It's time for honesty

Lack of honesty is one of the pillars supporting disordered eating.

Disordered eating, ranging from starving yourself to binging and purging to the simple guilt that accompanies an enormous piece of rich, gooey chocolate cake, is something I think most men and women have danced with at least once in their lives.

Accordingly, fostering honesty can slowly starve disordered eating habits until they shrink and wither into bittersweet nothingness.

I started this blog in an attempt to finally bring that honesty and clarity and integrity into my relationships, especially my relationship with my body and my food.

It's time to be honest.

Dishonesty, or simple ignoring of the truth, becomes a habit very quickly and can have overwhelming consequences for the way we eat and the way we see ourselves.

So here’s the honest truth.

I’m not honest with my emotions.  I turn to food when I’m upset and ignore the feelings behind it. Hey, it’s easier to eat cheesecake than confront sadness or loneliness or anger. I then blame my body for its unnatural hunger and completely forget that I was the one that forced it to eat in the first place.

I’m not honest with my body, and, more importantly, I don’t let my body be honest with me. I don’t listen when it’s hungry, and I ignore it when it says it’s tired.  It tries to tell me that it doesn’t really want a sandwich and that I’m actually just bored, but I respond by telling my body it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Worst of all, I tell my body it’s not good enough even though I know it’s doing the best it can.

I’m not honest with my goals. I resolve to gym like a madwoman all week, and then each evening I come up with a different, equally dishonest excuse: I didn’t sleep well last night, I have cell group at 19h00, I need to iron my scrubs. I want to lose weight, yet I avoid my scale as if it were a Bengal tiger. I want to drink more water, yet uncannily forget my water bottle at home. I’m hiding from the truth of whether the goals I set are reasonable, the truth of why I find myself unable to achieve them, and the truth of why I am setting those goals in the first place. If you are constantly setting goals that you constantly fail to reach, a lie is happening somewhere.

I’m not honest with the people around me. I tell them I’m fine, I pretend I’m ok, I laugh about how my pants are gradually getting tighter; whilst beneath the surface I calculate kilojoules and hate myself for not going running more often. Disordered eating, from comfort eating to denying your body what it needs, shrivels in sunlight. Exposing what is going on in your head, allowing others to look at it, will cause it to perish.

This post was difficult to write, because quite frankly, it was honest. But as I said, that is the very reason I am here.