Disordered A Deepeer Look Into My Relationship With Food

disordered

a deeper look at my fluctuating relationship with food

By Perri Moran

My earliest memory of my troubling relationship with food comes from age six or seven. At that age, my parents fed me and I was never responsible for making my own food. My family ate a pretty standard diet for the early 2000’s: PB&J on whole grain, grilled cheese and Campbell’s tomato soup and Annie’s boxed mac and cheese — a healthier alternative to Kraft.

However, on the particular night in question, my mom left dinner duty to my dad, who was not feeling up to the task of putting a pizza in the oven for me and my brother.

“I’m hungry,” I told him, as we stood in the kichen. He thought for a moment, then his eyes widened and with a grin, he said, “pig out!”

Essentially, he was telling me to go into the pantry and be self-sufficient. For 6- or 7-year-old Perri, this was huge. Never had I been allowed to take things from the refrigerator or pantry without asking or being moderated.

I recall the next part of this memory as if it’s Augustus Gloop’s scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; in slow motion, I shove sliced ham, string cheese, Oreo cookies, wheat thins, potato chips and whatever else looked appealing into my mouth, barely taking a moment to chew before my next mouthful.

Over the next decade of my life, as I became increasingly self-sufficient with food, I found myself doing this more and more. I grew up in a “finish what’s on your plate” kind of family. I don’t necessarily blame that rule for this, but as I got older, I often found myself overeating to the point of discomfort.

It was at this point that my disordered relationship with food began.

When I hear the phrase “eating disorder,” the first thing that comes to my mind is starving oneself, being at an unhealthily low weight or binging and purging. That’s not an uncommon correlation.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, eating disorders are “behavioral conditions characterized by severe and persistent disturbance in eating behaviors and associated distressing thoughts and emotions.” (Psychology.org)

However, eating disorders are not just anorexia and bulimia. Several other eating disorders exist, including Binge Eating Disorder, Other Specified Feeding and Eating Disorder and Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID).

And then, alternatively, there is the more recently recognized idea of disordered eating, and disordered eating can look a lot different from what comes to mind at the

first mention of “eating disorders.”

Dr. Cassie Vanderwall, a registered dietitian nutritionist, UW-Madison teaching faculty member and former clinici

in the UW health system explained what disordered eating means.

“Disordered eating is different [from eating disorders]. It’s not described as much because it can just be an alteration in one’s relationship or the way they use food to try to control their body,” Vanderwall said.

Disordered eating overall is typically less severe than eating disorders but for this reason can be more com-mon. According to Temimah Zucker, a licensed master social worker, “the level of obsession around eating disorder thoughts and behaviors can distinguish disordered eating from an eating disorder.”

When I started considering that my eating habits weren’t the healthiest, I began exploring what “disordered eating” could look like. I often dismissed my personal concerns bcause of what I knew eating disorders to be from the popular media: anorexia and bulimia. I blamed myself for being gluttonous and lazy as my weight slowly climbed higher and my pants grew tighter.

For some reason, no matter what I did to try and eat healthier, I would always find myself reaching for the extra helping, snacking when I didn’t need to, or eating to the point of discomfort if it meant finishing what was on my plate.

Things changed for me a little bit around age 16. At the time, my mom worked for a Madison-area farm sanctuary and I often accompanied her to her trips to the barn. In 2015, two calves were rescued. After meeting them, I vowed to never consume an animal product again. However, with my staple comfort foods (Annie’s mac & cheese, black bean nachos, grilled cheese and tomato soup) out of the question, I began to get experimental with my food choices.

I also fell deep into the hole of toxic vegan culture: the one that preached that veganism was the only way to be healthy, the best way to reduce your footprint and the primary criteria for being a good person (yikes — I know). But after a few months had passed and my acne hadn’t cleared up, I hadn’t lost weight and my eating habits in terms of volume of food hadn’t changed, I started to think that maybe adhering to a new diet wasn’t going to solve all my problems.

In 2020, I attempted to use Noom, the weight loss program that uses psychology to help form new habits and be a more conscious eater. I felt confident that this time it would be different: I wouldn’t be counting calories or not allowing myself an Oreo cookie once in a while. To my delight, after a month or two, I was ten pounds down, but at what cost?

I was more hyper-fixated on food than ever, obsessed with labeling every food red, yellow or green, logging each ingredient of each meal in exact quantities into my app and feeling immense guilt if I had eaten too many red foods at the end of the day. I made the decision to stop Noom because of how obsessive it caused me to be about what I was eating, despite the weight loss.

I was frustrated, disappoint ed and defeated.

I didn’t understand why Noom could work for so many people, yet exacerbate my problem with food.

“It’s when that knowledge starts to evolve really into a rule and starts to control our food choices that I think it gets a little messy,” Vanderwall said regarding weight loss programs like Noom.

So what’s the answer then? How can people break their habits of disordered eating in a healthy way? The truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

Erika Anna, a registered dietitian nutritionist and UW-Madison teaching faculty, describes eating as “very personal.”

“A healthful relationship is very much self-identified,” Anna said. “I’m very careful as a dietitian not to say, ‘Oh, this is what healthful eating or a good relationship with food looks like,’ because it’s very self-determined.”

Overall, though, one thing wide-

ly acknowledged by nutrition experts is intuitive eating.

“The intuitive principle basically says ‘reject diet mentality’,” Vanderwall said. “Reject that there’s just one way that fits all, or that eating in restriction is the way to health.”

Intuitive eating is a very natural, secure way to approach eating: it’s as simple as eating when you’re hungry, and stopping when you are no longer hungry.

“It gets back to honoring your hunger and knowing your body so well that you know when it needs food vs when it wants food to satisfy a non-nutrition need,” Vanderwall said.

Of course, in today’s fast paced and structured world, we can’t always choose the times we eat when we have a 30 minute lunch break at noon or 15 minutes for snack before a four-hour seminar. But doing our best to listen to what our bodies need and giving ourselves permission to nourish our bodies when they need nutrients is one of the best things we can do for ourselves.

I’ve adopted mindful, intuitive eating as an everyday practice and have felt so much more satiated, comfortable, and content in my relationship with food than ever. I took Dr. Vanderwall’s general advice: that self-acceptance is one of the most important aspects to having a healthy relationship with food.

By looking at why we eat the way we eat, we can begin to unlearn negative and unhealthy messages that we may have picked up from our family culture and society, and start to accept our bodies for what they are: vessels that we must care for to protect what’s inside.

“Self acceptance is one of the most important aspects to having a healthy relationship with food.”