‘It took time to love my soft, larger shape’: the body-positive writer who recovered from an eating disorder | Body image

Mr.Egan Jayne Crabbe’s transformation goes beyond the physical. “My ‘before’ was trying to make me as small as possible in every way imaginable: my body, my voice, my emotions, my opinions,” she says. “My ‘after’ is allowing myself to be my greatest self, whatever that looks like. »

Crabbe, 31, became aware of dieting before he was 10 years old. As she entered puberty, puberty intensified and she became obsessed with magazine articles about how to change her body, eating as little as possible to deal with anxiety about school and growing up.

At 14, Crabbe was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphia: “I was convinced I was fat and disgusting and needed to lose more weight. » For years, she hid her condition, until the physical symptoms became impossible to ignore. His body began to shut down – severe fatigue, low blood pressure, hearing loss and dizziness: “There’s hair growing all over your body, because they’re trying to keep warm.

She spent several months between psychiatric facilities and the hospital. At her lowest point, after her parents were warned that her body could fail at any moment, she was hospitalized and fed through a tube. “In this day and age when your eating disorder is telling you, ‘You need to be in control,’ having that taken away is torture.”

The first step toward recovery came when her usually stoic father burst into tears. “Seeing the pain my eating disorder had caused him was a huge shock to me,” she says. She committed to recovery with the same “all or nothing” mindset that had once fueled her anorexia. “I covered all the mirrors in the house because I didn’t want to see my body change and I couldn’t eat in front of other people yet, but I ate my meals alone.”

At age 17, she was declared recovered. “It’s not,” she said. “I was thrown back into the world in this new, softer, bigger body, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I fell right back into the trap of diet culture.”

The turning point came at age 21. “I had been dieting heavily all summer, I had reached my elusive goal weight and I still hated everything about my appearance. Something started clicking in my brain saying, ‘Wait, this isn’t working.’

She discovered the Body Positive online community – “People of all shapes and sizes saying: I’m not dieting, I don’t hate my body, I wear what I want, I live my life” – and a decade later, she is one of its leading voices. She is seen smiling in a swimsuit in Little Mix’s Strip video, celebrating the softness of her body on Instagram and has written books about empowerment. Getting here required reshaping her cultural environment: setting boundaries with friends who talked about weight loss, disengaging from shame-triggering influencers, and reading books such as The Beauty Myth and Health at Every Size.

“I began to realize that the problem wasn’t me. The problem was how we were taught to see ourselves.” Reconnecting with your body has become essential to healing: relearning the signals of hunger and satiety and moving for pleasure. “My eating disorder years, I was trying to detach myself from my body and not feel anything. And now the goal is to be with my body and listen to it.

“If I look at my ancestors, this is the body they had. I’m strong. I’m fit. I can do anything I want, and I can also enjoy food as an enjoyable part of my life that I don’t obsess over.”