I believe that society has a disordered relationship with food.
Few of us grow up with a wholesome approach to nourishment.
We don’t know how to eat intuitively.
Contradicting messages about food and body image are thrust in our face at every digital twist and dinner part turn.
It is ‘normal’ to eat foods that could outlive our elderly relatives.
The ‘wellness’ industry relies on us believing that one diet, one product, one program, is the silver, life-changing bullet.
What’s eating Rach?
I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at the age of fourteen and denied this label every step of the way.
If ever I did utter the words ‘I have anorexia’, I’d feel physically ill – like I was lying or, at the very least, not telling the whole truth.
It didn’t make sense to me.
I loved food.
I adored cooking.
Reading nutrition books and magazines was my idea of ‘fun’.
I had no intention to starve myself and I didn’t think I was fat.
How could I have ‘anorexia’.
At 23 years of age, after almost a decade of exploring the dynasty of disordered eating, earning my degree in Nutritional and Dietetic Medicine with the intention of spending the rest of my life healing people’s relationships with their food, bodies and bowels, and even writing a book on the subject, I finally had the words to articulate what I think went wrong and why we still have a long way to go with both preventing and treating disordered relationships with survival.
A wee history lesson.
I was eleven when my relationship with food became complicated.
I had just hit puberty and was heavily into sport.
The more I practised my various tricks – running, tennis and gymnastics to name a few – the better I got and the more validation I received from my school, my peers and, most importantly, my dad.
Then my grandma died. And my mum started dating for the first time since she and my dad had separated when I was four.
As a growing girl undertaking hours of strenuous exercise most days – most of which was being fuelled by cookies, cake and corn chips – I eventually lost my mojo.
I was grieving, processing enormous change in my home life and basing my self worth on external validation.
I didn’t feel safe or secure and to add insult to injury, I didn’t have the nutritional means to stay strong. And so, I developed depression.
A bit of a pickle.
A common symptom of depression is severe appetite loss.
This was problematic.
As a life-long foodie, eating was a hobby.
I was known for my appetite. I could eat more pancakes than any of my cousins. I always won the chocolate eating competitions at birthday parties. If my parents wanted to bribe me, all they had to do was offer to buy me a hotdog or an ice-cream and I’d usually oblige.
I had no energy to keep up with my sports and my weight plummeted. Somewhere within this time I developed a crippling autoimmune condition, that wouldn’t be diagnosed for another three years.
Between the hormonal effects of depression messing with my appetite and the autoimmune disease that was slowly eating away at my digestive system, I began to play games with my food.
Let’s play a food game.
You see, I still wanted to enjoy my food.
I didn’t want to cut anything out or have food group restrictions.
I learned that if I let myself go hungry for several hours, then come mealtimes, I could eat a decent serve.
I could still eat rich foods, if I ate a low-fat diet the rest of the time.
In my mind, it seemed logical.
To the outside world, it seemed disordered.
Delusional dietetics.
I began seeing a dietitian who taught me to override my natural hunger cues and eat according to guidelines, as opposed to intuition.
I also changed schools, which, for a brief period, lifted me out of my depression and helped restore my appetite to a functional level.
Alas, as time went by, my autoimmune hepatitis stepped up it’s game plan. The liver is a miraculous organ – not that I knew much about it at the time (if only I’d had this resource). It helps us burn fat, manufacture hormones, sustain muscle mass and store energy.
Guess what happens when you eat according to rules and timeframes and have a liver that is slowly dying?
Phrase 1: you pack on a few kilos, a result of a weight-gain meal strategy – that will supposedly stimulate your sleepy sex glands – and an impaired ability to burn fat. Side note: when the liver is weak, the body ain’t in no mood for impregnation.
Phrase 2: you lose the ability to store the excess energy (muscle wastage and liver destruction will do that), and also, those initial kilos. Your appetite is erratic. You wake up at 5am craving toast with jam. You find yourself binging (without purging) and worry about your lack of self-control. Little do you realise that this is a survival mechanism, designed to sustain your blood sugar levels.
Phrase 3: you finally get diagnosed with said autoimmune condition (after it becomes apparent that you are eating more than most humans, and even then, struggling to maintain your body weight).
All restrictions are lifted and no longer are you expected to eat in accordance to anyone else’s schedule.
Freedom (not really).
For the first time in three years, no one is forcing you to eat a small meal before you go for so much as a walk. The freedom is liberating. And sometimes (though you’re not proud to admit it) you eat less than you know you should, just because you bloody well can.
You still have an inability to tolerate fats, so you eat the lowest fat diet you can sustain, so that when your best friend has a birthday party, you can eat the pizza and ice cream cake without spending the better half of the evening chained to the toilet.
Your appetite is still erratic. Your ability to store energy is diminished. Your digestive capacity diminishes with every passing day.
The situation (not the human psyche) is disordered.
So many questions.
I had no idea what was happening to me.
Why did I need to play games just to get enough food in?
Why was my appetite erratic?
How could I feel hungry, nauseous, dizzy, determined, itchy, apathetic, angry, tired, restless, bloated, emaciated, hot and cold all at once?
Welcome to cirrhosis, immune suppression and high-dose steroid treatment Rachie-poo. The traumatic possibilities are endless.
You call this recovery?
Enter a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa.
Bed rest. Feeding tube. Non-negotiable meal plan. Rules. Restrictions. Doctors and therapists who only want to talk about food.
When you confess that your digestive system feels broken, instead of employing logic and saying ‘ah, yes, liver disease will do that to a human’, you are told that digestive discomfort is part of recovery.
You should’ve thought about this before you starved yourself.
In my defence.
But not once did I throw up.
I ate three meals and three snacks a day by my own free will.
Okay, so I followed a low fat regime and ate modest portion sizes so that I could indulge when I wanted to, but, honestly, it’s 2011. What female doesn’t do that? And they don’t even have a liver disease!
No, no. They’d reply. You have a voice in your head that is trying to sabotage you. Here, have another liquid breakfast drink and be the compliant skeleton we understand you to be.
I’m a survivor.
Thankfully, I survived this period of my life by being the compliant skeleton that everyone understood me to be.
My hands were tied. I was fourteen, had no medical freedom and my only way forward was surrendering to a system that I had come to realise was the textbook definition of disordered.
Why only I could see this, I still wasn’t sure.
Let’s skip ahead.
If you want to know exactly how the next decade of my life panned out, including how I healed my relationship with food (anorexia be gone) and put my autoimmune hepatitis into remission, you will find all the juicy details – complete with healing recipes for the likes of chocolate-chip cookie dough and self-saucing chocolate pudding – in what is arguably this century’s funniest biological bible.
It’s a new dawn.
In the year 2020 – long after this saga began in 2007 – I had an epiphany. When you get treated for disordered eating – be it anorexia, orthorexia, bulimia, binge-eating disorder or an eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) – the treatment itself is disordered.
Why? Because the body is not a calculator.
From the time we are born, we eat intuitively.
Our mums don’t have to do anything special to ensure that their breast milk is ‘balanced’. Their bodies just know what we, their bambinos, need and produce that sweet titty juice accordingly.
As babes, we cry when we are hungry and stop when we are full.
We don’t guzzle because we’re cognitively aware of our current weight class or metabolic rate. We simply scream bloody murder when we want the boob to pop on out and greedily latch on.
Then, when we are done, we nonchalantly unlatch from Mumsy bear’s bosom, burping our tokens of gratitude.
This pattern persists until the day we decide to give the chest a rest and move on to a life of mastication (chewing – that was not a typo).
It’s not an exact science. It’s instinct.
Repeat after me; “I am NOT a calculator”.
Whether a disordered relationship with food stems from body image woes (enter a misunderstood stereotype, stage right) or a seperate condition; anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorder, autoimmunity or digestive distress, a blanket treatment prevails.
Our height, weight, age and activity levels are entered into a machine.
The machine spits out nutritional targets and a goal weight.
We are given a plan to meet these ‘goals’, even if it goes against our better judgement or, worse, perpetuates the root cause of whatever interrupted our love affair with nourishment in the first place.
The most ordered relationship we can have with food is one where we eat real ingredients, those we enjoy, when we enjoy them.
If there’s any fixation at all, it has a positive connotation.
Like your mates knowing that the way to your heart is through a jar of natural peanut butter.
And yet nutritional science (and software) says no. You need to eat X at Y time because the calculator said so.
I believe that this calculating (pun intended) approach to eating disorder recovery is creating even more disordered eating. I often say;
If you don’t actually have an eating disorder when you are initially treated for one, you’ll emerge from so-called ‘treatment’ with a whole host of foodie fears and hang-ups.
Why? Because the root cause has not been addressed.
Starvation, food games, binging, purging or an apathetic response to mealtimes is not the root cause. It’s the symptom.
I am not a calculator. I am a human being.
No professional was able to help me heal because not one of them knew how to treat me as a whole person.
They wanted me to gain weight, eat what a rubric of guidelines said I ‘needed’ to eat because of my age and gender and then eat more when I exercised. Forever and ever, Amen.
No consideration for my liver disease or the fact that this all started because I was depressed, lost my appetite and adored food so much that I would do anything to ensure that I still found it enjoyable.
Freedom (yes, really).
As soon as my liver began to recover and I felt comfortable in my own skin, my disordered relationship with food resolved itself.
No hypnosis.
No behavioural therapies.
No psychiatric drugs – which my GP suggested at one point because (wait for it) I wanted to eat eggs, avocado and veggies for breakfast instead of toast and cereal. I wish I was joking.
Just an understanding of how my glorious body worked and what it was instinctively crying out for.
It also helped to know that I had complete autonomy.
As I mentioned, in the early days, I would occasionally eat less than I felt like. Not to be ‘skinny’ and not because a sinister voice in my head had hijacked my brain, but because I yearned to rebel against the last three years of food diaries and being told that ‘if I would just eat a bit more’, then all of my problems would be solved.
In reality, I’d eat more, gain the weight and the goal posts would then move because my uterine lining still wasn’t shedding.
Modern dietetics suggests that we eat from a template.
I suggest that we eat from the heart.
Food alone doesn’t heal an eating disorder.
That said, learning to listen to our instincts and witnessing the power of intuitive nutritional medicine firsthand, makes us less vulnerable to using food (or a lack thereof) as a crux when the going gets tough.
If you need support.
Please learn more about my (non-confrontational, calculator-free) eating disorder recovery service here. I will help you heal whatever it is that is eating YOU (or your child) alive. Judgement -free.
I created this manual to help you heal your relationship with food and body image. It is an affordable resource that allows you to heal at your own pace, in your own time. It’s simple. But it works. I promise.
If you have deep-seated trauma from being a victim of a system that is more disordered than the condition it intended to treat, I offer an eating disorder treatment-induced trauma recovery service.