New year, same diet culture

On the troubling overlap between sexual violence and disordered eating

Huge thanks for all your love and support after Budino's death last week. I am still feeling quite raw, and will miss him forever but I know that returning to some version of 'normal' will help. Thanks also for your input on the annual Life after Trauma reader survey, and especially your eagerness to do The Artist's Way as a community. I'm excited to start putting shape on that experience, and will share more on it soon.

This month, we’re talking about the intersection between food and trauma. Today’s post is a personal essay about my experience with disordered eating. As I wrote, I kept wanting to link to the resources that helped me heal my relationship with food. I decided to compile a full list, which I’ll be sharing with paid subscribers next week. Make sure you’re subscribed to get it in your inbox:

Photo by Jennifer Burk on Unsplash

This piece deals with diet culture and disordered eating. Please take care while reading.

When I hit puberty, I stopped eating.

My body was changing. The fleshy place I’d called home for more than a decade started to become rounder and more womanly. I hated it. All I wanted was to hide. I got in trouble every day in school for wearing shapeless tracksuit bottoms, instead of my uniform skirt. I hated getting in trouble, but it was worth it to me. It was worth it if I could find a tiny morsel of comfort in my alien body.

I now know that when a girl stops eating at this age, she's trying to stop time. I know this, not from the decades I spent in therapy, but from an episode of the old ABC show ‘Once and Again’, where a teenage Evan Rachel Wood develops an eating disorder and her therapist, describes how when a pre-teen girl stops eating, she’s trying to stop time¹.

Like Wood’s character, I was also trying to stop time. My body’s twisted instinct was to stop eating because I didn’t want to grow up. I wanted to remain a child, and avoid facing the horrific sexual harm I’d experienced.

Research has found that children who experience abuse are at higher risk of developing disordered eating. In a lot of ways, it makes sense: how and what they eat is one of the few ways children and young teenagers can assert agency over their bodies. The same bodies that have been subjected to unspeakable, terrifying violence. Children’s brains aren’t always developed enough to understand that, but they know it’s wrong.

They don’t have the language to convey their trauma, so their bodies find other ways to communicate it.

I stopped eating for a lot of reasons:

• Because food disgusted me.

• Beacuse I couldn’t bear to have anything (not even food!) inside me.

• Because I believed that I didn’t deserve food. When adults tried to coax me to eat by talking about “the starving children in Africa”, I thought those children deserved the food more than I did.

• Because I thought that feeding me was a waste of food.

• Because I thought I didn’t deserve to live.

• Because food made me feel queasy and hideous.

• Because being hungry felt safer.

• Because I wanted to communicate that I wasn’t OK

It was the mid 1990s, an era defined by heroine chic and Britney Spears’ muscular abs. My mother was tracking Weight Watchers points on the back of an envelope, calculating what she was “allowed” to eat.

It was sobering to watch her, a person I thought was perfect, ardently long to be smaller.

My eating issues escalated until she brought me to see a therapist. To a certain extent, it helped. It didn’t address any of my underlying issues, but I slowly began to eat again. Mostly, I remember feeling honoured that Mam thought I was worth saving. A few years later, she was dead and I started skipping meals to save money. After she died, I was too broke to feed myself, and saving money felt more important than satiating my appetite.

Anyone who’s been through an eating disorder knows how insidious it is. In the depths of my suffering, I felt like I was trying to separate oil from water. I had lived alongside self-loathing for so long, I couldn’t find the boundaries between it and me. Throughout my life, there have been times when my relationship with food was deeply disordered and times when I’ve felt mostly OK. Like most people, the size of my body has fluctuated too.

When I returned from a traumatic work trip to Gaza in June 2015, my c-PTSD symptoms were so severe that I struggled to eat anything more than chopped up Pink Lady apples. I was incredibly nauseous and whatever I did manage to eat tasted like ash. Long before Covid-19 stole our senses of taste and smell, trauma had taken mine.

There have been times that I was too triggered to exercise, and gained weight. And times that I was too triggered to eat, and lost weight.

During a period when my body was bigger, I wanted to understand if it was a “problem”. Offhandedly, I plugged my height and weight into an online BMI² calculator which concluded I was obese. (For context, I was about a UK size 12-14 at the time³.)

I worried that the dramatic red warning would trigger a return to my disordered eating. The only reason it didn’t is that I am better informed now than I was back then. I’ve benefited from the work of people like

Roxane Gay

and

Lindy West

. I’ve read about weight-neutral healthcare and can think critically about why women are encouraged to be small. This re-education was largely thanks to the work done by people in larger bodies, to whom I will always be grateful.

These days, I can challenge the toxic ideology that people who inhabit larger bodies are less worthwhile than people who inhabit smaller bodies, an idea which seems truly absurd when you describe it. I am able to identify how deeply fatphobic the information I absorbed from mainstream media, public health guidance and my formal education was, and to change how I think about food, diet and culture.

This body of mine has been through a lot. It has withstood enormous trauma, several years of severe mental illness and some episodes of serious physical illness. It has been sliced open and sewed back together again.

But, it survived. I am still here.

This year, I hope you’ll consider divesting yourself from the harmful messages of diet culture. If you haven’t already, I really recommend that you read about the racist history of the BMI and how it is both inaccurate and harmful as an individual health metric. And perhaps more importantly, I hope you’ll show up for the people who are still struggling to break free from January’s toxic diet culture. I hope you’ll remind them that a better world awaits.

Next week , I’ll be sharing a list of the resources that helped me to recover from disordered eating.

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear about your experiences managing diet culture. How has the intersection of food and trauma impacted your life, and what advice would you give to people still struggling to break free?

1. I don't think this scene is available on the internet, but I’ve linked to another moving scene from the same episode.

2. Many health systems, including Ireland’s, continue to use BMI (body mass index) as a standard metric for weight management, despite its racist and inaccurate origins. The BMI was created in the 1830s by a Belgian mathematician who wanted to understand the size of the average man. The formula was based only on white, European men and doesn’t account for muscle mass or bone density.

3. To be clear, I’ve always been a straight-sized person. People in larger bodies are subjected to shame, discrimination and unwanted commentary about their size. My suffering has sometimes been severe, but it’s always been mostly invisible. That’s not the case for larger people, and we all have a role to play in challenging that discrimination.