Self-destruction might make a statement, but you won’t be there to see it
Eating disorders and an everlasting obsession with food. Part 1 of 2.
I ran food and worked expo at an upscale American restaurant in college. I would arrive for dinner service around 3:30 pm, having just run 5 miles along the Genessee River—home, shower, coffee, cigarette, then straight to the pass. Throughout my shift, I’d steal about eight Marcona almonds from a prep container in the garde manger, squirreling them away in my cheeks and eating each nut over a few minutes, passing them around in my mouth and taking tiny nibbles as they tumbled around like shoes in an otherwise empty dryer. I’d watch the line cooks with greedy, yearning eyes as they fired the dishes I’d just called out, wishing I were on the receiving end. Each plate I laid on a guest’s table felt like an excruciating goodbye; I became obsessed with food, even though I’d obliterated my ability to feel hunger.
Now that we’re one week into the new year, the typical American will have already been exposed to hundreds of ads from the goliath health & wellness industry, peddling infinitude transactions for products that’ll allegedly boost one to peak health, injections for instant skinny, diet, and workout plans promising, always promising, a beautiful, smaller, optimized body. The body your mama gave you is to be shed—you are mired in the muck of Western beauty standards and are compelled to defend your body from nourishment. Here I go spouting platitudes. I just thought we were past this, though Golden Globes red carpet highlights prove that was misguided logic. The “body positivity movement,” to quote Paula Froelich on the wicked return of heroin chic, “which is meant to celebrate all physiques no matter how big or small, was built on wishful thinking.”
For those struggling with (and I’ll use the stark label here) an eating disorder, the holidays, and this subsequent flood of New Year's chatter can be a high tightrope walk. This might seem an obvious statement to those who’ve struggled with an ED, but not so apparent to those who take heart in the mantra “calories don’t count” during a holiday. For someone who has systematically dismantled their relationship with food and repressed their hunger cues, the prospect of inescapable indulgence can feel extremely precarious—another’s offhand comment about their fullness sets off gnawing guilt about that piece of pie you enjoyed, and a vow to work out extra hard tomorrow. Trying to celebrate, especially after this election cycle, could see a binge bubble over, one you’d hoped to keep contained but must now purge.
The mid-aughts, when I came up, were bloated with portraits of the sad and the skinny, the ethereal and the damned; The O.C.’s Marissa Cooper, Blair in Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, I’ve blacked out most of Skins - the disenchanted girl, always a girl, who wanted to take up less space, needed to control something, anything, told to eat a cheeseburger after pleading for help (thank you, Chuck Bass), idolized and emulated by teens on Tumblr, written into tragic oblivion in a later season, martyrs for those of us of tortured teenage mind and body, burning out in an inferno fanned by substance abuse and boy problems. These depictions, cliche as some were, contextualized eating disorders squarely within thinness, whiteness, and privileged adolescence, and led to the misconception¹ that these afflictions are a kind of warped pursuit of purity in a country with an overconsumption problem where so many go hungry through no motivation of their own.
Eating disorders are savagely complex diseases and have one of the highest all-cause mortality rates of any mental illness. I am reluctant to continue speaking in binaries; while anorexia and bulimia are the most well-known, Binge Eating Disorder, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), and Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder (OSFED), all make up the spectrum of these diseases. These diseases are prevalent—approximately 9% of the U.S. population will experience one within their lifetimes—but are often suffered silently, from shame, or fear of intervention. Eating disorders have an outsized impact on groups that bear the brunt of medical misdiagnoses and barriers to care in the US, namely women, people of color, queer people, the chronically ill, and low-income communities.
From the parapets of these barriers, insurers demand biological “proof” of illness (low weight threshold, dysfunctional liver or kidneys) to cover ED treatment; this is the only mental illness class treated this way by insurers². “This is especially and painfully true for patients who never present as underweight at all,” explains Emmeline Clein in her book Dead Weight. “Less than 6 percent of people with eating disorders are medically underweight, yet most insurers require an underweight BMI to approve treatment.” This diktat drives the alarming statistic that only around 10 percent of people struggling with eating disorders ever receive treatment³.
Neither the head rush of dominating your body with the power of your mind, nor relinquishing the guilt of eating into the nearest receptacle are the reasons one participates in their ritual self-destruction. These are custodial and all-consuming afflictions, full of tumultuous yearning for a thing you cannot have, of compensatory self-flagellation after you have the thing.
Zoe Denenberg writes about how extreme control can poison a life as her eating disorder peaked while working back-of-house at a restaurant. “I subsisted on coffee, rice cakes, and protein bars. I withdrew from social situations, snapped at friends and family, and always had a headache. My blood sugar could plummet on a dime… my palate indiscriminate, my hunger and fullness cues utterly obliterated.” For me, it was also coffee (years enough to ravage the lining of my then-empty stomach), cigarettes, zucchini, and, if I exercised hard enough, a little bit of quinoa. Food, and hunger, were something to overcome. Those around me were another factor to be controlled. My warped body, a body I would scream at in the mirror, was something to viscerally change.
I wrote about “the Custodian of Control” in an earlier essay, that dark impulse to forcibly categorize and scrub the brain’s natural impulses raw with rote restrictive behavior, altering them permanently. My days were spent accounting for every unit of energy consumed and burned, each logged item a pernicious little success. Relationships were compromised as my need to curb my body’s impulses took precedence over people. I watched my frail body shrink in the mirror, proud of my mind’s power over its bony cage. Light-headedness interpreted as meditative asceticism, judgment passed down on those who could not control their bodies as well as me. I was above food, I had mastered hunger and now laughed at its paltry pangs. I was 20 years old and dying a death by a thousand cuts, a thousand inadequate meals logged in MyFitnessPal. “In the thick of it, there’s no space or time for love, there’s only calories and light-headedness and a sense of purpose so pure it’s impossible, meaningless,” writes Clein. “A drive to self-destruction might make a statement, but you won’t be there to see it.”
This inextinguishable desire is what taught me to cook. Even as I became aware of that oft-summoned platitude—food as the great unifier, a source of warmth, a universal gift, an expression of love, blah blah blah—I continued to pine after food while starving myself. Yearning can lead to intensive learning (excuse this rhyme), and I found myself consuming food ephemera instead of food itself, steeping in obsession.
I would fall asleep nightly to Chef John of the YouTube channel, Food Wishes, watching his quippy and dad-humor-heavy recipe videos for anything from buffalo wings to baba ghanoush, a quarter cup of quinoa and half a zucchini jostling around in the pit of my desolate stomach. Picking up cooking fundamentals was a side effect, secondary to the voyeurism. I’d dream about arancini, a food which I’d never tried nor would have allowed myself to anyhow, imagining its texture, the craggy shell giving way to rich, cheesy risotto, imagining me lowering the rice ball into the fry oil, of handing a fresh one to a friend so that I might watch them eat, smiling at them as my abdomen sounded like a pitiful gong ringing alone.
Some cook large quantities of food to share with others, opting not to partake but to experience it vicariously through their guests, a semi-masochistic practice with so little reserved for the self. I would host dinner parties, thrown on the floor of my studio apartment in Rochester, NY, feeding my friends mediocre fried rice, a facsimile of my mother’s, who would make it for my sister and me after school back when I still allowed myself to eat. Seeing others partaking would alleviate my custodial duties and help render food safe again, temporarily. I’d allow myself a few bites here and there, which would remind me I had been slowly killing myself and needed to change course (the full road to recovery was all a bit longer than this, but I don’t like to think about where I could’ve gone without that reminder). The power of accountability is not to be underestimated. Denenberg captures all of this eloquently: “When it’s your job to feed everyone else, nobody ever suspects that you’re starving.”
Years out from the most restrictive of my compulsions, I take continued solace in sharing, both in conversation and food. I exhume all of this not because it’s the beginning of the year, though this period always has me reflecting on scars. After a recent conversation with a friend, I learned that this particular road was well-traveled; surmounting an eating disorder only to find the compulsion continuing—It’s strange how a life spent denying food can twist itself into one consumed by it; a path carved not toward escape but toward creation. And, at the risk of sounding precious, nourishment can become something to share, something to heal, something to finally understand.
It is a life lived still obsessed with food because food, that thing that was embargoed, counted, binged, and purged, was the only thing that was ever on our minds.
Part two of this series will document a recent conversation about this topic, careers in food, and motherhood with my friend Kate Ray, who writes the newsletter, soft leaves. I loved our conversation and I’m very excited to share it. She recently gave birth to her second child. Congratulations, Kate!
¹ Much of the research on EDs has been done with this misconception in mind, failing to account for those who hold marginalized identities
² Though specific to EDs, draconic and restrictive eligibility standards are nothing new for companies that maximize profits at the expense of people.
³ Treatment that, more often than not, exacerbates patients’ symptoms. Clein writes that the treatment obviously “includes weight restoration for many patients, but the constant, quantitative data collection patients are subjected to reinforces the numbers-focused logic of their disorders.” This is “an ethos driven home further by the constant trickle of patients from the facility, sent home before they are mentally ready because their bodies no longer look sick enough.” When a patient’s body no longer meets insurer criteria, they are sent home at a critical point in their treatment—out of immediate physical danger, patients now must navigate the gauntlet of their minds, alone. This often throws them into a cycle of relapse and continuing harm—insurers classify these patients as “failures”. For some this proves a steep challenge to receive additional care; for others, this consigns them to death.