My Eating, Disordered

It’s 4pm, and I’ve only had a small breakfast. I fell asleep before I finished my morning coffee and woke up in the afternoon.

Hunger, you see, makes you tired. But I wasn’t hungry because I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast. I was hungry from the night before, when I ravenously ate whatever I could get my hands on to sate a gnawing need. I had that gnawing need because I’d hardly eaten until dinner that night. And I’d hardly eaten because I’m the product of a culture that looks at self-starvation and says, “good girl.”

I’ve dieted since I was maybe ten or eleven years old. I’ve always wanted to be skinnier, even when I was at my healthiest. It didn’t matter that I was pushing myself daily in an athletics program, or that I was eating healthy foods wherever I could. That bit of extra weight on my tummy never left, and neither did the feelings of guilt.

Now that bit of extra weight is a lot of extra weight, and I’m setting my focus on losing the guilt instead.

My eating habits have other ideas.

It doesn’t help that my specific flavour of ADHD makes me forget to eat, but what really doesn’t help is the thought at the back of my mind whenever I go a day without snacking, whenever I forget lunch. The thought sits at the back of my mind and purrs a sadistic sentence: “At this rate, you’ll be skinny in no time.”

I try to tell myself that starvation is never the answer. That this is a symptom of a mental disorder, not an admirable trait. In reality, it’s also the result of an eating disorder that’s been passed down mother-to-daughter for generations.

But I’m not completely starving myself. I don’t eat in excess and then purge. I only starve myself when it’s convenient and then binge when I can’t take the exhaustion, the faintness, the hunger anymore. Which, for a modern woman, is status quo.

And it’s still disordered. It’s just incredibly pervasive, and you almost can’t treat it on the individual level. The whole system is sick, and it needs a reboot.

Instead, we have a culture who views things like binge eating disorder not as results of an unhealthy society, but as gateways to an unhealthy fat body. When I’ve discussed the disorder with doctors, they never tell me to eat more during the day so that I have enough fuel. They just look at which medication they can add to my current cocktail to curb my attempts at righting the starvation in my body.

The problem with binge eating, yo-yo dieting, fad diets, and all of their ilk isn’t that you might rebound into being even fatter than you are now. It’s that those disordered eating patterns tax your body in themselves. It’s that they leave you faint and nauseous and exhausted and starved.

Thankfully, I’ve found light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve found dieticians who are more interested in food freedom than restriction. I’ve found doctors who will tell you that feeling tired is a sign of hunger, not a stepping stone to success. I’ve followed so many of these great folks on Instagram, like @thenutritiontea, @break.food.rules, and @no.food.rules. When you click on their profiles, you see that they’re actual damn doctors, not “health gurus”, and they actually want to help.

If there’s any takeaway from this article, it’s that I highly recommend finding people like these who will affirm that food is good for you and help you learn how to appreciate it again. After all, this article, with all of its epiphanies, was written as I stood on the shoulders of those who had the same epiphanies before me.

They’re the reason that I wrote this while eating a filling lunch. I could have chosen to wait until dinner. Instead, I chose to honour my body.