Feb 27 | Fasting from Self-Hatred (Letters from the Coast)

Instead of fat jokes during the homily or bulletin announcements for the parish weight loss program, can we grieve the fact that Lent is a great time for an eating disorder to parade as a spiritual discipline?

“Why Lent can be a dangerous time when you’re recovering from an eating disorder,” Amanda Martinez Beck, www.americanmagazine.org, February 25th 2020.

CW: Body shame

I sat in my therapist’s office, hands clasped tight, refusing to look at her. There’s so often a point in the session where I can no longer meet her kind brown eyes.

“I need to tell you,” she said in her endlessly gentle voice, “that in over a decade of doing this work, every woman who has sat where you’re sitting – every single one – has said that she’s unhappy with her body. I need you to know that. It’s not just you.”

I do remember having a lightning bolt moment when I first got onto Facebook and started posting – and then looking through – old photographs of myself.

My eyes widened as I explored my shape, my angles, my curves. I was…hot!

Of course what I really meant was that I was thin. Or at least, thinner than I was now.

And as I stared, I felt profoundly cheated.

It wasn’t that I had always thought I was gross-looking, although I often did think that. But back then, when my friends and I would go swimming before bedtime at the UVic pool five days a week, I was in probably the best shape of my life, and still I would stand before the mirror and suck my stomach in and think, “Oh, if only I could just lose five or ten more pounds.”

I realized right then and there that I had never been happy with how I looked.

My mother, who I love so much it hurts, did not help. She struggled with her weight all my life and imparted that body anxiety to me, along with the turning to food as a comfort, and the lack of solid cooking skills. Although I always had enough to eat and never went hungry, I can see now that we didn’t eat the healthiest diet, and that might have had to do with the fact that the frozen chicken pot pies that I utterly loathed and the macaroni and cheese that Mum would fix on the stovetop (never Kraft Dinner, just plain macaroni with grated cheese on top) were not expensive, and about the amount of work Mum was capable of committing to after a 6am-6pm workday.

Mum also tried plenty of fad diets and fad exercise programs. She did a step class at her work. She did Pilates. She went running in the morning. She tried an absolutely bizarre diet when I was about 16 that involved eating certain foods in combination on a fixed schedule. There were a lot of plain hot dogs and canned tuna and toast. One day she ate a bad can and spent the night being loudly sick in the bathroom while I was trying to talk to my girlfriend on the phone. 

She also did Weight Watchers, and lost a significant amount of weight. I didn’t follow the program itself, but I did eat what she ate and lost quite a bit of weight myself. My heart breaks a little thinking about 16-year-old Clare so proud to have lost weight without even following the program itself, 16-year-old Clare who was, despite not giving the program any money, on fucking Weight Watchers.

I gained a little bit back in college but got into truly great shape after all of that swimming. Then I went to the UK and stopped exercising, as well as started eating like crap. I never really did particularly well at eating healthy after that, and I gained a significant amount of weight, about fifty to seventy pounds.

I cycled back and forth between sticking to an exercise regimen and having it fall apart. When I’m stressed out, I eat, and I cocoon myself. I just want to sit for hours and make things, or read. 2007 and onward was a new era of stress and anxiety. No wonder.

In university, I remember embarking on Lenten fasts for no particular reason. I wasn’t Christian then, but friends and I would do it anyway, because it was a good excuse to give up the things we “knew we shouldn’t eat,” like chocolate or pop.

Once I came back to church I resumed some Lenten fasting, including two years where I went vegetarian. But almost none of the food-based ones spoke to me much. And I think it was because, finally, after all these years, I realized that my relationship to God was not supposed to mirror the nasty, judgmental relationship I had with my body.

I am still trying to find myself, physically. I am still trying to love “the soft animal” of my body.

Lent is about fasting, but fasting is not about stripping the skin off our bones and offer the quivering mass to God. The season of Christmas and Epiphany is an important corrective: the body has been made holy by God’s having walked around within one.

It is a new fast we are called to, a fast from injustice, from self-hatred, from anxiety and fear.

My prayer is that you may find some love within yourself for the beautiful, fragile thing God has given you to walk around inside. Don’t punish it – it’s only trying to live, and in so many ways, it’s smarter than you.

It knows so much more than we give it credit for, if we would only listen.

And unlike my brain, which is endlessly arrogant, my body knows we need each other to live.