastion; the perky breasts. Pregnancy No. 2 had left stretch marks, a pot belly, and an extra eight kilos that made me look like the cartoon female version of the Michelin man; 177cm. of blubber. My body had evened out with my super thighs. Time kept running and all my feminist notions did not help me feel better about myself. I knew time would only continue deteriorating me, so I did what I swore I never would: I dieted.

In my defense, it was a healthy diet written by a nutritionist. I lost some weight (a lot really), then Christmas came and I gained some back. Then I went on a pay-it-forward diet because I knew the holidays to Italy would be mostly about eating, and lost some, and soon enough I was on the yo-yo train along with the better part of female-hood.

Eating mostly vegetables and fruits for my diet meant my kids ate more of those too. Not that they should be on a diet, they are like walking stick men at present, but these are the healthiest thing you can eat, which made me realize that I have a responsibility to model the best behavior for them. And although I’m currently failing miserably, it takes away the romantic notions of living life as a feminist with no cares for society’s rules, and -as most things in motherhood- puts even more pressure on ME.

I think success is mostly about accepting who you really are. So I have to accept that I’m a chocoholic, that to me the idea of never having sweets again is tantamount to a life sentence, but also that I don’t like being overweight.

I’m still working on becoming a healthy adult. Trying to control what seems to be an inherited obsession with chocolate, and looking for a form of exercise that I look forward to instead of dread and fits into my two-jobs-two-kids schedule.

But what worries me most in all this is how my struggles might affect my daughter. I want her to feel good about herself. I want her to be healthy, exercise regularly, eat well, and love her body. And all the while I want her to think that looks are superficial and irrelevant. In short, I want her to be perfect and in total balance.

So the most important part to me is to do it for the right reasons; to find a balance out of love for myself and for my loved ones. Out of respect for my body, my temple, the one that not only gave me my beautiful children, but also the strength to pull off everything that came afterwards.

Angelica used to work as an aid worker & photographer. When bundle #1 came along, she found herself unable to go back to full time work or become a stay at home mom, so she found a third way.  Now she lives in Europe, continues to work for NGOs and the UN on short term assignments, looks after her two monkeys, and takes the occasional photo commission.  She’s currently writing “Crossing the River, a letter to my daughter on becoming a mother.” You can find her blogging on www.onmotherhoodandsanity.blogspot.com about trying to have it all with out going crazy in the process. It’s an ongoing research project.

Guest Blogger: As It Turns Out, I Wanted To Live

Last modified on 2010-08-13 17:47:10 GMT. 13 comments. Top.

As it turns out, I wanted to live.

“Six months from now you will either be dead or be in recovery. Your choice.”

I wasn’t until a doctor looked me straight in the eye and said that sentence to me that I realized deep down, I was wanted to live. I don’t know what it was that snapped inside me, some primal survival instinct or what, but after so many years of slow self destruction this sentence straightened my spine and I unwittingly began to crawl out of the deepest, slipperiest well I have even been stuck in. I was so deep in the well at that point that the sunlight was a mere pinprick of light so very far away. Could I do it?

I feel like I should introduce myself as if this is an AA meeting.
My name is Stephanie and I am Eating Disordered. I say AM because like an alcoholic who is in recovery but must always be vigilant, so must I. I no longer exhibit disordered behavior, no more binging or purging, but I carry it with me always. What was once a burden is now a badge of courage. To me, anyway. It’s what makes me me. I survived but I very nearly didn’t.

Having a eating disorder is like having a demon on your shoulder. One who hisses to you You are bad. You are fat. Fat is bad. You are bad. You are weak. If you dare so much as put that food to your lips I will punish you. An eating disorder is part of you…but separate and full in control. It dictates everything, runs every part of your life. Those words hissed in your ear are repeated over and over and it seemed as if there was no way to silence the demon. (there is, I promise you) It controlled where I could go – will you have access to get rid of or avoid food – to what I could do. It ran my life.

Every night I would pray to be healthy.

Alright, that’s a lie. Every night I would pray to be in control. I would pray to trade my eating disorder for another one. I prayed my Bulimia would magically turn to Anorexia. To just not eat all…heaven. That’s control. That’s CLEAN. Bulimia was weak. Bulimia was dirty. Bulimia was a failure. I couldn’t even be ED right.
Bulimia for me was a cycle of feeling bad and punishing myself with food, eating so much my skin pulled and tore along my sides. Ten, twelve times a day sometimes. Then I would sit with it. The punishment of being bad. Being weak. Until the panic became too much and I had to let it go.

Finally the cleansing ritual of purging. The violence of letting it all out. And then the smooth flatness of my stomach. Purified. Never mind my hair falling out, the shaking feeling of weakness, or the terrifying reality that my heart being weakened by the second. I was pure. For at least a few minutes I had been purified, until it would beginn all over again. I flunked out of high school because of it, I managed to charm my way into college and skated along until a costume designer outted me to the head of my school. My head and my waist were the same measurement. The Dean gave me a choice, be kicked out of school or go into the hospital and get treatment with no academic repercussions.

I went into the hospital. For just long enough to pacify everyone. It took several more health scares and hospital visits before I truly began to make the choice to live.

I know I will never look in the mirror and see what I really truly look like. My vision is skewed, distorted and I have come to accept that. I don’t think about it to often. I eat healthy and can enjoy a good meal and a dessert without panic. I notice that I can easily slip into seemingly benign old behaviors without realizing it though, I weigh myself a bit too often perhaps. Things that wouldn’t be a big deal at all if I hadn’t been eating disordered in the first place. I had to give myself a good talking to the other day at a restaurant that listed the caloric count of each meal on the menu and I felt that old panic. I notice that when celebrities get too thin that while the world is discussing how they are too thin, for a fleeting moment I am jealous.

Disordered thinking is always knocking at the door, but it’s different now. A whisper not a command. It is easily silenced.

By and large I am free. Free. It’s phenomenal.

My body is amazing. (Yours is too.) My body despite years of abuse, despite burst blood vessels, despite bloody throats, and despite two heart ‘episodes’ grew a healthy baby. That’s a miracle, it’s so miraculous in fact, that I no longer can hate my body…no matter how big or small. How puffy or flabby or toned. I am in awe that something I abused for so long took over and gave me the biggest blessing I have ever known. My son. I marvel that I was so wrapped up in myself and that I believed my weight had a direct correlation to my worth.

I know now that thin doesn’t equal happiness. Fat isn’t bad. Anorexia is not ‘better’ than Bulimia, they are both deadly serious They are fraternal twin demons, both equally evil and destructive. Most importantly I know now that food isn’t the answer to a prayer, it’s not love, or punishment or anything other than food.

It certainly isn’t redemption.

Loving your self is redemption.

Stephanie Stearns Dulli aka Minky {moo}is a professional actress and comedian whose blogging has been featured in  the New York Times, DCMetroMoms and Washington Family Magazine.  She Twitters her life away @MinkyMoo and blogs at Dial M for Minky: Motherhood & Mimosas where she posts an insane amount of pictures of her son, celebrates her many embarrassing moments, and blames clowns for all the evil in the world.

Guest Blogger: Unforgiving

Last modified on 2010-07-26 00:21:00 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Each Friday, we will have a guest blogger share.  If you want to contribute a Friday post or help out in another way, please click here.

Since I can remember I’ve talked about dieting and longed for a flat stomach.  When I look back now, at my 12, 14 and 16 year old self, I can’t believe I ever doubted myself.  At 12, I resembled one of those African stick bugs.  At 14, I was just beginning to make the transformation from child to young woman.  At 16, I was roughly 5’7” and 135 lbs.  Yet, at 12, 14 and 16, you would’ve had trouble convincing me I was not “fat” or that my stomach, was indeed, flat.

I had my first child five days before I turned 17.  At 17, your body is ridiculously forgiving of pregnancy.  Sure I had a couple of light stretch marks but within two weeks I was back down to 145 lbs.  I started working out.  I had my fourth child at 30.  Body less forgiving.  My body at that point had been through four pregnancies and a number of attempted diets and exercise phases.  I’m soft and round and mushy.  My stomach is unequivocally not flat.  Does this make me any less intelligent?  Less attractive to my husband?  Less worthy?  No.  However, on far too many occasions I’ve made it clear, in front of my children that it does.

I cover up most of my self-loathing with humour.  I’ve made several references to my fat “sneaking out” from under my top or over my pants.  I’ve thrust my belly out and pulled up my shirt and made fun of it.  I’ve called myself a “potato on sticks” repeatedly.  I’ve let shopping trips destroy me when I can’t find something that fits.  And yet through it all, it never once dawned on me, an educated mature woman, that this was having an ill effect on my child.

It should have.

Because now at 13, she is petrified of being “fat”?  She fears she is already.  She is not.  She is beautiful in every sense of the word.  This has nothing to do with her weight.  But I?  I damaged this thought process in her mind with years of self-loathing, self-doubt and self-mocking.

What do I do now?  Quiet the repeated self-directed insults relating to weight.  Eat without commenting or referring to myself as a pig or cow or some other animal.  Dress to flatter myself and not worry about the number on the tag.  Encourage her to accept herself as she is and to recognize herself for all the beautiful things she is despite of her physical appearance.  And lastly, I take part in something like this that is a beautiful effort in and of itself to turn around this societal negative focus on body image and hope that someday, we can all be accepted and appreciated and loved for who we are and not what we are.

Angela Prior is a thirty-three year old married mother of four children.  Her children range in age from three to sixteen.  Three boys and one girl.  The girl is not the youngest (as most people assume).  She live in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada and is a social worker.  She blogs at Driven and the PMS Chronicles.  She love Vodka, chocolate, music and TV, although not necessarily in that order.

Guest Blogger: Getting In Touch With Myself. Literally.

Last modified on 2010-07-26 00:23:10 GMT. 9 comments. Top.

Each Friday, we will have a guest blogger share.  If you want to contribute a Friday post or help out in another way, please click here.

I come from a chubby family. Not fat, exactly, but I definitely belong to a blood line that provides a birthright of belly fat and double chins. Some of us fall on the fat side, some of us on the thin, but all of us have disproportionately large upper bodies that throw a shadow like a potato perched on two toothpicks. Sometimes the potato or the toothpicks are smaller, but we all pretty much look like we were made by Hasbro. Potato Head family, reprazent!

Where many of my friends are concave, I am convex. While prized is the hourglass, I got the fishbowl. When most little girls from my generation were dreaming of lives as Veruca Salt, all I saw when I looked in the mirror was Violet Beauregard after chewing the forbidden gum. Put me in a blue jumper and I was as good as dressed for Halloween. I am an apple in what sometimes feels like a world full of pears. What I’m saying is, it would have been easy for me to fall into the trap of disliking the shape that came with my DNA. And I did, for a while. But I found a savior in the form of earthquakes and fireworks, in the form of tingles and giggles, in the form of an orgasm.

In the time between realizing that my crop tops and Jordache jeans fit me differently than other girls and my first “Big O”, I was down. I felt unlovable. There was no one who looked like me on television or in movies. It was the 80′s and fitness was big. Everybody was wearing legwarmers and headbands even when not working out and Olivia Newton-John was getting physical in her music videos and turning fat slobs into Chippendale dancers in less than five minutes. I realized that I was the “before” in Weight Watchers commercials and thought I would always be. Cats? I like cats. Bring on the six cats and Lean Cuisine for one, baby. But one night, while babysitting at a neighbor’s house, I found myself glued to soft core porn while flipping through the channels after the kids had gone to bed. I knelt close to the television so as to have the sound low enough not to wake the kids. I resembled a worshipper as I bathed in the glow of sex. I felt funny in a place of which I was only vaguely aware because I had to wash it periodically when I showered. I touched down there and it was good. I touched a little bit more and it was better. Soon, I forgot to be careful, altogether, as waves of pure joy washed over me. It was as if each cell in my body had made itself known and I took note of and was filled with love for every one.

You know that Divinyls song “I Touch Myself”? The one where she sings to a lover “I forget myself, I want you to remind me”? Well, I do. I forget myself. I get busy, I get tired, I get down. I have bills to pay and kids to raise and flowers to arrange (I’m a florist) and posts to write. At any given moment I am late on at least two writing deadlines and dashing off apology emails to people I should have gotten back to weeks ago. I don’t even THINK about my body except to feed it, clothe it, and take it to the bathroom once in a while. When that happens I’ll notice that maybe I don’t iron the shirt I’m wearing before I leave the house. I’ll glance at the mirror and think “Meh, good enough.” Then, maybe I start leaving the house without makeup. I’ll take an even shorter peek in the mirror just to be sure I don’t have a screaming case of bedhead before heading out the door. Legs go unshaven. Hair goes unwashed. I start to fall apart a little. My seams start to show.

Then, like a whisper in my ear so faint that I almost instinctively know it, rather than hear it, something says “Touch Me”. I stop and listen, suddenly knowing that I’ve forgotten myself and my body is reminding me. And I remember. I remember the hell out of it. Several times over, sometimes. With batteries, sometimes. But alwaysalwaysalways it brings me back to the wonders of my physical self. Awakens the part of me that knows my body is wonderful and useful and beautiful. I glow with the reminder. I am awash in the waves of pure joy once again. And I once again carry the knowledge that this potato, this apple, this fishbowl is a temple and deserves to be respected and worshipped. Then, I take a shower, iron my shirt, and put on some lip gloss, tucking in the seams and getting on with my life. Mrs. Potato Head got nothin’ on me.

If you want to read more about Jennifer’s orgasms, damaging childhood, and parenting adventures, head on over to Fuck Yeah, Motherhood! You can also get to know her 140 characters at a time on twitter at @fyeahmotherhood or the slightly less p.c. sassypants version of herself, @thecheckoutgirl.

You Can Read Or Write Naked If You Want

Last modified on 2010-07-26 00:25:53 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Our Blogger of the Week will begin on Monday, July 12th!

We will feature a post and an interview of each of our calender mavens on Mondays and Wednesdays.

And on Fridays, we will feature YOUR STORY. Because most of us have struggled with our bodies. Or watch those we love struggle. Or maybe we’ve learned to love our body. That’s awesome, too. So click here to read all the ways you can participate or email Alex if you want to send in your story.

Meanwhile, you can check out My Bottle’s Up poignant post on being apart of this project, In This Skin.

Or Attack of the Redneck Mommy‘s shock that her husband’s on Facebook AND WANTS TO BE HER FRIEND. Oh yea, and he might find out that she’s going to be naked in a calendar (HINT: this calendar), What To Do If Your Husband Joins Facebook.

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