Article 6PCVV After 30 years of dieting I was exhausted. So I started to ask: what if I stopped? | Jason Prokowiew

After 30 years of dieting I was exhausted. So I started to ask: what if I stopped? | Jason Prokowiew

by
Jason Prokowiew
from US news | The Guardian on (#6PCVV)

My childhood bullies instilled in me a hatred of my body. Now I hear the word fat' as a neutral term rather than a label of shame

Two years ago, in a session with my therapist, I suddenly found myself saying, I want to talk about my relationship to my body sometime." Just saying that one sentence out loud was all I could muster that day, and had taken me decades to get to that point.

My first real awareness of my body started when I was around eight years old in the hallways of my grammar school in suburban Boston. As I cycled my bike over mounds of dirt in the woods behind my house, and flew around the corners of a roller rink on a Thursday night as Michael Jackson tunes blared, I was blissfully unaware that my body was being judged and seen as wrong.

Jason Prokowiew is a writer and author of War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir

In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD's eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading...
External Content
Source RSS or Atom Feed
Feed Location http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/rss
Feed Title US news | The Guardian
Feed Link https://www.theguardian.com/us-news
Feed Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2024
Reply 0 comments