Content Warning: This post talks about diets, diet culture, and includes numbers associated with weight.
I know it’s been a while since I wrote a blog, but 2020 definitely got the best of me these last few months. And fun fact, just as I started writing this, the power went out. But that’s just 2020, right?
On top of it just being 2020, even just thinking about writing this blog made me anxious, because this diet was one of the worst ones I have ever tried and I felt the absolute worst. It was a diet that caused me to have the worst relationship I have ever had with the scale—not that I have ever had a good one until me and the scale broke up earlier this year. It was so hard to get myself to think about and write about that time. But it’s time.
I don’t remember what year it was but I was probably a junior or senior in high school at the time. After going to the doctor (this deserves a whole other series of its own) for an annual visit, the doctor told me that I needed to lose weight and he gave me a tip about how I could do so. He said that if I got hungry at night, I should just eat cabbage with lemon. This had worked for him to lose weight, and that I should do the same.
Being worried about my weight, I decided that I would eat 1000 calories a day, work out twice a day, and if I was hungry, I would eat cabbage. I stepped on the scale and saw a number that I did not like. I was determined to lose weight and hoped to see a number that I would like when I was done with this diet. Although, now that I think about it, I don’t think I have ever seen a number on the scale that I did like . . . but this again, is just another stray thought to think about (and maybe blog about) at a later time. My mind really wants to think about everything but this right now—and can’t say I blame it.
So I set out to start this new diet. For breakfast, I had a cup of cereal with skim milk, for lunch a cup noodle soup, and for dinner, grilled chicken with vegetables or a salad. I also worked out twice a day by jogging outside. At night, when I inevitably got hungry, I would eat raw cabbage with lemon juice. I did this for a few weeks before I just couldn’t anymore.
Even worse than my super restrictive eating and forcing myself to exercise twice a day, was my obsession with the scale. Throughout the time I did this awful diet, I weighed myself multiple times a day. If I got on the scale in the evening and had not lost at least one pound from the morning, I would cry. If I woke up the next day and hadn’t lost at least one to two pounds from the day before, I would cry. I felt like a failure if I hadn’t and I would exercise more and harder.
All of this at an attempt to be what doctors and others called healthy. While if you asked me back then I would have probably said what I was doing was to try to achieve health—there was absolutely nothing healthy about what I was doing. Not only was my body suffering, my mind was suffering too. The scale determined how each day and each night were. It determined if I was happy or sad, if I was a success or a failure.
A few weeks later, I just could not do it anymore. It was mentally and physically draining. While I had lost some weight during those few weeks, I gained every ounce back, and more—that’s just how that goes. Another failed diet cycle. As always, I did not think to myself—these diets don’t work. Instead, I thought I was a failure.
Thinking back to this now, I wish I could let my high school aged self know that I was not the problem—the restrictive, unsustainable diet was.