Anxiety. Addiction. Shame. Going on a juice cleanse to detox your body is easy, but what happens when you try to rid your life of bigger, badder influences? Three women tell us their stories…
Anxiety. Addiction. Shame. Going on a juice cleanse to detox your body is easy, but what happens when you try to rid your life of bigger, badder influences? Three women tell us their stories…
“I tend to have very extreme reactions to things, so when I first discovered online shopping in JC, I was hooked. I had about $2,000 (thanks to Chinese New Year!) in my account, and everything was gone within two months. And I was spending on things I did not need – I’d start with dresses, and then things started adding up; after dresses, it was pants, and then I had to get tops, and then I had no accessories… and it just went on and on and on…
One day, I was trying to buy food at McDonald’s. It was a $5 meal, but the cashier told me I didn’t have money in my account to pay for it. And I was just like, ‘What?’ That was the first slap in the face. But my online shopping addiction continued to be a bad habit for maybe two to three years more. I took on part-time jobs, but there was never any savings. I would work and, within a couple of weeks, I couldn’t buy myself food anymore.
Eventually, I just came to the realisation that this was an issue that I had to seriously deal with, so I started taking active steps to get over it. I created an Excel sheet, which I still use today, to track my daily expenses. The other thing I did was open a second bank account, which is my savings account. And I refused to get an ATM card for it. I could only access it via Internet Banking, so it would take more effort to access the money.
I also deleted all the newsletters from online retailers, unsubscribed to them, deleted their bookmarks and stopped following them on Instagram – because, I figured, if I don’t see a new thing to buy, I won’t think about it.
And if I ever thought about buying stuff online, I forced myself to go through additional steps to block the final purchase. For example, I have to check my budget first – I only put aside $100 each month now for shopping. Then I’ll ask myself, “Do I really need this or do I just want this?” And before I click “buy”, I’ll close everything. If I’m still thinking about it a week later, then maybe I’ll buy it. These kinds of checks help.
My sister also said something that kind of struck me. She told me, “It’s just stuff.” And it gave me another test for myself as well, which is – if I lose this stuff, would I really care? Does it actually mean a lot to me, and would it add value to my life? And when I do this test on individual items, I realise, no… not really.
I also enacted a “zero consumption” rule about two years ago – whenever I buy something, I have to throw something out. So it’s replacement, rather than addition.
Shopping online also takes a lot of time, and when I stopped, I decided to channel my time into more productive things. I asked myself, what do you want in the short-term, versus the long-term? Do I want to consume, or do I want to add value to the world? So I decided to channel these energies into creating. I have a travel blog (soniamao. com), so instead of spending two hours browsing online, I’ll try to write. I save up for travelling, and ever since I started university, I also stopped taking money from my parents. So that helped me realise that my resources can be used in better ways than getting a nice pair of shoes… even though I really like shoes.”
Sonia is now a seller on Carousell (@sonia.mao), and organises flea markets where vintage and pre-loved items can find new homes. Find out more at facebook.com/2ndchancesmarket.
How does a recovered anorexic/bulimic go from starving herself to becoming a fitness and bodybuilding enthusiast? For Joanna, the answer was in letting go of what other people thought of her, and taking ownership of her choices.
“One day, when I was feeling depressed, I was at home after having a full meal. I remembered a girl who told me that sometimes she threw up after eating. I was feeling really full, to the point of being uncomfortable, so I decided to try it. After that, it became a habit. And then the habit became an addiction.
It continued on and off, then when I was 20, around Christmas, I decided I was really tired of being bulimic, and maybe I should just stop eating. One day, I decided to skip a meal and just have an apple; I thought it wouldn’t be that bad. But one day became three days and eventually, I started incorporating extreme cardio exercises into my workout regime, like swimming 50 laps, followed by 45 minutes on the treadmill. And to fuel all that, maybe I’d just have a banana.
I knew I was unhealthy. But in my head, skinny was good. After polytechnic, I started working. But it was hard to conceal the fact that I wasn’t eating much, so I eventually just sunk back into my bulimia. But at the end of last year, I went through a breakup that devastated me. It could have sent me back into depression, but that’s when things started to change.
I started going to this new gym at Nex called Anytime Fitness, and I was also following quite a few people from the gym community on Instagram. After a while, I realised I could use my Instagram to talk about my past.
I found that it was a very positive place for me. [For instance,] I decided to schedule a workout session with a fellow Instagrammer on New Year’s Day, and after that, things just started getting better. I really liked hanging out in the gym and making friends with all the trainers, and I felt like I had found a whole new family.
I used to have an unhealthy weight loss goal, but now I plan my diet based on complementing my workouts and building a lean, muscular physique. I know that if I’m serious about bodybuilding, I can’t waste all the effort I put in. I used to train in the past, but my diet screwed it up. I have to maintain a proper diet, and that means eating enough.
Today, I think nutrition is not just about counting calories, or cutting out carbs or fats. It can even be about putting on weight. Many people think that if I say I’m on a diet it just means salads. That’s absolutely wrong!
I also know that there are better ways of dealing with my feelings, instead of just turning to food. When I realise that I’m thinking negatively, I tell myself, ‘OK, you have to stop’. Now, if I feel bad, I’ll wait on the feeling. In the past, that self-awareness was almost non-existent.
But the biggest change wasn’t physical; it was mental. I don’t obsess over food anymore. Like any other girl or bodybuilder, I may look at myself and think [what I see] is bad, but I think what I have now is the ability to recognise what is an eating disorder and what is a natural person’s worry about getting fat. Telling the difference is how I prevent my ‘eating disorder thoughts’ from controlling me.
Recently, there’s been a lot of selfrealisation in terms of understanding why I think or feel a certain way, and I feel a greater sense of independence as a person. In the past, I was more submissive and non-confrontational, and whatever decisions I made had to be agreeable to everybody. But in order to take ownership of myself, that unhealthy mindset just had to go. At the end of the day, you can’t please everybody – it’s just draining.
But I think no one can make you do that. It has to be your decision. Sometimes, I still worry what other people think but then I realise that it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to enslave myself to what other people think of me. I’ll never find happiness like that, and I just want to be happy.”
Follow Joanna’s fitness journey on her Instagram, @jojoxoxo.
As a plus-size fashion blogger and We Can! Change Maker, Aarti, 33, speaks up for embracing beauty, no matter what size it comes in. But after a lifetime of being taught to hate her body, learning to accept her curves wasn’t easy.
“Asia is not a kind place for plus-sized girls. You go to a mall and someone smiles at you and hands you a brochure on why you should lose weight. Or you walk into a store and the first thing the assistant tells you is, ‘There is nothing in your size.’ The night of my 30th birthday, a husband pointed at me and told his wife, “See? You’re not that fat.”
I was actually very skinny as a kid, but my doctor told my parents, ‘She’s malnutritioned, you’ve got to fatten her up’. That’s when it started. My parents introduced me to fast food, and also put me on an appetite-increasing supplement, so my metabolism slowed down and my appetite bottomed out, meaning it has trouble telling me when I’ve had enough.
So I was a skinny, athletic kid, and then I became dumpy and out of breath. I didn’t know what to do with my body, and neither did my parents. They didn’t expect a drastic change, and that’s when the fat-shaming started.
I know it wasn’t my fault but I took it upon myself because I was a kid. I would allow myself one meal a day and do PE lessons in school, plus around two hours of cardio each day, without fail. It got worse when I was 15. There was a lot of strife at home and I needed to fill this void, so that’s when I started binge-eating and purging, and I became a bulimic.
The void still did not leave, and by 16, I had completely given up hope on myself. I started overeating and ate through my depression. As I got older, I would do a lot of fad diets – the cabbage soup diet, the Long Beach diet, meal replacements… And throughout this time, there was constant shaming. But it didn’t really seem to matter whether I was slimmer or fatter; it just never seemed like I was enough.
On my 30th birthday, I felt my worst. I felt that something needed to change, and I knew the biggest change I could bring about was how I looked at myself. Because, despite being well-educated and confident on the outside, I suffered. I had social anxiety and depression. That’s when I started reading a lot of body positive blogs and really tried to understand how I could embrace myself.
For a long time, I really struggled because I assumed I should be thinking about losing weight instead of staying the size I was at. Which is why I went through my yo-yo weight cycles – I would lose all that weight, and then I’d get angry and wonder, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I pleasing my parents, my friends, or boyfriend, just so I can be accepted? Why can’t they just be happy that I’m here, and basically accept me for who I am?’
So I finally decided that I was not going to lose the weight. Was I exercising more? Yes. But I was learning to tell myself that fitness was something to have fun with, not obsess over. Beating myself up over my weight [never] helped. I had to take a step back and reframe all those beliefs – ‘If you’re fat you won’t be loved. If you’re too tall or too skinny, men won’t find you attractive.’
Ultimately, a lot of it boiled down to the need to please other people – and I had to give that up. It’s not an instant thing. It’s a constant road to selfimprovement, but I was not going to change the way that my body was for anyone else.
Since then, there’s been a lot of healing. And I think a breakthrough moment happened in my sixth month of starting my blog (curvesbecomeher. wordpress.com). I started doing these body positive workshops run by another blogger, which made me delve deep into how I felt about different body parts. It wasn’t something I had done before, but she wanted us to talk about how we appreciated that body part, how it kept going through the years, and how it sustained us – how it’s more than just another flabby body part that’s just an eyesore. And that really made a change. Looking at my body beyond the skin – the dimpled thighs, the cellulite – it made me realise that it really isn’t about that. It’s not about the skin, it’s about how I value myself.”
We Can! Singapore is a campaign that works to end all forms of gender violence by empowering individual Change Makers and allies. Find out more at wecansingapore.com.
