'This Christmas photo looks innocent but one detail still haunts me four years later'
By Maddison Leach|
The Christmas photo that has haunted me for years looks totally innocent.
Snapped in 2018, I'm smiling with my arm around my mum, both of us dressed in matching red shirts as the sun shines down on us.
We were at our annual family lunch on Christmas day, surrounded by good food and better company while my young cousins splashed about in the pool just out of frame.
To anyone else, it seems like a typical holiday photo. To me, it's a painful reminder I return to every year and ask myself 'why can't I look like that again?'.
The year that photo was taken, everyone showered me with compliments, telling me how good I looked, how fit and thin I was.
No one but my mum knew the truth; that I was deeply sick and the praise was only going to make it worse.
Six months earlier I'd returned from a study abroad program in the UK where I'd spent half a year living off tiny portions of food and over-exercising in a desperate bid to be thin.
It had started when I downloaded a calorie-tracking app, something designed to help people keep on top of their eating habits, but I quickly fell into a dangerous and all-consuming obsession with food and weight.
Some days I would spend hours trying to 'work off' what I'd eaten the day before, other days I barely had the energy to leave my single bed in the tiny uni dorm I called home.
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When I came home to Australia, I brought my eating disorder with me. If anything it got worse once I was home.
For a year I starved myself in secret and when Christmas Day rolled around I was flooded with praise for how my body had changed and shrunk.
It felt like proof that all my scary thoughts about restricting were right, that I'd achieved something by making myself so unwell.
Pride swelled in me every time someone new asked me if I'd lost weight, reinforcing the dangerous ideas about weight that had consumed me for a year.
Not that any of my relatives knew I was sick; my mum was the only one who had any clue why I'd dropped a dress size.
We had been fighting for months, her desperately trying to convince me that I needed to get help while I resolutely ignored her and insisted what I was doing was healthy.?
All the praise I got on Christmas Day only made me more certain that I was right.
After all, I'd never received so many kind words about my appearance at any Christmas lunch before the one in 2018 where that fateful photo was taken.
And I've never received as many since.
Three Christmases have come and gone since that photo, and between the tinsel being packed away and brought back out again I got better, but the compliments dried up.
"So much of an eating disorder is mental."
I've given up most of the restrictive eating habits and don't use exercise to punish myself anymore.
Many of the disordered thoughts are still lurking in the back of my mind กช after all, so much of an eating disorder is mental กช but I'm a lot better at managing them now.
Gradually, I was able to accept getting better meant gaining weight and started to learn how to be OK with that. I'm still working on it now.
But every Christmas I am haunted by the fact I will never be as thin as I was in 2018, when that photo was taken.?
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It shouldn't be a big deal กช I'm older now, my body has changed, that's natural, right? But like so many women before me, I can't help but long for the love I was showered with when I was at my smallest.
There's a part of me that knows I shouldn't care, that I should just delete the photo from my phone and focus on how much happier and healthier I am now.
But the small part of my brain where the sickness lives, the part that I know I'll never really be rid of, tells me to keep the photo as 'motivation' to one day look like that again.
It's a cruel thought and one I wish didn't still haunt me, but every Christmas when I turn up for lunch and think about how proud my family seemed to be of me that year, I can't help but miss it.
The sad truth is the holidays are full of moments like that, where a few off-the-cuff comments about a person's body can affect them for weeks, months or even years.
Even when you say something about someone's body that's supposed to be kind จC "You look like you've lost weight" or "You look so slim!" จC you never know what's going on behind closed doors.
I've spoken to women with devastating illnesses who were praised for their weight loss, I've listened to girls battling anorexia or bulimia recall how one compliment from a relative gave them the motivation to stay sick even as their organs were shutting down.
Other women who were shamed for their weight over Christmas dinners and holiday lunches cite those moments as the start of their eating disorders or unhealthy relationships with body image.
"One well-meaning compliment may haunt them for years."?
When did Christmas become a time to take stock of our loved ones' bodies? Perhaps it's always been that way, but that doesn't mean we can't change it.
Tomorrow, try to compliment everything but the bodies of your friends and family. Praise their achievements from the year gone by, celebrate their relationships and keep mum about their weight.
Even if someone's slimmed down, think twice before you praise them for it because that well-meaning compliment may haunt them for years, like this photo still haunts me today.
If you or someone you know needs help, contact the Butterfly National Helpline on 1800 33 4673 (1800 ED HOPE) or email support@butterfly.org.au.
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