TW - talk about EDs
So it’s currently 23:15 on a Saturday where I live and I (17 f) was going down the Luke Narwhal rabbit hole as one typically does when trying to stay motivated. As I was getting sucked in, I came across a video titled, “Short Women, Don’t Starve Yourself For Weight Loss,” And just for the lols I clicked on it.
Now you might be wondering, why just for the “lols” you say? Well you see, I am a bit over 5’9 (pretty tall for a girl) so none of the advice would really apply to me I guess. Within the first minute of the video, a 5’2 women says that short women should not be eating 1200 calories a day as it is not sustainable.
Huh, that’s so weird, because 1200 calories is exactly what my dietitian told me to eat... wtf.
For some background info, I was pretty overweight as a kid and in 6th grade I started gymnastics and therefore started losing weight. Around halfway through 9th grade I quit gymnastics because I stopped winning competitions (petty, I know, but I liked the medals, what can I say). This was also around the time when I started hanging out with the wrong crowd and was binge eating every day. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I gained more than 20 kg. When lock down started (in April I think) I realised that I should probably start doing something about this, so I did extensive research, found Luke Narwhal on YouTube and by October, I lost 10 kg.
But as we all know, after a while, it gets hard to keep going so after a lot of begging, my mom booked me a dietitian appointment in the beginning of December. When I went to the appointment, I realised that I had gained 4 kg during the exam season (I struggle a lot with eating out of boredom) and I was super grateful that I was finally going to have a plan to stick to!
During my first appointment, she asks me pretty basic questions like what I normally eat in a day and if I do any exercise. I told her what I ate in a day pre-exam season and that I started doing gymnastics again in August. With this in mind she gave me a basic outline of what my meal plan would look like, a nice breakfast with a hearty lunch and dinner and even three snacks in between. I booked an appointment for next week and left there with a twinkle in my eyes and a spring in my step.
So the next week I go to the appointment expecting a meal plan around 1800-2000 calories as I was actually eating more than that while I initially lost weight (and I know that this was fat-loss and not just water weight because I weigh myself on a special scale). I get the meal plan and I was immediately confused. Was there a back page that I was missing or something? Meanwhile this lady is going through the plan like she really did something for the good of humanity and I was trying to figure out if I was at the dietitian or the DIEtitian. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she had the audacity to assign me 1200 calories a day (some days a bit more, and some days even less).
Now I know what you might be thinking. She’s a registered dietitian, there’s no way she would give you so few calories without a reason, you probably just had literally no muscle or something. Fair enough, but you would be dreadfully wrong because underneath all that fat, I was totally ripped. I was at 39 kg + of muscle at that point and my BMR was 1824, so if I was just lying down and breathing at that point, she was putting me at a 600kcal deficit.
I went home and I was mad. My sister, who is also very informed about CICO and weight loss methods, agreed that this was just not right. But then came my mom. You see, my mom studied medicine so obviously she should have some type of understanding that sufficient calories = survival. But no, she actually agreed with the dietician, it even got to the point where she got mad at me for getting mad at the dietitian (to be fair, I was pretty harsh, I sounded like someone from the 18th century with the way I was putting this women down - okay, not that harsh, but you get the idea). So I thought okay, I can either listen to the 100s of people on the internet who say that this is wrong and unsustainable, or two women with degrees who should actually be informed on this decision. So I went with neither.
A quick reminder that I started with her in December and December is a difficult month because it has my birthday, Christmas and New Years. So I went a bit overboard (if I had to guess around 2000-2400 calories a day) for the week between Christmas and New Years ( I was actually able to restrain myself in my birthday - small victories :)). But after that, the only thing I could think of was my upcoming dietitian appointment. I started off by saying that I would just stick to the plan for that week and all should be fine, but a voice in the back of my head told me that I needed to ~restrict~ or else I wouldn’t have lost any weight and everyone would be mad at me and see me as the failure that I am. So 900 calories a day it was. And surprise-surprise, it worked! But not in the way I was hoping.
When I got back on to that dreaded scale, I saw that I lost 7 kg over December. But only 2.5 kg was fat? I lost more than 3 kg of muscle and the rest was water weight. Anyway, this woman was over the freaking moon with me and she just kept congratulating me and telling me how I lost “5 blocks of butter” in fat. But I didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything. In fact, at that point I was ready to just stay fat because I knew, right then and there that she was all about the numbers and she didn’t give a swag about how I got there. I felt trapped and in that moment, I knew that that was just how it was going to be from now on. I would continue to go overboard for a few days and then starve myself in the week before I went.
Eventually I started thinking that if I could just starve myself every day for the entire month before the appointment, I would reach my goal much faster. It got to the point where I couldn’t even do my two hours of gymnastics a day because I just didn’t have energy. My friends there started getting really concerned for me because I would have to sit out after an hour or I would just get really really pale and dizzy but I would just keep going because hey, more practice, more calories burned right? Even my friends at school noticed because I looked like a sick person and I was depressed as hell and I could genuinely barely function anymore. The worst it got was when I would stop eating completely for two days and then just binge on everything I saw the third day, sometimes I would purge as well. Needless to say, I lost more muscle than fat using this method and my mom allowed me to stop seeing her (even though she doesn’t know how bad things really got, nobody does, but she isn’t blind).
I had to stop going to gymnastics again and right now I’m working in fixing my relationship with food and regaining my muscle to be the tank that I once was. A huge thank you to Caroline Girvan, I would highly recommend her channel to anyone because with her it’s not about looking a certain way, but rather feeling good and doing your best - she also kicks my butt (try the Epic 1 challenge, the first week had me dead).
(Please excuse my French in the following paragraph)
I don’t know what this lady’s issue was. I mean, this is such a mind-fuck to me. What the actual FUCK was she thinking telling a teenage girl to eat 1200 calories? You know who else eats 1200 calories? FUCKING TODDLERS! And I tried... I tried to give this conniving bitch the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe when she was studying to become a dietitian she skipped over the part where you need food to survive. That’s the only logical reason that I can come up with. I mean clearly she just wasn’t allowing her education to get in the way of her ignorance. I never did think that the greatest place to pick up and ED was right at the dietitian’s office, who woulda fukin thunk it!? I feel about ready to stick those 5 blocks of butter straight up your ass ;)
Okay, I’m done slandering the poor woman, I feel bad, something is clearly wrong with her, maybe she needs help and I would gladly help her burn her degree.
Okay, okay, enough passive-aggressiveness. I wanted to use this platform as an opportunity to bring awareness to the fact that sometimes even the dietitian can give you bad diet advice, and you should not feel obliged to stay with your dietitian if you feel like it is harmful to your mental or physical health. There are better ways to complete your journey that aren’t going to cost you so much happiness.
Thank you to the two people that might have come across this post, it’s 00:53 now and I think it’s time for me to go to bed now that I’ve said what I needed to say. Good luck with your fitness/health journey, we’ve got this ;)
Also, sorry for any spelling or grammatical errors and lmk if you or anyone you know has had a similar experience.
TL;DR: went to the dietitian to lose weight and lost my sanity instead.
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