1 Captions by Desney Shaw. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 (SLOW PIANO MUSIC) As women, we're objectified. We're meant to be a certain way, to be attractive, to be successful. In society, we think it is unwanted, unsocially acceptable to be bigger. We have a very dominant narrative that says skinny is healthy and fat is bad. We're just going further and further into depression, anxiety, not good mental health states. These issues of anxiety, depression, binge eating ` no matter what it is, it's never the issue; it's just a symptom of what's the bigger problem. I have always had issues with my body image. I think that started off very young for me. I remember I was, like, 8 years old, and a family friend of mine asked me to jump on the scales ` me and a friend ` and I weighed, like, 2 kilos more than her, and then she was like, 'Oh, she's better than you.' You're not good enough. You're not worthy. You're weak. Your body is weak. You're not smart enough. You're not a leader. What are other people gonna think? What do my parents think? I've let them down. I haven't done enough for them. How as a kid did I just know that to be skinnier, that would be better in society's eyes? I felt like I had to be perfect and not able to actually express who I really am on the inside. And I think after years and years of doing that, of just trying please other people, do things for other people, trying to be this perfect person, it comes to a point where you just actually can't take it any more, and that's when my eating disorder ` I had bulimia ` came out at its worst. I was at uni, didn't enjoy what I was studying and just completely stuck and had no idea who I was any more. I'm not angry about it. I get sad, because, um, like, I know what it feels like to... Sorry. ...um, to have so much hate and... knowing that, like, the little girl inside you has done nothing wrong. Do you want to go to the playground, Jen? I always have been the biggest in the class and the tallest, the biggest. Just always feel like I've needed to be smaller. When I was growing up, I used to have dreams about chainsawing my hips off, like, every night. So even though I'm not, obviously, giving the appearance of somebody who's bulimic or anorexic, I'm still, I think, on the same sort of level of just that focus on food and just concentrating, like, 'How many calories am I taking in, how many am I allowed to have, how many is too many?' In my mind, it's me. It's all my fault. I'm always too fat for anything. My legs are too big. They don't fit in small spaces. Just fail at not eating. I fail at getting smaller. I fail at being... a normal size. I'm just too big. I used to just cry and cry and cry if I had to go out of the house, because I thought I was so horrifically ugly and fat, that people would actually be sickened by the sight of me. I had a very bad experience with bulimia and taking too many laxatives and starving myself. It's so crazy that you would rather be anything but fat. I'm lazy. I'm fat. I'm overpowering. I'm unattractive. I embarrass my partner. It's just impossible to be screaming those words at yourself and then still have a great day. If I had a person literally saying that to me, I would crawl up unto a little ball and just kind of sit there and cry until they disappeared. If the dominant narrative is telling us that skinny is good, then the person is going to hear that and internally take that in on themselves and then continually beat themselves up. Come on, then. In my role previously as a bariatric nurse specialist, we were working with surgery to aid weight loss. The surgery was essentially like giving birth in that that was the beginning of the process, but what we didn't provide was adequate support ` how to become this new person and how to be the new person. We tell people that they need to eat nutritious food, they need to exercise well, they need to get enough sleep, they need to drink enough fluid, yet we still see that up to 40% of people who have weight loss surgery gain all of that weight back. The physical health was improving, but if we didn't deal with what was going on psychologically and emotionally, we ended up back in the same place. So you don't just have physical health and mental health. Mental health and physical health are inextricably linked. I really don't know that I was fully mentally prepared for bariatric surgery. I had the gastric sleeve bariatric surgery four years ago. I went from my heaviest weight of 130 kilos down to my lowest weight of about 63 kilos. That was, you know, over a year. I enjoyed what's called a honeymoon period within this time, which is the first 12 to 15 months after surgery, where the part of your stomach that has been removed is actually the part that sends the signal to the brain to tell you` the hunger signal, essentially. OK, so, this is what I eat my meals out of at night. For my mental health, this is my check. That grows back over that period of time. My happy bubble, if you like, started to normalise out. Real life started kicking in. My old habits that I hadn't taken note of to change started to come back in without me really realising it. Remember when I first had bariatric surgery, this was enough for me. That was how small my stomach was. What I really didn't think about was how I got there in the first place. My experiences that I had gone through in my childhood of the sexual abuse, the emotional abuse, mental abuse contributed to... the way that I belittle myself when I am being my own worst critic. One of my fears was of abandonment, and as a child, when my family had gone out for the day, I would be cooking baked beans on toast every time, because that was the comfort thing that I did for myself when my family left me at home. I know and what I see with dieting, by decreasing your calories, you create a change in your physiology and you increase specific hormones that tell you that you need to eat more. But we feel because we're hungry, then we need to eat less and that's how we're losing weight, and so we actually create more of an issue, because you have more of the hormone floating around, so you become a greater food seeker because you're constantly denying it. I want two mandarins and a little baby chippies. Little baby rice crackers? Yes. I didn't start dieting until probably I left home. I left home when I was about 17. I didn't realise it at the time, but I actually moved in with my bulimic friend. Both went to Weight Watchers together, and that was kind of the start of the diet roller coaster that went through probably all of my 20s. Yeah, trying anything and everything. I really think I've stuffed my metabolism after all the years of laxatives and pills for weight loss and the diets. I did this HCG diet, which is actually a chemical from urine that I used to, like, take. All this stuff I've done to lose weight is crazy. And I think if I had just stayed away from that, I would love to know what I'd be like now because I honestly think there'd be a difference. I've just messed around with my poor body so much, and I've told it so many things of, like, 'You have to constantly starving to be good,' and now my body kind of almost thinks, 'God, I've got to hold on to this fat, because God knows when she's gonna feed me again.' The research shows clearly that the more diets you go on, the further your weight's gonna go, so a large amount of the people that I work with have actually dieted themselves to morbid obesity. I've spent the last 10 years working with people moving forward for weight loss surgery. The truth is that weight is not what we think it is. There is a very clear belief that it's energy in versus energy out. That couldn't be further from the truth. It's really, really complex. So do you have, like, good foods, bad foods? Yeah, definitely. Yep. So where does sugar sit for you? Oh, it's evil. (CHUCKLES) It's made of evil. Really? Yep. I hate it. If I could eradicate it and not have it, I would totally do that. You hate sugar because? Because it's delicious and wonderful in everything. Right. No food is evil. No food... Kale does not represent me being a good person. But kale sits over in the good white category, right? And liquorice or chocolate or something that's got massive sugar in it is over in the bad. But if I eat that, that doesn't inherently make me a bad person. This is food-wise and exercise-wise the healthiest I've been. I've had my bloods tested by a doctor, cos they were so concerned about my weight. I would sit there and tell them I've had eating disorders in the past, and then I've told them that I exercise every day and I eat vegetarian food, and they just couldn't get it through their heads that I could possibly be healthier at this size than I was. I could feel myself getting into this space again of, like, 'Maybe I do eat too much.' I understand fat and obesity is unhealthy. I truly understand that. But in some cases, like mine, it seems I'm totally healthy. You're with Edge 11. It's 11 hits back to back. If you haven't seen the music video for this year, I highly recommend you go and watch it. Alessia Cara has written a song about, like, body positivity, women empowerment, loving yourself, loving who you are no matter what, and she really shows it in the music video as well. So... My doctor will say, you know, 'You could still tend to lose a bit of weight,' and I say, 'Truly, just tell me why.' They just say cos you'll look better and feel better. And I think, 'But... (SIGHS) 'But I've just told you I've had an eating disorder in the past. The blood tests are telling me I'm fine. 'Why are you still trying to make me lose weight when I've told you I've got this mental health issue 'that if I get put back on to this wavelength of bulimia and anorexia 'and all that horrible mental health issue, I'm gonna be stuffed.' Like, my mum's response to me was, 'Tila, why don't you just eat? Or, 'Just stop going to the bathroom and chucking it up. Keep it on the inside. You're fine. 'There's nothing wrong with you.' We're Kurdish, and we came to New Zealand as refugees. My dad was a freedom fighter, and to him, real problems was waking up not knowing when to eat and dying from starvation or dying from cold, harsh weather. When I hear his stories, it made me feel almost embarrassed to share the problems that I had. And I thought all my value as a person was based on me providing this for my family, studying. There was more than one way to help my family and to help other people. I feel like I've overcome my eating disorder. There'll be times where I have the same thoughts or something will come up. 'OK, Tila, step back. Have a think. What's going on? I need to relax around this more.' I got into personal training because I love being healthy, and exercising made me feel better about myself. If you look at obesity, we are still victim blaming the fat person. So partly why I'm sitting in this role is, as a skinny, thin, white person with privilege around that, for people to start understanding that it's not just about the food that people put in their mouths. It has to come from somebody who hasn't got the lived experience but has heard it over and over again and understands what that bias and privilege is doing to that marginalised group. I've always wanted my own cooking show. Ha! We were coming back from town, and Guy got this big, giant burger. The boys got all big burgers, and I got the miniature burger made out of tofu. And we were walking past this big bunch of drunk guys and girls, and I guy yelled out to me, 'Don't eat that. You'll get fatter.' And I thought, 'I'm the one that's eating the miniature tofu burger, 'and I've got three skinny guys around me 'that are eating, like, the chips, the big beef fatty cheeseburgers. 'How come I'm the one that is apparently going to get fatter, 'according to you, this random guy walking down the street? Preschoolers have been shown to have significant dislike for the fat child. They will be the one that's left out, that doesn't do things, that's not allowed to play with this game. The bullying starts really, really early. So for most of my patients, they've experienced some form of bullying from 3 or 4. I put a lot of shame and a lot of blame on to myself because of some of the things that I went through when I was a child ` the teasing on the school bus, the, um, emotional and physical abuse that sometimes goes on behind closed doors in New Zealand. When I was 130 kilos, what I was conscious of was the things like going to Rainbow's End and not being able to fit in one of the rides with the kids. One time I was at a hens night, and I sat on a plastic chair, and I'd been sitting on it for some time, and then it just collapsed. I wanted to cry and cry, but instead I just laughed it off with everyone else that was laughing. But in the back of my mind, I was thinking, 'My God, you're so fat.' In third form, my mother knitted me a jumper cos I was quite into Greenpeace at the time, and she knitted me a jumper that said 'save the whale', but unfortunately it was a really big jumper, and I used to wear it everywhere, and obviously that didn't really work out that well. Kids are tough, you know. WOMAN: What are you really measuring here? (CHUCKLES) The level of my failure. The whole exercise industry says that exercise is keeping us thin. In actual fact, exercise does not make us skinny. Exercise absolutely makes us healthy ` physically and emotionally. But if your sole reason for exercising is simply to be skinny, you're missing out on the health concept of it. There are people who actually abuse exercise and use it as a form of punishment as well. And I knew that there were days that if I hated myself and I was very negative, going into the gym made me feel worse. But if I went from a place of feeling empowered and feeling I deserved to be there and I deserved to move my body and I deserved to be strong and to feel strong, then my training would completely be different. Are you eating enough now? Yes. (LAUGHS) Yeah, your body's changing. Yeah. How does that make you feel, though? Uh, yeah, it makes me feel fine. I'm hitting my targets for my lifts and all of that, so I think the way my body looks comes second to that. Big jump. Every client that I've had has some kind of issue with, like, self-image or body. Hips at the top. Good. Faster up on to the box, Amy. Open up the hips. Good. Step straight back down. There is a lot of self-hate, a lot of issues with feeling worthy and not feeling empowered or comfortable in their own skin. I don't believe that it's their fault. OK, thumb width from the bar. Yep. I'm studying at this institute school, the Psychology of Eating. It's online study in the States. And it deals with any kind of form of eating disorder ` bulimia, binge eating, overeating um, self-image, body image. OK, so we've got to extend on that one, OK? Elbows up. Good girl. If I had the opportunity to work with parents to teach them that, you know, there's other ways to deal with, you know, their child, being, like, 'Oh, my child's overweight. 'They need to eat better and exercise.' It has nothing to do with that. It's about ` how can we show them more love and acceptance? Significant stressful events in people's lives also create unhealth. So that's like this perfect storm. And if you've got the genes that mean that you were gonna gain weight more or if you've got the genes that your father and mother have had type-II diabetes, you're on a much lower rung and are much more unhealthy a whole lot sooner. Any kind of external trigger raises our cortisol levels, and those cortisol levels make us feel uncomfortable. They give us that yucky feeling in our stomach. They make sure that we're not breathing deeply. They give us tight shoulders. They give us headaches. These are all things that our body is telling us that high levels of cortisol are not great. So what we do is we wanna come back to that central point where we feel good. So we distract. We distract from that feeling. So we do things like have a piece of cake, have a bar of chocolate, have a couple of glasses of wine, do a little bit of gambling, have sex, go and buy something. Cos all of those things give us a serotonin hit. That works in the short term. But what invariably happens is we need more of the hit because we're having a hard day at work or whatever's going on, so we keep doing the distracting. The distracting comes and bites us in the arse and causes problems, like our credit card starts to max out, we start gaining weight, we start needing a whole bottle of wine instead of half a bottle of wine. This is my treat jar or my joy jar, filled with all the things in here that give me joy and give me pleasure or when I am at a loss for what to do or lonely or bored, the things that I would normally be driven towards going to the cupboard. A little higher. Yeah, hold on. I'll just get Ally on. The amount of effort that I put in to worrying about this; imagine if I used all of that energy on something else, like, you know, reducing plastic or... But I'm too busy obsessing about food. I couldn't point to somebody in my age bracket anyway and say, 'Do you love everything about your body?' I couldn't find somebody for you that did. I hope my children do, though. I hope that they... (CHUCKLES) I hope they love everything about themselves. Everything came second to me wanting to lose weight. First thing I thought of every day, last thing I went to sleep thinking was, 'Can't wait to be thin.' I thought about me being a 15-year-old and who I would look up to and why I'd look up to them. And I thought, 'I've gotta be the better person. 'I've gotta be the person that I wish I had when I was 15.' Which was the person that was in the job for talent and personality rather than for looks. You don't have to be blonde and a size 8, which I honestly always thought that I had to be to get the career that I wanted. Being in media, I don't see many women my age at my size. I wish there was a pinpoint in my life that I could say that I woke up and it just changed, but I think I honestly got sick of it. Hey, everyone. This is round two of this kind of video. This is five outfits that I would wear during the week. I was so tired of being depressed. I was so tired of hating myself every day. Look at that butt. Um, oh my God. Welcome to my first bikini haul. I've never called it a bathing suit in my life. I call them togs. These are togs. I do not need to worry about covering my butt, because I don't have one. So, here I am heaving up a pair of Spanx. That's not how boobs are. I wanted to live my life better. I had these amazing friends that... they didn't choose to hang out with me or be friends with me because I was skinny. Hi, guys. Hello. This is a bit of a different video, you'll be excited to know. Just with the whole body positivity thing, you know, everybody talks to Meg about what she has to go through and stuff, but then a lot of people ask me the question. They're not asking it from a bad place. It's more of a curious, interested place. 'What's it like dating a bigger girl?' And I hear that maybe at least once a week. Yeah. I just say, 'It's like dating any other person.' You said, 'What's it like dating a bigger person?' They're still a person at the end of the day. There isn't a list of rules for like` oh, these are the rules that you must follow to date a bigger person. It's like you can't feed them after midnight and stuff like that. (LAUGHS) I'm comparing you to a gremlin. (LAUGHS) But, no, I'm dating Meg for who she is. She is this confident, beautiful, hilarious, kind person. Bye. See ya. It is more socially acceptable to say, 'I'm shit. I look fat. I'm horrible,' than to say, 'I'm great. I look fantastic. I'm beautiful.' I did put on weight while being with Guy, and I had to kind of say to myself, 'Would you rather be skinny and this kind of miserable person with him 'where you're constantly thinking about weight, 'you're constantly hungry, you constantly hate yourself; 'or would you rather enjoy the fact that you've found this person that just clicks with you insanely?' We're constantly thinking, 'When I'm skinny, I'll be happy.' We're really missing out on living our lives and living to the potential of what we could be. You actually know that your body is really good. It does amazing stuff. And I think you probably also know at the back of your mind you're really healthy. Like, you can take a boxing class. You're fit. But your level of concern around your weight is very heightened. But there's` That'd be accurate. Yeah, but the truth is you know that you're actually quite healthy, because you've had two beautiful babies, you've got a whole lot of really good stuff, but you just keep dumping on yourself cos somehow you're not enough with all of that. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'd agree with that. Yeah. So, if I said to you, 'You're enough simply because you breathe,' how would that make you feel? If you talk to yourself when you're in a bit of a pickle like your best friend would, your chances of getting out of it feeling better about yourself are much greater. I'll fight for my children. And I'll continue to be a good mother. I'm a good person, and I make good choices. I'm so blessed in my life and everything that has been given to me. And I'm thankful for what I have. I'm brave. I'm worthy. I'm powerful. I'm smart. I'm grateful for my life, my family, for the beautiful people in it. I feel genuinely happy about where I am right now. I feel good about myself. I love me. I'm determined. I'm understanding. I'm comforting. I'm warm. I'm kind. I'm a good partner. I'm a good friend. I am confident. Captions by Desney Shaw. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017