alternatively: my battle with disordered eating
TW: mention of eating disorder symptoms
Diet culture is everywhere. For so many of us, from the time we are children, we are made to equate our worth with our weight and to believe the deluded notion that “fat” is a bad word. Since I can remember being cognizant of food and bodies, I remember hearing about fad diets and the incessant categorization of foods into categories of “good” and “bad”. I was in elementary school when I first started the likes of demonizing carbs, turning away desserts to watch my figure, and ultimately beginning a journey of self loathing - because my 7 year old body wasn’t fitting the mold for what was society acceptable. Sad, disgusting… and did you know that most little girls in the US go on their first diet by the age of 8?
And from this very formative age onwards, for almost 15 years , I convinced myself the worst thing in the world that I could be was fat.
And who could blame me? We live in a society that glorifies thinness and abhors fatness. We moralize these body types - with thin being good and fat being bad. Thin being smart, athletic, healthy - and fat being dumb, lazy, unhealthy. Terrible, isn’t it? But we’ve all been fed this messaging throughout our lives whether through the media or in our personal lives. Do these scripts sound familiar?
“I’m being soooo bad for having a second piece of cake right now.”
“I look so big in this outfit; I’m changing.”
“My diet starts tomorrow. I’ll be bad today.”
Unless your human experience has been particularly novel, of course they do. And here begins the convergence in our minds between our bodies, food, and shame. And so it began for me.
Given diets are the top risk factor for developing an eating disorder, it is walking a dangerous line to get into the habit of dieting. Given I started down the slippery slope of dieting as a child, by the time I began high school, that dieting had become a full blown eating disorder. My absolute infatuation with thinness had begun and extreme restriction was soon to follow. I began obsessing over calories and checking my body in the mirror ~100 times a day. I weighed myself before and after meals and bowel movements. It was sick… and at first, it was very gratifying. My illness was encouraged and praised by those around me (to no fault of their own - none of us knew better) as I was asked for my diet regime and my workout routine. Family members told me, “You’ve gotten so thin!” - and they said it like a compliment. And that felt like a high. As I grew more and more sick, and my body looked more and more like what was societally ideal. And as so often happens with eating disorders, since I was never more than a little “medically underweight”, I was praised for looking strong and healthy. And so my disordered thoughts were fed.
A quick note debunking some of the justifications for fatphobia over the years:
- BMI as a measure of health is BS. It has long been disproven to be physiologically wrong, bad statistics, incredibly outdated, and an irrevocably inaccurate way to measure obesity levels.
- The “obesity epidemic” in the US is also BS. It based on the bad science of BMI, tiny upswings in average weight (when this phrase implies that there is an epidemic of people putting on mass amounts of weight) and if there is any validity to this, the marginal rise in average weight in the US is directly correlated with the rise of diet culture. Because guess what - almost everyone who goes on a diet gains the weight back and more.
- Fatness is not the indicator of health (or lack thereof) you may think it is. Health exists at every size. Being “overweight” does not affect one’s health nearly as much as we have been led to believe - and yes, you can live in a large body and be perfectly healthy. Groundbreaking.
By the time senior year of high school rolled around, I had stopped going to lunch entirely. I would spend that time taking pictures in the bathroom mirror of my body to document “progress”. I was fatigued and irritable constantly, perpetually dizzy and nauseous, and I became distanced from almost everyone in my life. And this all felt more than worth it in order to shrink myself. Meanwhile, I was a two sport athlete - who compulsively exercised on the side. And as I lived this shell of a life, I was commended for being healthy and even strong. Remember, because I was thin?
This age of severe restriction went on for multiple years, up until it was time for college. And despite the rhetoric on eating disorders being that only teenage girls can have them, I was not about to grow out of my ED anytime soon.
I will always remember being at physical with my PCP, a few weeks before I was to head off to my first year of college. Again, a deeply ill individual at this time. But nonetheless, a fresh start was coming my way and so perhaps a new chance to heal my relationship with food and body. I will never forget stepping on the scale that day, after having quite literally been starving myself at more and more dangerous increments for years, and having my nurse say to me, “It’s a good thing you’ve lost some weight since last time I saw you. Keep it up so you don’t gain the freshman 15.” Keep it up, she had said. Of my malnourished body. I have never let a medical provider talk to me about my weight since.
Looking back on this (terrible and unprofessional exchange), a few things come to mind.
1 - It’s important to remember that the majority of nurses and medical doctors do not have a depth of knowledge in eating disorders. I have the privilege now of working in an eating disorder treatment facility (more on that later) on a team of nurses, doctors, and dieticians who are trained in eating disorders. Unfortunately, though, a PhD or a nursing degree does not prevent ignorance and problematic ideologies. Fatphobia and diet culture are alive and well in the medical field.
2 - On the freshman 15? My one wish is for this to be burned into everyone’s brains: gaining weight is not a bad thing. College means growing into an adult body, not to mention fun and meals with friends and drinks and memories. Who the hell cares about an arbitrary number when it comes to life experiences and memories?
3- And finally, looking back, this was the origin of a brand new chapter of disordered eating.
Beginning in college, my disordered relationship with food and my body took a new form - equally insidious but veiled under the guise of “health and wellness”. Here entered into my life orthorexia and the dark side of fitness culture.
Orthorexia is defined as an unhealthy obsession with eating “healthy”, and anorexia athletica characterized by excessive and compulsive exercising. And conveniently enough for the pervasive nature of eating disorders, these deeply damaging disorders have been completely normalized by “wellness culture”. The concepts of “no days off” and “no cheat day” gym culture are immediately ingrained into the minds of any curious minds looking into fitness. Herein lies another area we see that convergence in the mind of body and shame.
Another quick note on “healthy eating”:
What does eating healthy mean to you? For many, eating “healthy” means cutting calories… AKA, restricting our source of energy. For many, eating “healthy” means only eating unprocessed or “all natural foods”. With this often comes the moralization of food groups - labeling foods as good or bad.
High energy foods are not bad, unprocessed foods are not the holy grail of health, and cutting out pleasurable foods for a smaller body is not inherently healthy in the slightest. The good food/bad food ideology is where toxic ideas come from such as “carbs are bad” (carbs are the body’s main source of energy and needed for cognitive functioning), or “gluten-free is best” (unless you are diagnosed with a gluten intolerance, this is irrevocably false). These are the traps I fell into as I convinced myself I had “healed” from my eating disorder and I was now on a path of wellness - meanwhile I was falling for all the diet culture gimmicks and “clean eating” (restricting myself from certain food groups, which is… disordered!).
Starting at a young age and through high school, I was an athlete. In retrospect, I could’ve seen my unhealthy relationship with exercise coming - as there came a point in high school where I absolutely, positively dreaded going to practice for my sports. Alas, I continued - largely because sports were a way to “stay fit” (and yes, to me, this meant to stay thin). Coming into college, I no longer was committed to exercise through sports… and so I decided that in pursuit of wellness, I would start hitting the gym and eating healthier. This was at the peak of the “strong is the new skinny” movement, and so another type of body became the latest fad. Out with the heroin chic body ideal, in with the [still extremely thin but now also] muscular body ideal. Wow - a much more attainable body type! Tiny… but now, with an ass.
I began to workout obsessively at my campus gym… obsessively to the point where I would skip social events constantly to make it to the gym, break down crying if my schedule was too busy to go, and I would workout to the point of faintness and nausea most every time I went. Aah, the healthy nature of the “grind never stops” gym bro mentality. Meanwhile, I was “eating clean” - which means I was falling for the ridiculous gimmicks of juice cleanses and detox teas that diet culture capitalizes on. I was still demonizing food groups, assigning them labels of good or bad in my mind and following a strict diet that brought me absolutely no pleasure or joy. How fulfilling. Meanwhile, I would post photos of my body online, with captions about how ‘it’s cool for women to be strong!’ and boasting my new alleged sense of self love and healthy lifestyle.
I hated myself more than ever, and I had a terribly unhealthy relationship with my body.
Symptoms of anorexia and orthorexia, like I have described, are tragically often romanticized, and I have seldom felt shame when sharing my battle with restriction symptoms. The media, particularly social media (I’m looking at you Tumblr, TikTok… and Gwyneth Paltrow) has made restricting disorders seem desirable and sometimes sexy. Though this rhetoric is sick and twisted, it releases some of the stigma of restricting-type disorders. What I have refrained from sharing with almost everyone in my life is my battle with purging as an eating disorder symptom.
I began struggling with purging around sophomore year in college when another shift happened for me. This was when I decided I really did, deep down, want to restrict less and enjoy life more, as body positivity and neutrality movements gained traction. I wanted to recover. I started going out to eat with people more. I was going out to parties more. I was indulging in foods I hadn’t touched in years. How wonderful, theoretically… Until the guilt and shame, that which diet culture has ingrained in me deeply since birth, kicked in. Feelings of regret for enjoying pleasurable food. Thoughts of how much exercise or restricting I would have to do to “burn this off”. And from those feelings of body shame began multiple years of a battle with a purging eating disorder.
There is a lot of stigma around bulimia, restricting and purging anorexia, and other purging disorders because it is simply not as glamorous. It doesn’t fit as well into what diet culture has presented as normal restricting and fatphobia. Starving oneself is beautiful, and vomiting is gross, right? And it is. It is an awful disorder. It has caused hormonal imbalances in my body, destroyed the enamel in my teeth, and caused daily bouts of extreme nausea after eating even after ceasing symptom use.
I also can’t begin to quantify all the time and energy and happiness that my eating disorder has stolen from me. And I would not wish an eating disorder on my worst enemy.
… And so what? What’s the point of all of this? It’s all a bit of a downer.
But the point is that I am not alone in struggling with these symptoms and under the soul-sucking reign of diet culture. It’s thought that 10-15% of individuals in the US suffer with some sort of serious eating disorder at some point in their lives. And diet culture, which contributes to eating disorders more than anything else, is still alive and well. It’s about time we start dismantling that.
The latest chapter of my journey with body and food has taken place in the workplace, funny enough. I have been so incredibly lucky to have worked at The Emily Program as an Eating Disorder Technician since my graduation from college. By this I mean, I work at a residential treatment facility for adults with eating disorders on a clinical team, supporting clients through their recovery. This might seem like an interesting choice of employment for an individual who struggled/struggles with an eating disorder (recovery can be a lifelong process) - but this job has truly changed my life and my relationship with my body.
Working in this field has helped me dismantle ideologies that I didn’t even have words for. I have made many a realization, including -
My internalized fatphobia, my fear of becoming “fat”, has stripped the joy from my life for more than half of my years on this earth
Diet culture is a gimmick and plays upon insecurity - very intentionally, might I add, as it is a multi-billion dollar industry
Living in a larger body is not a bad thing - it does not make you undesirable, and it does not make you unhealthy, and it does not make you any less of a person
Calories are not the enemy, and cutting calories is nothing more than a way to say restricting energy to live life
Food groups do not have moral virtue, and there is no “bad” food
I have come to the conclusion that my clients are the strongest people I have ever met. I have seen how eating disorders are in no way a choice. I have learned how you can’t tell someone has an eating disorder by looking at them. I have been shown how eating disorders don’t discriminate - they affect all ages, all genders, all races, all walks of life - and are in no way exclusive to white, cisgendered, teenage women. I have witnessed how the aftermath of a triggering post, a comment by a family member, or the subtle ideas promoted by diet and wellness culture can affect someone for years after. I have seen how eating disorders can take away lives entirely.
So I guess the point is - we are in a culture that makes it incredibly difficult to have a healthy relationship with our bodies and food; and everyone deserves to find peace here. And I am hoping that by beginning to destigmatize this illness, and to break down the harmful ideas perpetuated by diet culture, that we can all begin to separate our worth from the bodies we live in. We are so much more than the vessels we exist in, or what we ate today. I am so, so much more than this, and so are we all.
And: help is out there. You don’t need to fit into any box to seek treatment for an eating disorder, and it’s never too late or early to get help. It’s as good a time as any to start making peace with food. Life is too short, and you are worth it.
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline
https://www.emilyprogram.com/for-families/get-help/
