Dear Younger Me: how your eating disorder will impact your marriage
Dear younger me:
I wish this is a letter you could have been given and read as a newlywed. Oh, how it would have helped you back then.
First of all, I want you to know that getting help for eating struggles will not result in you exchanging one extreme for another. You fear listening to podcasts on food freedom, intuitive eating and joyful movement because you are afraid of their influence. You think from listening to those resources you will let go of your rigid food rules and intense food fears, you will become 800 pounds, never workout again or taste produce again.
Wrong!
What they will teach you at Christian counseling and during 1:1 private coaching sessions is BALANCE. They will teach you how to use tools, like exercising in a healthy way, rather than a life-consuming way. I know you think getting “better” and “healthier” means gaining so much weight, but really, any weight you gain will feel good because your body needs you to feel your best, to live life to the fullest.
Set point weight happens when we trust our God-given body wisdom in the form of body cues, and it is a weight that is uniquely perfect for us! Nothing bad happens when we eat when our bodies ask us to. Only good things. Promise!
A few years into marriage, after you start working with Kris, your intuitive eating coach, you will hear your husband say, “Your issues with food — it was the hardest thing we went through. I hated seeing you not eat, bullying yourself. I felt so helpless watching someone I love harm themselves and not knowing how to get you to stop.”
Nyla, recovery makes life better. Every aspect — including your marriage to Mark. How we are around food drastically impacts those closest to us. Your food struggles aren’t a you thing, it’s an us thing.
Reaching out for help is such a strong thing to do. So brave and so strong. I can tell you from this side of recovery that it’s worth the uncomfortable parts, like squirming on a counselor’s couch, spilling your heart and buckets of tears in front of her. It’s worth the not linear journal of learning body cues and becoming a team with your body, a body that diet culture wrongly told you couldn’t be trusted. We can trust our bodies — because we can trust God and the fact that he made them. Our body cues for what, when and how much to eat are safe to trust, just like he is.
Sweet younger me, in post-eating disorder recovery there will no longer be half-day-long fights over you not eating supper, or skipping multiple meals and making your husband panic. There will be no more hushed arguments in the line-up at a fast food restaurant, trying to not draw the attention of your family ordering things that make your skin crawl, fearful as you count the seconds until you have to pick something. There will no longer be fretting before potlucks at friends’ houses or church, worrying out loud to your hubby about what will be served.
Once you receive help from professionals, you’ll enjoy slow mornings together eating breakfast, cuddling with your cat and reading the Bible together. It will eventually be a distant memory of you getting angry at Mark in the mornings for talking to you when you were about to do a workout video before work, annoyed that you will not be able to do exactly an hour of cardio.
When you make those two incredibly hard phone calls — one to book a Christian counseling appointment and one to sign up for three sessions with an intuitive eating coach — you’ll be doing your future self (me!) a huge favor.
You don’t miss out now.
It makes your husband so happy to finally share some of his childhood favorites with you, instead of seeing you decline the baked goods his mom brings over. You’ll even get to enjoy and have the experience of learning to make your mother-in-law’s pie crust with her! You’ll have countless fun memories of eating white carbohydrates, dessert and foods that don’t have nutritional labels on them, with his family and yours. Food will just become neutral to you, no moral worth attached to it anymore.
Your life gets better once you reach out for help for an eating disorder… and so does your husband’s life. He trusts you now to honor you hunger cues. He knows you will care for yourself. No longer does he get scared or angry.
“I was never angry at you,” he will one day say to you. “I was angry at the lies you were believing about food and yourself.”
There are hardly any food-focused fights anymore, and it makes your home and marriage a peaceful place now, for both of you. He doesn’t have to constantly hear his bride say cruel things about her body — similar to how God doesn’t like us to say mean things about ourselves, someone he cherishes and sees as a precious and flawless work of art.
Words that described your marriage when an eating disorder was a third member: fear, rigidity, obsession, pre-occupation, distracted, anger, disunity.
Words that describe your marriage once an eating disorder was given the boot: freedom, peace, joy, fun, lightness, adventure, flexibility, togetherness.
Do you remember the drive to your hometown? The topic of butter came up. It was Easter, and you were so excited to bring your hubby home for a holiday, something you dreamed of since you were a little girl. But, your eating disorder ruined that memory. Your fears over butter overcame you and a huge fight filled most of that two-hour drive home to your parents. Post-recovery, memories are not ruined because of food fears. No, food becomes a beautiful part of memories! You even take up baking sourdough and other specialty bread together! With all different types of flour, not just whole wheat, which was the only kind of flour you would dare use before.
Food used to tear you apart.
Now it brings you together in a fun couple’s hobby… just as God designed food to be: a gift to us with pleasurable nourishment but also a way to bond and enhance community over a shared need for food.