I have always measured myself and what I eat. Why? I am Autistic and I am an engineer. So it has always being a simple calculation considering energy in and energy out.
But this took a rather alarming turn, and I developed an eating disorder.
On self-reflection, I realised I developed a special kind of eating disorder fuelled by my accidental social experiment.
Being autistic, I often feel like an outsider. So I regularly find myself observing intently to learn the rules of society. I explore this wholeheartedly in my upcoming book “Othered” where I explore systems and how to thrive in them.
This observation led me to make a interesting discovering that's the skinnier I was the less I had physical features of my ethnic phenotypes and as result, the more I could be excluded from the disturbing assumptions/stereotypes that are associated with my ethnic features in society.
A marked moment was when I was working with my personal trainer and telling him my goals were to change the composition of my body to move away from physical racial features. I remember telling him the story of Sarah Baartman - the south African slave who was exploited and displayed for entertainment. To me, this was the epitome of racism and the evidence of the long history of ridiculing and hypersexualising black bodies and the awful consequence for the black person.
Image source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35240987
I knew I didn’t want to be sexualised and have a tragic story like Sarah who died at 26.
But I also knew I could not control how people behaved or re-educate society wholesale.
Therefore, I took control of my body.
Getting smaller and smaller till I weighed less than I did before puberty.
And its worked, looking chronologically through my journal entries and calendar I can see how the world has treated me differently as I changed my body.
Turns out, it goes further than race but thiness is also linked to economic status. The research on this is robust. Just look at the economist viral article and TikTok the ‘The secret economist of thinness’ linked below.
Today, I now attend an online eating disorder group to rebuild my relationship with food and myself and come up with new ways to navigate society’s systems and thrive. Here is to recovery.