I sit down knowing there are decades of stories available to me—or what I’ll call decades of qualitative data for the haters*—and almost immediately, the details begin to blur. I become overwhelmed and often dissociate. This is why this blog has quite literally taken me three years to finish. It is still wildly incomplete, but with another fat liberation month passed, here it is anyway.

As a somatic practitioner and certified trauma professional, I know the forgetting as a protective response. My body and nervous system aren’t super keen on revisiting experiences that have hurt me since I was six years old, even when I know how important it is to recover out loud.

Do I begin:

A. At six, when food was a source of comfort during experiences of trauma and shame?**
B. At ten, when I was told during jump rope*** that I had a heavy frame and couldn’t perform with my friends because of my body shape?
C. At eleven, when I grew taller, and my best friend’s mother complimented me on my weight loss and told me how pretty I looked in my bathing suit?
D. At twelve, in front of a full classroom, when someone who I thought was my friend said that I had “more rolls than a bakery”?
E. In the same year, when I lost most of my friends because I was now labeled fat and unworthy of friendship?
F. At thirteen, when I was suspended for buying diet pills at school and not one adult stopped to ask why a child believed she needed them?
G. At fourteen, when I stopped eating lunch because I just wasn’t hungry (and believed it) and I started wearing strong perfume to cover up the acetone smell (ketones) seeping from my pores?
H. At fifteen, when rigorous training and dieting were strongly encouraged to improve athletic performance in a competitive sport?

In my twenties, my pursuit of wellness became textbook orthorexia.

I exercised relentlessly–often attending two rounds of hot yoga, playing hockey, and spending time in the gym per day. I became consumed by clean eating, and watched my list of what I considered safe foods become excruciatingly smaller. If I ate something and wasn’t certain of its ingredients, I purged. When my body eventually screamed for nourishment, I would binge as a survival response to the chronic restriction. My body needed calories. It was intelligent. Food is energy.

[Info dump: One of the strongest predictors of developing an eating disorder is dieting. Severe dieting during adolescence increases the likelihood of developing an eating disorder by 18 times. After adjustment for earlier dieting and psychiatric morbidity, BMI**** was not found to predict the development of an eating disorder.¹ Dieters have also been found to be two to three times more likely than non-dieters to develop binge-eating patterns.² The thing we prescribe to prevent fatness can become a pathway toward the very eating pathology we claim to be preventing.]

My life became smaller too. Food lost its pleasure. Eating lost its spontaneity. Movement was a form of punishment. I became increasingly disconnected from hunger and from my body.

That is one of the most difficult parts of my disordered eating history to reconcile. When my body looked closest to what our culture had conditioned me to believe it should be, I was very unwell, and nobody could see it because my illness was producing a socially desirable result.

People congratulated me. They asked what my secret was and treated my shrinking body as evidence of health. It was even seen as evidence of my recovery.

I have spent nearly two decades working and living in recovery, and early on I started noticing the same contradiction in the spaces where I worked. At a treatment center designed for addiction and eating disorder recovery, name-calling women in larger bodies was just a normal part of leadership’s vocabulary. I can still hear the nicknames ring through my ears to this day, like an insidious shame soundtrack.

I was the only one who would speak out against this behavior, so it went without consequence, and I became the scapegoat. Anyone who has been around the treatment world may recognize the scapegoating as a familiar feature of an addictive, dysfunctional family system.

I’d argue that much of the harm we associate with being fat comes not from fatness itself, but from the stigma, discrimination, and hatred directed towards people who live in larger bodies.

(And if you feel compelled to jump in here with obesity is the greatest public health crisis of our time, I invite you to notice how urgently you needed to defend the problem being fatness rather than the way we treat fat people. And if you can’t do that, here is your permission slip to stop reading this because it’s just going to get more uncomfortable for you from now on.)

We have been told fatness is an epidemic, a crisis, a ticking time bomb, the new smoking, a threat to our children, and a burden on our healthcare systems. We have declared war on obesity, and then somehow act surprised when the bodies we declare war on become collateral damage.

As I began recovering from orthorexia, I set out to do something that felt much scarier than following impossible restrictive food rules. I chose to eat food I feared and allow my body–and society–to respond however it wanted. I remember ordering fries with dinner and having a waiter ask me three times if I was sure I didn’t want a salad instead. My thin friend ordered the same meal without interrogation. This bias was something I faced regularly.

I read books by fat acceptance activists, educators, and authors such as Dr.Sabrina Strings, Aubrey Gordon, and Sonya Renee Taylor.***** I worked with a therapist and pursued education in food neutrality and eating disorders. I wrote and made art. I vented to people who had earned a right to hear my story.

I gave myself permission to dance EVEN IF people were watching. I practiced yoga for bigger bodies. I swam naked in the ocean. I focused equally on nourishment and pleasure with food. I moved my body for celebration, not punishment (which meant no more running. Sorry runners, but I have come to learn I only run when necessary for survival, like if I find myself running away from a predator. Otherwise, not fun and certainly not interested). I rode my motorbike, A LOT.

I left an abusive partner. I spent intentional, slow time in nature. I developed a new relationship to singing, a sacred practice where my body served as the vessel for the divine. I began to follow an earth-based tradition that wove social justice, feminism, community, care for the earth, and spirituality together…to name a few things.

Through my personal recovery process, I started exploring our need for collective recovery.

Dietitian Shana Minei Spence of The Nutrition Tea writes, “Purity culture, clean eating, and eugenics/white supremacy are all in the same Venn diagram.”

Everywhere you look in society, clean eating and healthy living are tangled up with race, class, culture, and access. I started to explore who has access to organic food, expensive supplements, boutique fitness classes, private practitioners, childcare, and time to meal prep, and whose traditional foods are erased when we label them dirty.

Food is nourishment, but it is also culture, memory, family, geography, survival, celebration, and belonging. When we strip all of that away and turn eating into an individual test of discipline, we’re no longer just talking about health. We’re talking about power.
Then, in January 2020, I went into labour and delivered my first son twenty-two weeks early. The birth was traumatic. I stayed overnight for monitoring and went home the next day.

After his passing, beyond the unbearable grief, I knew something was wrong. I was in significant pain, nauseated, still bleeding, and exhausted. I went to the hospital looking for help.

An ER obstetrician looked at my chart, looked at me, and he said, “Sick is sick, and you don’t look sick.”

I tried to explain that I have a lifelong tendency to minimize my symptoms and appear fine when I am not. I pleaded for help.

In the following weeks, I became increasingly unwell; it felt life-threatening.

I went back to emergency, and they discovered I had a serious infection that required emergency surgery.
My body had again been begging me to listen.

I had spent most of my life ignoring its cries–and allowing others responsible for my care to do the same–because of my weight.
While I don’t believe every harmful healthcare experience I’ve had can be reduced to anti-fat bias, I do know how it feels to seek medical care in a fat body and have your weight be scrutinized before the actual problem has even been acknowledged.

I remember my friend Bryn Meadows****** asking me once, “What if your body was never the problem, but the system that rewards your silence, shrinking, and shame is?”

(Aside: She also shared with me that fatphobia is actually very rare, because it is the literal fear of fat, as in being afraid that fat is going to come crawling out from under your bed in the night and hurl itself at you like a predatory animal.)

Her humour made visible to me the absurdity of treating fatness as the threat, rather than examining the very real systems that perpetuate bias, discrimination, and shame, and profit off of us staying small and sick.

I have held space for women recovering from substances, eating disorders, trauma, grief, codependency, burnout, perfectionism, and toxic relationships. I have sat alongside women in fat/thin/disabled/aging/postpartum/chronically ill/menopausal bodies. And I have seen the healing that can happen when someone is met with curiosity instead of judgment, and empathy instead of blame.

This is why the SHE RECOVERS commitment to food and body neutrality is both deeply personal and celebratory for me. My lived experience, recovery, and professional work have become inseparable from my advocacy for more inclusive recovery spaces. That work eventually included co-authoring the SHE RECOVERS Food & Body Neutrality Philosophy and Community Companion Guide—resources intended to move these values beyond good intentions and into how we actually practice recovery in community.

As a woman in a fat body recovered from orthorexia, I know what it feels like to enter a space wondering what your body implies about you before you ever open your mouth.

Fat liberation asks us to examine what happens to people as a result of the bodies they inhabit.

A. Who gets appropriate care?
B. Whose food choices get scrutinized?
C. Whose bodies are automatically celebrated?
D. Who gets to exist publicly without their body being treated as an invitation for commentary?

As I learned to nourish myself without trying to control the size of my body, my body became something I had been taught my entire life to fear.

To be clear, health isn’t a dirty word. I care deeply about my health. I want to nourish my body and move in ways that feel supportive.

I can care about nutrition without dividing food into virtue and sin. I can care about health without the pursuit of thinness. And I can believe deeply in health while knowing that people do not have to demonstrate that they are healthy enough to be worthy of fair treatment.

But living that belief out loud isn’t always easy. I have shared my recovery publicly and had my story met by strangers who insist that I must secretly eat myself sick every day out of self-loathing because I couldn’t possibly be well and occupy this body (my bloodwork is better than it’s ever been, so I have the receipts).

I have watched people celebrate their own wrinkled bodies in the name of body positivity while simultaneously pledging they will never become fat. I have heard people claim they just don’t get it when they’re asked to simply consider the harms people in larger bodies endure every day. I have even been told I am better off dead, more than once.

A beloved fellow traveller, Regan Spencer, once shared an image of recovery that I think of often–the body as the battleground left behind after a war.

Ending the addiction, eating disorder, or other harmful pattern may stop the fighting, but a ceasefire is not the same thing as restoring the land. The soil still needs nourishment. The damaged places need protection. New growth needs water, sunlight, patience, and time.

For most of my life, I believed my body needed another commander—someone stricter and more disciplined who could finally make it behave and fit into society’s standards of wellness.

Then I think about that kid buying diet pills in eighth grade.

Instead of asking her why, what hurt, or what she was taught to believe about herself, they punished the behaviour. But that was the tip of the iceberg; they completely missed the wreckage (read: trauma) hidden in the ice below and the chunks floating all around it (read: shitty society).

I think about how different things might have been if someone had helped her understand that food was not a moral issue, hunger was not a character defect, and her body was not a problem she should spend the rest of her life trying to solve.

I think about the middle school girl, whose friends, instead of speaking out against a bully body-shaming her, walked away because that was more comfortable than having courage.

Dr.Peter Levine talks about how it’s not always what happens to us that is traumatic, but the lack of empathic witness.
This is certainly true for me.

I can’t recall much of what it felt like to be verbally abused back then, but I will never forget how my heart raced, and my throat closed, and my eyes welled up with tears, and panic set in when my friends stayed silent.

I want recovery communities where we don’t hotwire connection over disparaging certain foods, hating our bodies, or congratulating weight loss. I want places where we center the most vulnerable and historically marginalized and believe in community care—spaces where we can feel a greater sense of belonging. A culture where we are so much more than just a body. A society where we are celebrated for who we are, not what we look like.

I am learning to become the keeper rather than the conqueror of my own body.

My body has comforted me, endured complicated pregnancies, survived grief and loss, been through illness, chronic pain, and years of my own distrust. It has experienced significant discrimination and hatred. It made me a mother. It carries me into places where women entrust me with their stories. It allows me to learn, teach, play, and recover.

I still have tough days. I can wake up and feel uncomfortable in my own skin before my feet have even hit the floor. Instead of feeding the gremlin that believes this discomfort says something about my value as a human being, I practice self-compassion. I send love to the tender places. I thank it for being. And when I can’t get there on my own, I have a community of people who I know will never tire of reminding me that I am worthy of love and belonging.

My body is my vehicle, my home, and the place where dreams are realized, and precious memories are made.

Maybe that is where I begin.

*People (often fatphobic, sexist, and misogynist men) who are so allergic to lived experience, de-centering themselves, listening to marginalized voices, and refraining from sharing their harmful opinions that they require a peer-reviewed citation to believe women.

**Coping by way of food can be a natural and adaptive response to trauma and distress—especially in adolescents whose resources and supports for coping with trauma may be extremely limited. When we experience a threat, our stress-response systems mobilize energy to help us survive. Food provides actual energy while also engaging neural systems involved in pleasure, reward, and emotional regulation. Sometimes reaching for food when we are overwhelmed is simply a body doing what bodies do: looking for energy, comfort, grounding and relief when something feels unbearable. That strategy can become less helpful when it becomes a way to avoid or numb emotions and sensations we don’t yet have the capacity or resources to face. But shame can turn a coping strategy into a false narrative about who we are—one that is reinforced by a culture that moralizes food, celebrates shrinking, and treats larger bodies as evidence of personal failure.

***Competitive jump ropers experience similar pressure to perform, disordered eating, and training as their gymnast counterparts.

****BMI (Body Mass Index): a nearly 200-year-old formula developed by an astronomer, mathematician, and statistician Adolphe Quetelet (not a doctor or healthcare professional). It was part of his attempt to mathematically document the average man. Developed from data drawn primarily from Western European male populations, it was used for insurance purposes, not to diagnose or measure a person’s health—much less a woman’s or people from other regions. And yet, it is still routinely used to do exactly that.

***** Honorable mention book I read last year: This is Body Grief™: Making Peace With the Loss That Comes With Living in a Body, by Jayne Mattingly

******Shoutout to amazing friends and mentors like Bryn Meadows, Seraphina Capranos, Suzanne Sterling, Melynda Johnson, Suzie Spitfyre, Lucy Price, and so many more who have guided my path and saved my life more than once.

¹ Patton, G C, R Selzer, C Coffey, J B Carlin, and R Wolfe. “Onset of Adolescent Eating Disorders: Population Based Cohort Study over 3 Years.” BMJ 318, no. 7186 (March 20, 1999): 765–68. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.318.7186.765.

² Goldschmidt, Andrea B., Melanie Wall, Katie A. Loth, Daniel Le Grange, and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer. 2012. “Which Dieters Are at Risk for the Onset of Binge Eating? A Prospective Study of Adolescents and Young Adults.” Journal of Adolescent Health 51 (1): 86–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2011.11.001.

About Lisa Wall

Mission Programs & Community Care, SHE RECOVERS Foundation

Lisa Wall is a certified trauma professional, somatic practitioner, educator, and SHE RECOVERS Coach with additional training in addiction medicine, sound healing, circadian biology, intimacy education, and herbalism.