‘Wellness’ Sort Of Ruined My Life

By Payton Aper

Ispent the first half of my teenage years feeling deeply uncomfortable with myself and my body. I don’t recall having a problematic relationship with food as a child, but by the time I was in middle school, it was, well, less than ideal. I survived the emo Tumblr phase of 2013 and somehow managed to dodge most of the pro-eating disorder content that was online, mainly because it was so obvious in its messaging, and I wasn’t trying to get an eating disorder, anyway. At some point, I thought, eating disorders must require a conscious decision. And in true internalized-misogynist fashion, I wasn’t like anorexics or bulimics because I didn’t want to be skinny—I wanted to be strong. I wanted to do pushups on my feet and maybe ignore the fighting going on at my house and my sexuality while I was at it. But I didn’t want to lose weight. In fact, for the entirety of my eating disorder, I never once stepped on a scale. That last statement isn’t to invalidate disordered, deliberate weight loss—rather, it's to highlight that eating disorders don’t always manifest in the most obvious ways. It’s easy to find mainstream YouTubers talking about scraping the cheese off pizza as a healthy choice or making “Mother Nature’s cereal” instead of just having Special K. Few of these influencers look as if they had an eating disorder or veer outside the realm of “self-love”; some even admit to beginning their journeys “overweight”. Therefore, what would be telltale signs of an ED in the “right” kind of patient become normalized and even heralded for victims that don’t fit the mold.

At 15, I was following a league of vloggers in their twenties and thirties because I wanted to look like them. They had glowy skin, nice makeup, and big friend groups. They were strong in that they had a six pack yet were still petite enough for brand deals and calorie deficits. Somewhere along the line I had, like these influencers, begun to conflate the word “skinny” with “strong”. This seemingly harmless change in vocabulary kickstarted my wellness journey, which was really an eating disorder in sheep’s clothing.

Needless to say, my first full-on attempt at a total body makeover was my last. Oh, how wrong I was, to think that an eating disorder was a forceful step off a cliff and not creeping slowly, slowly down a landslide until you’ve slid so far you can scarcely recognize yourself. There’s a sixth-month period of my life that’s an absolute blur, where I felt like I was underwater. Reality had been distorted, and I could either thrash for air or dredge one foot in front of the other as if walking on a pool floor. I had dissociated so badly that I became a third party, watching myself perform daily activities over my shoulder. The only hobby I bothered with was soccer, a form

of exercise, and the only time I felt energetic was when hyperfixating on my disorder. I’ve never experienced drug addiction, but I reckon my exercise addiction was pretty similar. I snuck around on school property, ditched plans, threw food in a tampon receptacle and did crunches on the floor of a bathroom stall. The girl I was a year prior would have been horrified; meanwhile, I was beyond the point of self-help and miserable to be around.

I told myself it wasn’t disordered if I still ate three meals a day or if I was getting stronger (which, eventually, I wasn’t). I googled terms like orthorexia— an unhealthy obsession with exercise and food—as if they were somehow a lesser evil than anorexia. In retrospect, the idea of quantifying my own mental health is as amusing as it is sad. The death grip that the wellness and fitness movements had on me was even sadder. I don’t believe that diet culture was the sole cause of my eating disorder, but it became a means of justifying my behavior. My actions were at first in the name of wellness, then to prove that I wasn’t a quitter, and eventually because I had forgotten how to live otherwise.

It took an anorexia diagnosis to make me admit that I actually had an eating disorder, and admittance alone was not enough to spearhead my recovery process. I argued with my parents and doctors for the first few steps of recovery and reverted to disordered eating and exercise several times before my relapses finally started to decrease in frequency. My willingness to recover coincided with finally being ‘weight-restored’, or back to the weight range I’d had before my disorder. In emerging from survival-mode, my body dredged up a lot of old emotions with it. The world was bright and loud and cruel, but it was wonderful. I didn’t realize how much I’d wanted a life without obsession and compulsion until it was in front of me.

My recovery involved a combination of physical and mental practices to repair the relationship I had with food and my body. I made monthly visits downstate to see a therapist and psychiatrist, who worked together to create a recovery plan for me and prescribe me with antidepressants for my anxiety. I avoided nearly all forms of exercise and can say with confidence that I’ve tried a blended form of every Ben and Jerry’s flavor. Another thing that no one tells you about recovery is that developing acid reflux is pretty common and pretty awful when you finally just want to eat. But I was privileged to have access to healthcare, parents who could drive me four hours to see a specialist, and a mother who refused to yield to my disorder. This isn’t the case with everyone in recovery, and without these In a sick twist of logic, I finally got what I wanted during recovery. My parents stopped fighting because they were worried about me. I finally finished puberty and was praised for it by the same people who bullied me when I was at my lowest. Prior to my eating disorder, I’d been struggling with emotional trauma, bullying, an identity crisis and all the other lovely parts of middle school, and they had taken their toll. I'd also struggled to numb my anxiety rather than confronting my emotions head-on, which I had long since grown tired of doing. In a way, my eating disorder was a last-ditch effort to demand the respect and peace I had been denied for years—and it sort of worked. I genuinely believe that I could have equated recovery to a sort of reset button. Instead, I am learning that, no matter what, I do not need to be sick in order to deserve love. I do not need to work myself into the ground in order to rest (which I still struggle with as a college student). Any recovered person could tell you that there is a fine line between exercise and exercise addiction, between a diet change and a diet outright. And I never want to cross that line again.

When I was a kid, my family had a “beach” (a glorified patch of sand in our yard) that I weeded as a chore. The weeds were stubborn

and gave me calluses, and it was tempting to just move on to the next plant whenever I finally pulled out its top. If I did, however, the weeds would come back with a vengeance sooner or later. And so I learned to extract the roots as well from the soil, to transplant them to a compost pile where they could grow on their own. Recovery doesn’t end when a doctor or parent tells you it can. It ends when the roots are gone– and to remove the roots, you have to start digging. to address the childhood trauma and personality traits that had made me susceptible to an eating disorder in the first place. Some of that trauma continued until I finally moved to Ann Arbor, so I’d be lying if I said I’ve processed it completely. It’s easy to procrastinate healing when you’re a full-time college student and a workaholic, and I’ve had disagreements with my therapist over how I should even go about it. Part of me believes that healing is going to take time: time to set boundaries and build friendships, which I’ve done, and time to unlearn self-hatred. I still have to actively manage my anxiety at times, and I’m not always satisfied with my body. But the days of hating it, of letting food and movement control my life, are over. They can come to an end. I promise.

I understand why people make wellness into an aesthetic— it’s incredibly motivating, and sometimes you just need to make an iced coffee or take a fire mirror selfie to pick yourself up. But mainstream wellness tends to reek of privilege and obsessive personalities. It reminds me of how vulnerable I was as a kid and how vulnerable others may be to pro-eating-disorder messages. I learned at sixteen that recovery would never be Instagrammable and aesthetics weren't going to save my life. Wellness wasn’t just going to SoulCycle, drinking a matcha smoothie, and all the other emblages of the white bourgeoisie. It wasn’t lighting a candle in my room or a juice cleanse. Wellness was eating drive-through fries even though I was terrified; it was calling my therapist instead of compulsively exercising; it was seeking help for my anxiety and finally getting my period back. When I began to see my eating disorder as something conquerable and took my life back, I felt stronger than I had in years.

When we talk about wellness, it is paramount that we tell not only the glories of fitspo and meditation but also of the people who fought for their lives with mental and chronic illness, and won. We need to acknowledge forms of wellness that go beyond the corporeal and the “cute”. We must applaud those who practice them, those that try, and those that fail. There is so much more to life than the way we look living it, and I wish we would all remember that.