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Lizzie Ens was shunned by her family after leaving home to start a new life at the age of 19
NEED TO KNOW
- Lizzie Ens grew up Amish until the age of 19. She was shunned by her family after escaping to start a new life
- Despite the traditionalist community's rejection of vanity, Ens developed an eating disorder as a child as a result of constant comparison to her twin
- In the modern world, she discovered diet culture and struggled to better her relationship with food. After studying functional health and nutrition, she launched her business, UnDiet You
We tend to think eating disorders stem from characteristically modern societal pressures. At-home workouts and dieting tips are easily accessible to anyone with internet access, regardless of their age or health status.
However, when you take away the elements of technology, it becomes clear that poor body image is rooted in something timeless: comparison.
Few represent the sentiment as well as Lizzie Ens, who was raised Swartzentruber Amish alongside her 18 siblings. She partook in the traditionalist lifestyle until the age of 19, when Ens left in the night at the cost of being shunned from her community.
When she entered the outside world, she left behind her twin sister. Ens, now 40, tells PEOPLE that they were "incredibly close" as young girls. They were also constantly compared to each other from the moment they were born, as tends to happen to twins.
"I was bigger than she was. She was the tiny one," Ens recalls. "I wasn't obese or anything like that, but there was a period in my early teenage years that I was chunkier than she was, and I would get bullied for that."
In the face of ridicule, she remembers yearning for approval and attempting to receive it by any means possible. Ens experienced that "incredibly painful" period of her life in real time. Looking back, the ex-Amish woman now understands that she was developing an eating disorder as well.
"I would eat very little at meal time and then sneak-eat between meals," she explains. "Then I told myself that I will work harder than anybody else in this family, just so that I can lose the weight."
In the modern world, people "work" to lose weight by exercising, but the Amish lifestyle is physically laborious. It demands a level of exertion on par with training in a gym. Ens was regularly farming outside, milking cows by hand, plowing fields and helping her family butcher animals. Even cleaning could be made intensive, between mopping floors and washing wide windows.
"Everything's manual labor. You have to chop your own wood for firewood for stoves to cook and to heat the homes," says the Amish Renegade author. "In the summer, it was hard work out in the gardens all the time. Mowing the yard was the hardest thing ever, because we had those push-mowers that don't have any power."
After each day of inconsistent nutrition and constant manual labor, the teen would step on a scale to check her weight. At the time, Ens didn't realize that she was developing issues with her thyroid, hormones and cortisol. She just wanted to see that her efforts were paying off.
Looking back on her upbringing, Ens say that the Amish generally dismissed vanity and regard for one's own appearance. Self-image was "not really a thing," she adds. "I truly believe that it comes down to being a twin."
She often weighed herself alongside her sister, who wasn't immune to the pressures of comparison. Despite her longtime status as the smaller one, Ens says her twin was also "obsessed with her weight," not that they ever discussed the topic explicitly.
"I think we just kind of knew. She knew that she was always smaller than me and she knew that I got bullied," Ens notes. "I still so vividly remember the day that we weighed in, and I weighed less than she did ... She was not happy."
Ens left home by herself, escaping in the night with her then-boyfriend, another Amish man fleeing his own community. She embraced a fresh world, with its technology and modern conveniences, but the way she cooked and consumed food changed in a significant way. The method of cooking she grew up with simply no longer made sense in a modern kitchen.
"We baked bread every single week. Our three meals a day were made from scratch every single day," she tells PEOPLE. "We grew most of our own stuff. Now I have to go to the grocery store and figure out, like, 'What vegetables do I buy?' And I didn't have any money to go buy that stuff."
Enter the likes of Lean Cuisines and Hamburger Helper: cheap, quick and mostly microwavable. Ens says she gained about 20 pounds before she realized that her nutrition was off balance again. She didn't understand how to eat right in the modern world, so it was easy for her to get it wrong again.
She found out about the "Lemonade Diet" first, which is also known as the Master Cleanse: a blend of water, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper meant to be your sole intake for several days. Healthline debunks the detox as a "crash diet that isn’t safe or sustainable," noting that people who do see the scale drop will "most likely gain the weight again after this type of weight loss," which, if repeated, can cause severe stress to the body and cardiovascular system.
Ens took on the detox for seven days straight, and at the end of the week, she did indeed shed a total of 10 pounds. She was so pleased by her results and blind to the downsides that she became addicted to the diet.
"Anytime I wanted to lose weight fast, that's what I would do, but eventually it starts wrecking you because you're doing it wrong. And I did various other types of dieting," Ens says. "Again, it's the obsession of shrinking yourself and being smaller ... Those diets never truly gave me what I was looking for."
Her mindset shifted after she received her GED. Ens — whose Amish education only reached an eighth-grade level — sought even more education, first obtaining a certification to become a personal trainer. About two months into her career working with others on the gym floor, Ens says she realized that exercise "was just a small fraction of what people needed" to live a healthy life.
She returned to the classroom to study holistic health and nutrition, and in 2020, she launched her online business, UnDiet You. The concept has branches in all of the stages of Ens' wellness journey, from the time when she developed an eating disorder as a young, Amish girl to her early introduction to dieting and ultimately her realization that health was more than weight loss.
"When I went to holistic nutrition school, I learned about a hundred different types of dietary theories and why they believe that that's the best diet there is. At the end of the day, I learned that we're all bio-individuals, and it's whatever works best for you," Ens says. "You don't need a diet label on it."
UnDiet currently offers a six-week, beginner portion of the program that explains fundamentals about food and about the body, the type of foundations which Ens believes should be taught to high schoolers, before they go off into the adult world.
"Food is energy. It's not something to be feared," explains the content creator, who has over 580,000 followers between Instagram and TikTok. "There's an overload of misinformation and an underload of the correct information on food."
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She continues, "I teach people how to feed their body to feel good, sleep amazing, have energy all day, get your thyroid and your hormones regulated." While her program does help people looking to lose weight too, she says UnDiet You prioritizes maintaining a lifestyle over radical calorie cutting.
"It has nothing to do with dieting," she says. "At the end, it's diet freedom and food freedom as well."
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, The Alliance for Eating Disorders provides a fully-staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235, as well as free, therapist-led support groups.
Read the original article on People
