The Body Image Story I Carried in Silence for a Decade

I grew up in Taipei in an environment where commentary on body size and appearance between family members and friends was normal and common in ways that would be considered intrusive in other cultural contexts. It was not malicious.

It was the texture of how people related to each other - an aunt noticing that you had gained weight, a friend observing that you looked thinner than last month, relatives comparing your figure to a cousin's at family gatherings.

I had absorbed, by my mid-teens, a specific and very focused anxiety about my body that I managed through monitoring and restriction in ways that I maintained for nearly a decade without identifying them as anything that needed to be examined.

At university and into my working life I ate carefully in a way that was invisible as a problem because it produced a body that was socially approved of. I counted, restricted, and compensated with a discipline that I presented to myself and others as healthy eating habits.

The internal experience of all this was entirely different from how it appeared. I spent an enormous amount of cognitive energy every day on food and appearance - the calculation of inputs and outputs, the monitoring of how I looked relative to how I had looked, the particular anxiety of situations where eating was social and public and outside my control.

I was not in crisis in any visible sense. I was high-functioning and managed the whole thing quietly. The cost was not one I was counting because I had no baseline to compare against.

At 26, I was referred through my GP to a nutritionist for an unrelated digestive issue and in the process of that appointment I described my eating patterns with the factual neutrality I had always applied to them.

The nutritionist asked me a series of questions with the specificity of someone who was looking for something and I answered them honestly. She referred me to an eating disorder specialist, which I resisted because I did not identify what I was doing as an eating disorder - eating disorders, in my understanding, were more extreme and more visible.

My specialist explained to me, in several sessions, that disordered eating exists on a spectrum and that the restriction and monitoring I had normalised were on it. What followed was two years of gradual and non-linear work toward a different relationship with food and my body. It did not happen quickly.

But I can tell you that the cognitive space I recovered - the hours per day that are no longer occupied by monitoring and calculating - has been the most significant lifestyle change of my adult life, more impactful than any of the career or relationship work I have done.