Earlier this month, the team over at This Is… independent magazine released their fall issue, centered on a theme near and dear to my heart: recovery, with a sub-topic of adulting. I took this broad but personal topic to share some real talk about the kind of relationship I’ve had with food for the better part of 15 years. Hit the link below my excerpt to be taken to read or order this issue on the home page of This Is…, or scroll for the abbreviated text.
A college friend from out of town, my boyfriend’s former roommate, came to visit us over the summer. He’s a talented home cook whose Instagram feed is populated with his various culinary adventures creating everything from meat substitutes to fusion cuisine. Naturally, during the week he crashed on our foldout couch, he wanted us to feel no pressure to take him out to eat.
“We can cook a few meals together with whatever you have,” he said. Then he saw our fridge in all its sad, empty glory: it held only iced coffee, oat milk, half a stick of butter, and an amount of LaCroix that no household of fewer than six people should have any business hoarding.
This was a common state for me. When I lived alone, I’d go through periods of time when I’d be inspired in the kitchen after seeing a cool dish on a blog. A handful of weeks a year, I’d churn out a stupid volume of fig and fontina paninis, iced lavender chai cookies, and even a few ill-advised Charlotte Russe desserts. In between these flurries of activity, however, there would be…nothing. The fridge would contain, at most, half a dozen eggs, a milk substitute, and a package or two of pre-cut, pre-washed vegetables. And in my kitchen drawers: a dull knife, one cheap pot, one cheap pan, and an ancient spatula.
I think friends and family assume that I have a poorly stocked kitchen and a set of cooking implements that look like Fisher-Price toys because I’m a lazy adult who never grew up and can’t be bothered to cook. The uncomfortable truth is that I’ve had a difficult relationship with food and have spent every year of my young adulthood trying to recover from it.
“I’m not sure when I first became aware of food and body being connected in a consequential way. It was probably a constellation of childhood or preteen moments all interconnected”
I’m not sure when I first became aware of food and body being connected in a consequential way. It was probably a constellation of childhood or preteen moments all interconnected: the time someone told me my favorite foods were fattening, the time a friend’s mom unfavorably compared my body and eating habits to her daughter’s, the time a friend said we should skip lunches together (and we did). Maybe it was those moments combined with the fashion magazines I consumed in the early aughts, all packed full of ribs and clavicles.
But tracing the earliest sources of my food issues is a meaningless exercise because so many elements have fed into them over the years that nothing can be disentangled. What’s more critical to recovery is to know how those issues impact physical and mental health. Across the span of my teenage years and beyond, I developed quirks and rituals meant to stave off what was, at the time, my biggest fear in the world: gaining weight.
Most of those rituals were easily disguised as health-conscious habits and didn’t look suspicious to observers. Terrified of restaurant food, I’d gulp down a glasses of ice-cold water to make me too full to eat – but who could fault me for staying hydrated? Obsessed with minimizing intake, I started a food journal to itemize what I ate each day in high school – but who could fault me for mindful eating? In college, I’d get mean and cranky on days I couldn’t squeeze in an hour or two of HIIT at the gym because of coursework – but who could fault me for having a steady fitness routine?
Other rituals were harder to rationalize. At one of my lowest points as a teen, I collaged clippings of bony figures from my old fashion magazines as if to tell myself, “This could be you if you tried hard enough!” In college, with the advent of Pinterest, my collaging habits worsened. My food diary escalated into a meticulously kept Excel spreadsheet of calories in, calories out. After college, everything I perceived as a binge (read: normal, reasonable indulgences) had to be balanced out the next day with dramatically reduced consumption.
The tipping point came after I took stock of just how much of my life was getting eaten up – pardon the word choice – by food. Daily, my thoughts were almost entirely occupied by food worries. I measured the passage of time in a day meal-by-meal. I’d cancel plans based on how fat I did or didn’t feel at the time. At the store, I’d buy the same ten “safe” items (a combination of fruit, fish, vegetables, and low-calorie drinks) over and over. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I’d scroll through photos of comfort food that were off-limits. Even in moments of indulgence, I’d run through an internal script of self-punishment: “You have no discipline. This is why you can’t lean out.” It would suck the fun out of eating, which would make me feel terrible, which would make me self-comfort with food, which would start the cycle all over again.
My visiting friend’s shock at the state of my pantry and fridge was my most recent major reality check. Until he expressed his amazement, it hadn’t occurred to me that my ill-equipped kitchen was in any way dysfunctional. My empty fridge was a tool of avoidance: a way for me not to take full ownership of what and how I eat. All of my at-home food habits, including subsisting off of energy bars and low-calorie microwaveable things, not stocking my kitchen, and not having the right equipment, were results of an unconscious desire to think about food as little as possible, and to make sure that scraping together a meal in my own home would be as difficult as possible.
Although I’d been taking steps toward recovery for a number of years already by the time of my friend’s visit, that moment made me realize how much work I still have to do.
Recovery is a big undertaking. I’m still learning how to be a functional adult and caregiver to myself in this area, which involves consciously shedding destructive habits and adopting healthier ones. Along the way, it has helped me massively to read widely, talk to professionals, and get support from trusted friends. In particular, I can’t stress how important emotional support from female friends can be. We’re a demographic that’s been force-fed decades of commercial messages that we should aspire mainly to be thin and beautiful – so why not band together in rejecting those messages? There’s something quietly revolutionary in that.
“My empty fridge was a tool of avoidance: a way for me not to take full ownership of what and how I eat. ”
Seven key practices and perspectives adopted from my readings and conversations have gotten me through the worst of my food issues over the past few years. If you’re like me and find yourself on a long and bumpy road to food and body image recovery, may the suggestions below be a map of sorts for you:
1. Be flexible with routines and habits. It’s true that it’s easier to be and stay healthy if you cultivate consistency in diet and exercise, but it pays to be reasonably flexible with those habits. If you’re on vacation and can’t get to the weight room for five days, or if you’re at the store and some chips call your name, that’s totally okay. Cultivating good habits doesn’t mean that you never, ever deviate from plan, and being too rigid will be unsustainably stressful in the long run. A little flexibility and self-forgiveness will go a long way in terms of mental health.
2. Find ways to make food feel joyful in your daily life. If you’ve spent years feeling anxious about meals, try introducing new rituals to offset the old ones, thereby decoupling negativity from making food. Your mileage and preferences may vary, of course, but for me, it helps to add beautiful and/or useful things to my cooking space: a cute dishtowel, fridge magnets, a toaster and kettle that match the appliances. The more positive I feel about my kitchen space, the more comfortable I become with using it.
3. Heed your emotional responses. In the past, each time I started a new diet, I’d feel great for three weeks before my mood took a nosedive. I’d get anxious and irritable while trying to stay the course, and when I inevitably slipped up, I’d berate myself, thinking there was something wrong with me. But our emotional responses to nutrition are actually 100% worth heeding. If a routine is making you feel worse, that’s because your mind and body feel deprived, and said routine is not right for you, regardless of how many celebrities may swear by it. A healthy and sustainable routine that is right for you doesn’t require sacrificing physical or mental health.
4. Don’t weigh yourself – or just weigh yourself infrequently, without dwelling on numbers. It helps me to never weigh myself at all, because a numerical reading can’t tell you anything about your metabolism, muscle tone, or nutritional intake. But if you do prefer to track your weight, know that there’s not a lot of value to doing it very frequently. Weight can fluctuate wildly and rapidly even under normal circumstances. Plus, frequent weigh-ins can add unnecessary emotional pressure.
5. Filter your social media feeds. No matter how much progress I’ve made toward being mature and mindful about food and body image, seeing my favorite bloggers post photo after photo of their salads and bikini bodies on Instagram can still knock me down a little. Rather than go cold turkey on social media, which would prevent me from keeping up with friends and artists I enjoy, I periodically unfollow or at least mute feeds that I know can derail me. Over time, their impact upon me has lessened as a result.
6. Consume “fitspiration” content critically. While there’s value in getting a wealth of fitness and diet tips from coaches and content creators on Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest, not all fitspiration comes from a good place. For every one trainer who is genuinely invested in health, there are a few who are peddling weird supplements, encouraging extreme behavior, or asking you to fixate on looks. Ditch any fitspiration source that embodies those red flags. They’re not looking out for your best interests.
7. Know that you don’t have a responsibility to eat or diet a certain way for anyone. All that guilt that you and I might feel about having dessert or a side of fries is understandable (thank you, years of toxic diet messaging directed at women)…but misguided. Save your guilt for real mistakes and real obligations. If you promised to take your cousin to her swim meet and then forgot to do it, should you feel guilty? Yeah, you messed up. But if you ate ice cream after dinner, should you feel guilty? Hell no. Who exactly are you letting down? If you want a scoop of ice cream, you can have a scoop of ice cream!
None of this is to say that full recovery is imminent or even on the horizon. It’s a process, and I still go back and forth with alarming speed. There are amazing days when I feel like my food and physical insecurities are as far behind me as the retreating road in a rearview mirror. Other days, all I want to do is lie on the couch, scroll on my phone, and complain to my cat about how I’ll never have the willpower to eat as responsibly as Miranda Kerr seems to do each day. I swing between adding a burger and fries to a cocktail order, and ordering a fashion model-recommended supply of prepped meals that will help me rebalance my life and “eat clean.” I still jump from fad workout to fad workout, hoping that one will eventually click with my body. It’s all giving me more than a little emotional whiplash.
The good news is, I’ve outgrown my most troubling behaviors, and things are looking up. I’m sharing delicious meals and wonderful conversations with friends and family without rejecting every dish or falling into a dark mood for hours afterward. I’m letting go of food guilt. I’m curbing any unhelpful online content I consume. And I’m learning for the first time what a responsible adult’s kitchen needs – a real knife, better cookware, herbs and spices, a variety of fresh ingredients – and knowing that it’s time to take healthy ownership of what and how I eat. I’m feeling less and less weird, by the day, about food.