“Some people say anorexia never goes away. It just stays with you. I guess that’s true. I’ve just learned how to restrict it’s thoughts instead of food. My name is Genevieve and this is a short excerpt of my experience with wellness.”
Growing up as mixed race kid, I found myself subjected to so much bullying. I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. I thought that if I made myself thinner, I’d be accepted. I subscribed to this version of wellness/health we see around us.
Today we are too busy chasing happiness and health, with endless cardio, pumping weights, work, obsessing over the latest diet, constantly restricting and depriving ourselves of things that bring us joy, in the name of discipline. And instead of getting peak wellness, we get peak exhaustion. This very state of exhaustion has become a status symbol. This whole emaciated ripped look, adorned, revered.
Is it burnout or is it depression? Either way, restricting and depriving ourselves will only reduce our energy. Without enough energy, it becomes hard to be rational about how unhealthy and disordered this way of living is, and so the ‘wellness’ cycle continues.
In my recovery with anorexia, a push and pull struggle that has lasted 15+ years, I kept trying to find the answers in diet and exercise. I played it by the rules, counted calories, meal prepped, you name it, I did it. But none of this really helped me. Instead of reconciling with my culture and my identity, I was making myself smaller.
With the help of years of professional counselling, I’ve learned that food is about love and culture. I remember my mom cooking for me and me refusing to eat, although I was dangerously underweight. Mom would cry, “I’m not trying to kill you.” Hers wasn’t the last heart I broke from anorexia, but I’d swear it would be the last.
Contrary to popular belief, diet and exercise isn’t the cure for all that ails you. At least for me, it was getting back in touch with my culture, through connecting with family and visiting cultural museums. I learned about my mom’s struggle as a refugee person in war torn Vietnam. There were no diets back then, there was just survival. Thinness wasn’t a sign of success, but rather a sign of malnourishment and poverty. Food was seen as hope and a means to build a new life away from destitution.
We can’t erase the past and the trauma, but by eating enough, I give myself and my mom a chance to have a better future, every single day. Food may not have any nutritional value, but it’s true value comes from the memories and traditions entangled within them. The stories they tell and the wonders they continue to inspire…
My weight, not merely a number anymore, but a telling sign of how much I am loved and how much I am able to give love, not just to myself, but to others. For me, I need to eat enough to get my mind off food and more towards giving myself energy to live and live to be a crux of support to those I love. For me, this will always be more important than being thin. And the less you focus on weight, the more you’re able to see what life is about, until eventually, you are too busy enjoying life to care what others think of your weight as well.
Life is final. Yet we spend all this time chasing wellness, when we forget who made us well in the first place and who will continue to make us well. This extreme individualism is leaving us vacuous. Once we have those chiseled abs, what do we have other than that? (Were those two gym sessions a day worth it when we barely have seen a friend/family member in weeks?)
We need each other. Yet choose compulsive exercise and restrictive eating over a good meal together. The notion of wellness takes us away from looking after each other and in turn, ourselves.
In the past, whole villages survived, because everyone made a contribution. As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child.” It wasn’t a matter of survival of the fittest, but rather a case of survival of the kindest. This is what we need more of, not more “wellness,” and certainly not a “wellness barbie”.
This very version of wellness we see, all over social media wellness, rarely, if ever, is wellness. True wellness is looking after ourselves, but not to the point where we don’t have energy to look after each other. True wellness is understanding that to be well, we need to look after each other. Humans are a social being and WE cannot have WEllness without each other.
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