I have been dealing with disordered eating for about six years. For the first four of those six years, I didn't know what disordered eating is or realize the extent to which it affected my well-being. Despite its prevalence, disordered eating is not taught or talked about nearly as much as disorders like anorexia and bulimia are. Many people don't even know that disordered eating exists. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, disordered eating is defined as "a wide range of irregular eating behaviors that do not warrant a diagnosis of a specific eating disorder." The vagueness of that definition has always frustrated me and I find that it's easier to explain disordered eating by describing some of the common irregular eating behaviors, the most common of which for me were "feelings of guilt and shame when unable to maintain food and exercise habits, pre-occupation with food, body and exercise that causes distress and has a negative impact on quality of life, and compulsive or emotionally-driven eating." (Here's a great website that explains disordered eating further.) So how does disordered eating start? What should you do if you feel like you're experiecing it? And how can it be overcome? I will attempt to answer those questions using my own personal experience as a reference. Part 1: Childhood & High SchoolI was raised by two parents who are both great cooks and who both value the comfort, culture, and sense of community associated with food. Cooking meals from various cultures and sitting down to dinner together as a family has always been incredibly important to us. Luckily, I was taught the basics of healthy eating and being a conscious consumer from a young age. Our kitchen was stocked with mostly healthy foods. We didn't eat sugary cereals and things like chips and pop were rarities. Ironically, I have pinpointed this as the earliest contributor to my future eating issues. The lack of junk food in my childhood led me to underestimate the power of food addiction and made it incredibly difficult for me to control my portion sizes when I reached college and junk food became readily available to me. Seeing my brother struggle with weight gain throughout his teenage years and knowing that his friends made his weight the topic of many jokes also contributed to my fear of weight gain. I started noticeably gaining weight in high school. I had never dealt with disproportionate weight gain and was at an all girls private school where I wasn't thriving. Somehow I went from not thinking much about what I ate to thinking about (literally) every single piece of food that I consumed. I had always depended on sports to stay in shape, but that wasn't enough to keep weight off anymore and I was at a loss for what to do. At the end of my sophomore year, I quit eating meat cold turkey (pun intended) for animal rights reasons. Going vegetarian was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It has opened my eyes to hundreds of foods I might have never tried otherwise and has greatly increased the respect I have for where my food comes from, how it was produced, and the effect it has on our earth. Adopting a vegetarian lifestyle is what kickstarted my interest in clean, nutritionally balanced eating. At the beginning of my junior year I was not happy with my body. This became apparent to me when I transferred to public school where there was a greater emphasis on appearance. I decided to start following Weight Watchers points guidelines, knowing that it had worked for my mom in the past. I started eating portion controlled meals and focused on eating a lot of fruits and vegetables. There were many times when I reached the end of the day and realized I had only consumed 1,200 calories (that's not good), but I was never hungry and didn't deny myself the occasional splurge, so I didn't see anything wrong with that. Eating such few calories became normalized to me. Eventually, eating more than 1200-1500 calories in a day made me feel guilty. This was also around the time when I started running and going to the gym with a friend who was also trying to lose weight. I lost twenty pounds that year, entered into a relationship that would last three years, and reconnected with many friends I had lost touch with. My life was great, but I still wasn't satisfied with how I looked. The longer I stuck to Weight Watchers, the more restrictive I became with my diet and the longer I spent in the gym every day. Hindsight is always 20-20, which is why I can look back on photos from high school now and acknowledge the body dysmorphia that I was experiencing for what it was. High school is a bubble that doesn't accurately represent the "real world" and I was surrounded by friends who were either extremely fit or naturally thin. I felt like I had to keep going. The progress I made was never enough. I thought as long as I could reach my goal weight (a completely arbitrary number), I'd be happy with myself. This obsession and preoccupation with my body image meant that I didn't fully experience things as they happened. I struggled to truly live in the moment. A party was more about what food would be there and how I would avoid eating too much of it than about socializing with friends. At the time, I didn't see all the ways in which my obsession was holding me back. Part 2: The Freshman FourteenYep, you read it right. Despite being determined not to, I gained fourteen of the freshman fifteen. College proved to be a whole new monster in my battle with food. I simply didn't know how to control myself when junk food became readily available to me and I didn't realize how quickly it would impact my body. My parents had always taught me, "everything in moderation", but when it came to foods that I rarely got to eat, moderation went out the window. The addictive power of foods full of sugar or saturated fat became real to me and I started to understand how someone could become obese. The overwhelming emotion I recall feeling during this time was frustration. I exercised for an hour and a half every day and, though I occasionally ate junk food, I ate relatively healthy compared to my friends and didn't drink alcohol. Why could other people eat whatever they wanted with no noticeable consequences, but I couldn't? One of the worst things about my body dysmorphia and weight gain problems was the impact it had on my relationship. I was never worried about how my boyfriend viewed me; I knew his love for me went beyond my appearance. It was more about how I viewed myself and how my appearance made me feel when I was in public. There was really nothing my boyfriend could say to make me feel better. Telling me that I was beautiful the way I was didn't change the way I viewed myself. This proved to be understandably frustrating for him. This wasn't the reason we broke up, but it most certainly didn't positively contribute to the health of our relationship. That year, I spent a lot of time analyzing and criticizing my body, overthinking everything I ate, and feeling lost. I attempted to purge once and convinced myself that I had done it because I had eaten too much and felt sick, not because I felt guilty. Indulging in junk food led to seemingly insurmountable guilt and when I came home and weighed myself at the end of freshman year, I broke down. I spent that summer losing all the weight I had gained during the school year and tried to go into sophomore year better prepared for the challenges I would face. Becoming a Resident Advisor meant I would have to be even more focused on my physical and mental health, but I was determined to deal with my eating and exercising issues in a more positive way than I previously had. This is when Megan entered my life. We became running buddies and I owe a lot of my sanity that year to her. We motivated each other to get up every day at 7:00 and go for a run. We talked about anything and everything on our runs, releasing a lot our stress and bringing us closer together as friends. I started classes each day feeling healthy, awake, and refreshed. Because of my experience freshman year, I was extremely paranoid about rapidly gaining weight again. I reverted back to my high school habit of calorie counting and restricting my diet. I thought that if I couldn't eat junk in proper portions, I shouldn't eat it at all. My self control during this period was kind of extraordinary. I learned to simply say no to unhealthy foods and reached a point where I didn't even think about the food I was missing out on. I was also training for my first half-marathon and knew that fueling my body with the proper nutrients would directly impact my success in the race. Having Megan, a dietetics major and fellow vegetarian, by my side to run with and cook with actually made my health/fitness journey fun rather than grueling. She was the only person I felt I could open up to about my diet related issues. There was something that I couldn't shake though. I was healthy and happy at a certain weight, but I knew that if I didn't maintain that weight, I'd be unhappy with myself again. There was so much pressure on me. What's more, I still had moments of guilt, disappointment, and dissatisfaction with my appearance. This battle with food and weight loss was constant and stressful. The stress I put on myself to remain at a certain weight likely contributed to any weight that I did gain, which made the cycle seem even more vicious and hopeless. I still had problems with binge eating, only now I was over eating health foods instead of junk foods. There were a few instances where I crushed close to half a jar of peanut butter in one sitting. Sometimes if I had a certain food in my room, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about it. I have always associated food with comfort, so I would eat when I was stressed and then I would stress about what I just ate. It was maddening. Holiday meals were more about dealing with my food anxiety than enjoying time with family. What's so interesting about all of this is that I knew how irrational my thinking was. I would often try to talk myself out of my feelings, tell myself to be rational, that this was all in my head. It didn't work. One of the biggest and most unfortunate assumptions about mental health disorders is that the people dealing with them can simply think their illness away. A person with anxiety can tell themselves to not be anxious. A person with depression can think happy thoughts and no longer be depressed. This is not true. Mental illness is real and oftentimes crippling. I couldn't simply convince my brain to stop thinking about food. Even if a person wants to get better (most people do), there is no quick fix. During this time, the song "Migraine" by twenty one pilots was incredibly inportant to me. It provides brutally honest insight into the mind of someone with mental health issues and touches on the feelings of isolation caused by social stigmas surrounding mental health. To this day, it is the best description of what I experienced. My favorite verse can be found below.
Part 3: Asking For HelpMy first half-marathon took me two hours, six minutes, and four seconds. I was incredibly proud of myself and moved to tears when I crossed the finish line. It was one of the best moments of my life. Soon after, I moved to San Francisco for the summer to complete my dream internship. I stopped weighing myself, which relieved a lot of stress. This was a period of growth for me and my eating issues somewhat subsided. However, once junior year rolled around, I realized I still had not overcome my food and exercise related anxiety. If I went a single day without working out, I felt disgusted with myself. This exercise addiction led to several minor running-related injuries (shin splints, hip flexor pain, strained tendons in my feet, etc.). I ignored the pain in my body and the importance of rest days because I couldn't handle not fitting my workout in. I greatly regret this. These injuries have followed me for years and have made other fitness endeavors more difficult (ex: I cannot deadlift because it will further damage my hips). This constant battle within my mind had ruled my life for several years at this point and I had dealt with the majority of it alone. I was really sick of fighting it. I knew that I had ten free counseling center sessions available to me at school. Initially, I thought my problems weren't big enough to justify counseling. I was angry with myself for not having already fixed my problems on my own, but I was starting to wonder if there was really something "wrong" with me. I knew I wasn't anorexic or bulimic and it frustrated me that I couldn't find much scientific research to support my symptoms. Eventually my research led me to disordered eating. I found that many people who exhibit disordered eating symptoms are diagnosed with Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS). It might sound kind of odd, but not being able to identify with a specific disorder made me feel like my problems were mostly my fault and made me feel more isolated. Finally, with the help of a couple friends who had utilized the counseling center, I took action. While reading through the biographies of the counselors on the Oneonta website, I found a male psychologist whose interests were similar to mine (spending time outdoors, weight training, cooking) and who specialized in stress and anxiety management. He was the obvious choice for me. My first appointment was by far the most difficult. In addition to opening up to a stranger, I had to explain exactly what was going on in my head and why. I had never actually spent any time trying to understand how and why my mental health issues had developed. This uncharted territory of my mind was full of painful memories. I remember crying and seeing my hands start to shake as I voiced some of my thoughts, none of which had ever been stated aloud. Hearing myself speak my thoughts was horrifying and sad. I would never talk about or treat someone else the way I treated myself. My counselor was truly and genuinely invested in helping me. He assigned me different activities to try. First, it was a chart. At each meal I would write the time I started eating, the time I finished eating, what I ate, and how I felt while eating it. This taught me a lot about the connection between my emotions and food and about mindfulness, a practice that's easy to stray away from during college due to how are often you are rushing and eating in a hurry. My counselor also provided me with book excerpts written by others who had experienced the same things I had. I no longer felt like I was fighting this battle alone. When we began to discuss other aspects of my life, patterns emerged. It became apparent that I feared losing control in almost every part of my life. I juggled so many (too many*) different things throughout college, bent over backwards for friends at the expense of my mental health, and held myself to incredibly high, sometimes absurd, academic standards. My fear of losing control and habit of never saying "no" had led to burnout on several occasions. Each week I came away from my counseling session feeling reflective and inspired, having learned something new about myself. This experience was invaluable. Part 4: Now What?A lot has happened since I went to counseling. I met my best friend Adam, who understands what goes on in my mind better than most. I studied abroad in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I graduated from college and started working in the music industry. I'd be lying if I told you that I haven't struggled with disordered eating since I went to counseling. Sometimes I still obsess or over-analyze or become fearful of losing control. It comes in waves. I'm sorry if that's sad or not the ending you expected. Mental health issues can be year, decade, or lifelong battles. I don't expect to ever fully overcome my disordered eating. That's not meant to be cynical. It's simply the truth. I have, however, made great strides in dealing with my mental health issues. Over this past summer, I trained with a personal trainer I had trained with in high school. I switched my focus from being thin to being strong, from being obsessive to being mindful. I've lost 18 pounds since May without counting calories. I am stronger and leaner than I have ever been and I'm proud of my body and proud of how hard I work to keep getting stronger. I still have the occasional craft beer, midnight snack, or oversized desert when I want to. I feel healthy, mentally and physically, so life is pretty good.
When I reflect on the past six years, it makes me sad that so much of my time was spent battling my disordered eating. However, confronting my mental health issues led to immense growth and learning. I know more about my character and what I value than I otherwise would. Saying that I'm grateful to have gone through what I did sounds odd, but I am. It has made me stronger, more self-aware, more confident, and more loving. Seeking help was the best thing I did for myself and I'm very lucky to have the support and resources in my life that I do. I've been meaning to write this post for a while, partially because I think it's important for me to remember what I experienced, but also because reading something like this a few years ago would have been very comforting to me. I hope that someone can take solace in the fact that they are not alone. More people are struggling with mental health issues than we realize. It took me years to reach out. In order to progress, we need to stop stigmatizing mental health issues and work towards empathy rather than judgment. Thanks for reading!
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