Many of the people consulting me in my counselling practice these days are struggling with their relationship with their body. What I’ve come to realize is that my work is rarely about food, weight, or even how their bodies look. More often, it’s about the practices that disordered eating recruits into a person’s life: restricting food, over-exercising, bingeing, purging, counting calories, compulsively checking labels, walking to burn calories, or mentally dividing the body into parts to be criticized, monitored, and fixed. Over time, these practices begin to organize a person’s attention, decisions, and daily life in ways that often go unnoticed by everyone else.

The women that I meet their bodies come in all shapes as sizes. Not all of these women would meet the DSM-V-TR criteria for disordered eating though some do. If they were in a police line up they likely wouldn’t be picked out in repsonse to the question- “Which of these women struggles with disordered eating”? Because here’s the thing, the size and shape of a women body can not accurately describe or define the relationship that she has with her body and food or the amount of time and space the person spends thinking about food.

What most people don’t see is the thinking. The thing that all of these women I work with have in common is the amount of time, space, and energy that thinking about food, exercise thinking, calorie in calorie out thinking takes up in their daily lives.

They don’t hear the calculations happening before breakfast. They don’t hear the negotiations about lunch, the rehearsals for dinner, the bargaining over whether a walk “counts,” or the relief that comes from reaching an arbitrary step goal. They don’t hear disordered eating’s constant commentary about whether their body is acceptable, whether someone else is noticing, or whether enough time has passed, exercise has happened or enough has been done to deserve the next meal.

That thinking is invisible. And it is exhausting.

Disordered eating becomes so convincing that people can vividly imagine what others must be thinking. So much that they can list in detail the disgust that strangers experience because of the shape of their body, the size of their body, and the food intake. One woman once described not wanting to eat in front of people as she imagines them thinking “She is so fat, why is she eating that?” Another woman described in exact detail the specific parts of her body that strangers, people passing by would be most disgusted by. Disordered eatings voice mainly only speaks in negative judgement negative comments, harsh criticism.

That thinking is invisible. But its costs are not.

When so much of your attention is occupied by food, exercise, and your body, there is inevitably less attention available for the rest of your life. The invisible part that most folks don’t see is that disordered eating robs people of their attention to the beauty of the world around them. They enter a world in which body shape and size, calories in calories out becomes all consuming, a never ending pursuit to achieve a bodily ideal determined by someone else, in the attempt to be seen as good enough, to fit in, in the hopes of one day resting. But the bar always moves and the relief that is promised never comes.

As you read this, you might start noticing. Not just in others, but in yourself. How food, your body, or exercise tries to organize your days. The way it whispers about what you deserve, what you’ve earned, what makes you acceptable.

Consider these questions:

This essay is intended for education and reflection and is not a substitute for mental health care. If reading this brought up concerns about your relationship with food or your body, consider reaching out to a qualified healthcare professional or eating disorder service in your area. *The image is from Fat Panic! https://reelcauses.org/fat-panic/