The Beginning of Depression

“I said to my body, softly:’I want to be your friend’.

It took a long breath and replied: I have been

Waiting my whole life for this.”

Nayyirah Waheed

I grew up with women everywhere in my life. My mother, my grandmothers, auntys and cousins.  Just women everywhere.  What I did not realise at the time, but realise now, is that none of these women – who I love dearly – actually liked their bodies.  As a young girl, this has a very profound effect on me.  You see, every time one of these women complained about how they hated their thighs or they had to lose weight or compared themselves negatively to someone else, it reinforced a notion that in order to be beautiful I had to be thin.  Or, in order to love and appreciate my body, I had to look a certain way.

Without knowing it, the actions of the women in my life were causing me to obsess about my size and to find fault with my body.  It is no wonder growing up I hated the way I looked.  I was merely copying the example of everyone I knew and admired.

What about you?  How many women do you know who really love their body?  My guess is not may.  Sadly, this is the case for most women.

Now here is an even scarier question.  How many of you, through your actions and words about your body, are negatively impacting the women and girls you interact with?  Perhaps your daughters, your nieces, your friends?  Is your example teaching them that the only way they can be happy about their body is if they are thin?

Even if you are doing a good job for those around you.  They are bombarded with hundreds and thousands of images every single day on television, magazines and on social media that associate beauty, wealth, fame, popularity and even intelligence with how you look.  It is almost impossible to find anyone or anything that is not reinforcing the idea that to succeed in life you have be thin.

For me, this barrage of outside negative influence started when I was about 11 years old.  Like many young girls, as I hit puberty my thighs and hips started to grow and this was really upsetting for me.  To complicate things, being a teenager in the ‘80s I was exposed to the likes of MTV and fashion magazines and I remember looking at these women on TV and these magazines and recognizing that my body was different to theirs.  This really bothered me.

In fact, I was angry with my appearance and hated looking at myself in the mirror.  I would verbally reprimand myself for being what I considered to be disgusting and fat.  Truth is, I wasn’t either!

Like most young girls and most women, I constantly compared myself to others and the images I was being exposed to all the time. It didn’t matter what I actually looked like because in my mind I wasn’t good enough.  As women that is part of our dysfunction.  We are never satisfied!  We never think we are enough!

“It is almost impossible to find anyone or anything that is not reinforcing the idea that to succeed in life you have to be thin.”

Here is where my story took a tragic turn.  At this delicate age of eleven years old, I watched a movie about a girl who suffered from bulimia.  At the end of the movie this girl actually died.  However, as much as I believe the producers of this movie were trying to expose the dangers of eating disorders, that is not what I took from watching it.  Instead, I found myself saying, “Oh! That’s the secret.  I can eat whatever I want because I can just throw it up afterwards.”  So, at around 12 or 13 years old I started making myself throw up.  And when I felt that wasn’t working as I still felt too fat, I started skipping meals.  There were times I couldn’t make myself throw up so I later found out that there is a tea I can drink that would help with this, which was truly vile.  It made me throw up and gave me severe tummy cramps and diarrhoea. All of which did not stop me from using it.  Just made me make this part of my routine to manage my weight.  I was just so determined to get thin that I was willing to do anything.

My life as a sports woman

A couple of years into my unhealthy eating behaviour, I developed an obsession with working out.  I played high school hockey.  I joined a club swimming team as well as the school swimming team.  I played soccer, tennis and I even tried long distance marathons.  I completely immersed myself in everything fitness and it felt like the perfect fit.  Here is the not so perfect part…

Between training formal competition and scheduled matches, my eating habits did not get any healthier, which quite naturally resulting in me always being sick or week and always having fainting spells.

By my twenties I had gone from one fad diet after the other.  Everyone thought I had it all figured out.  No-one knew my dirty little secret that between aggressive fitness training I would binge on fast food and then purge.  It was such a lie!  The truth was that I was abusing my body on multiple levels.  From what I was eating and then either throwing up or shitting it out – to how I was abusing myself through exercise.  And perhaps the worst form of abuse was how I talked to myself and beat myself up inside my head.

As I look back, I recognise that I had never been given the tools on how to manage my inner world.  My thoughts, emotions, desires, fears.  No one ever teaches you how to deal with that kind of stuff.  Yet your inner world contributes more to your overall health and can bring out a level of hatred and insecurities perhaps more than anything else.

For me, my inner-dialogue was so negative and so destructive that I had completely convinced myself that I was worthless.  I was living and working in Cape  Town and I was constantly comparing myself with everyone else.  Telling myself how inferior I was.  This self-loathing and desperation to look a certain way even led me to an unloving marriage.  And this relationship was not any better as he also constantly bombarded me with what I was eating, how I looked and pointed out all my imperfections.

To put it mildly, my life was a total mess.  I was working seventy hours a week, abusing myself on all levels – and yet nobody knew it.  That’s because I knew how to mask what was really going on.  Most of us can do that right?  We put on masks to convince the world that we are fine when in reality, we’re hurting.

While you may not suffer from extreme depression and negative self-loathing like I did, I will bet you have struggled with dieting, exercising and body image at some point in your life.  In fact, for most of the women I talk to, this is a daily struggle.

We haven’t figured out an effective way to be healthy.  We continue to punish our bodies through excessive exercise, crazy dieting and negative talk.  Or, we just give up and we stop moving our bodies entirely.  Then, we overeat or eat things that don’t make us feel our best.  We allow negative thoughts to dominate our internal conversations.  We forget how special and unique we are.  We put our needs on the back burner to everyone else’s.  We lose hope.

That was my life for longer than I’d like to think about – but then I had my awakening and things very quickly took an amazing turn.

I hope my story connects and helps you on your own journey to good mental health. Until next time, Coach Rehana.