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foodpolitician · 6 years

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introduction

hello dear readers

i created this blog as a forum on which i can openly and honestly discuss my recovery from a lifelong battle with eating disorders.

for the first time in my life, i am engaging with food in a way that is reparative instead of self-destructive. i reflect often on how i got here, how grateful i am to be here, and how i can help others. from that, this blog was born.

in my eating disorder, food was a reward or it was a punishment. restricting instilled me with an unshakeable sense of pride while binges and purges felt perennially shameful. my weight loss was unsustainable; my eating disorder had completely diminished my ability to experience joy and to experience love, be it inwardly or outwardly directed.

a pivotal part of my recovery involved reschematizing food as something that is reparative - a means of healing myself and finding balance - instead of conceptualizing it as a locus of my anxieties and fears.

an eating disorder falls under the umbrella of anxiety disorders and can be categorized very aptly as the misidentification of food as a threat. simultaneously, eating disorders are a societal disease tightly interwoven with western beauty standards, western dietary patterns, and a heaping spoonful of misogyny. eating disorders are poorly understood, but from my experience i can attest that they are complex and ever-changing, and to speak about them honestly requires careful attention to nuance. with that said, there is so much more going on in this scenario than faulty wiring.

growing up, i absolutely did conceptualize food as a threatening entity. i found it absolutely terrifying to try new things and to deviate from long-established patterns would often leave me visibly shaken and, more often than not, panicked and in tears. i remember looking at the inside of a piece of chicken as a child and panicking because i found the color and texture distressing, but had never realized until that moment. i had unwittingly been poisoning myself. i had been introducing something into my body that i all the sudden conceptualized - presently, retroactively, and forever - as impure and disgusting. i couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance. i had a meltdown then and there.

yes, i can identify the neuroses, the disordered patterns of thought. i cannot, however, write off my behaviors as wholly irrational.

i grew up eating the standard american diet. nearly everything i put in to my body was high in fat, hyperprocessed, and full of sugar - it was usually fried and on the rare occasions that it wasn't, it was always a variation of cheese on grain. i actively avoided fruits and vegetables, and conceptualized snacks like nature valley granola bars and special K weight loss cereals as the pinnacle of healthy, nutritious food. i rationalized that i could eat whatever i wanted so long as i exercised frequently enough.

obviously, my understanding of health and wellness was deeply flawed. in my mind, i connected exercising with healthy living while completely neglecting the incredibly significant relationship between eating healthy and sustaining physical and mental wellness. this is a pattern i have observed throughout my lifetime that remains ubiquitous amongst the people i know and love and meet to this day. in america, we live to eat, but we seldom eat to sustain ourselves, to preserve our collective mental health, to invest in our future well-being - to live.

i believe in the mind-body connection, and looking back, it isn't hard to understand why i felt so terribly unwell, and it's hardly shocking that my body never looked the way i wanted it to. i often wonder if my eating disorder was rooted in a subconscious understanding that my diet deviated so immensely from the way humans were biologically designed to eat - an intrinsic understanding that the patterns i carried with me were entirely antithetical to my desire to be physically and mentally healthy. in many ways, the standard american diet is inherently disordered. embracing it on an individual scale it is to engage with an evolutionary abberation. embracing it on a societal level is to normalize a cultural abhorration.

i discovered veganism in the summer of 2015 through an ex-partner. i became vegetarian and transitioned to veganism within a year. for a while, i was sincerely doing extraordinarily well. i felt physically healthier. my depression lifted. and for these reasons, for a very long time i conceptualized a vegan lifestyle as the way, the truth, and the light.

once again, i was horribly wrong. nothing in this world is so black and white. to the surprise of no one, it was actually terribly unhealthy for me to hinge my value as a person upon my ability to engage with a diet that conflates food choices with morality. i had freed myself from the binge-purge cycle through my healthy food choices only to run headlong into anorexia and orthorexia when i took it too far.

veganism eventually stopped feeling like something i wanted to engage with and became something i felt obligated to engage with in the absence of choice. my desire to improve animal welfare devolved into a life dominated by my all-consuming fear of certain food groups. i became very ill. i routinely lost my vision upon standing and for months i was hounded by the worst nausea i had ever experienced in my life. my hair started falling out again. i had never experienced a depressive episode so intense. i had never weighed so little.

i was dying.

i took a necessary break from veganism that lasted the better part of a year. disengaging with ethical veganism was one of the most pivotal and important steps i have taken on my to recovery. at no point, however, did i ever stop thinking about the benefits of plant-based diets. i knew i was on to something important, and i was determined to engage with a whole food diet again once i had given myself time to heal.

i decided to endeavor a vegan diet once again when i moved to philadelphia earlier this year, rationalizing that doing so would be easier in a big city than it was in my dumpy college town. i knew, however, that i had to go about it differently if i wanted to sustain it.

instead of focusing on the moral value of the food i was eating, i started focusing on how the foods i put into my body made me feel - which ones made me feel full, which ones made me feel energized, which ones i felt safe engaging with, and which ones triggered a desire to binge or purge.

practicing mindfulness in this way paved the way for my realization that i feel physically and mentally best when i eat a diet primarily composed of minimally processed, plant-based foods, with an emphasis on fruits and vegetables.

it finally clicked. my neuroses surrounding food began to dissipate as i continued to nourish myself with foods that made me feel physically and mentally well. because these foods feel safe to engage with, the thought of purging them seldom crosses my mind. because i am eating enough of the right things, i have reached a stable weight at which i feel content and, more importantly, capable of engaging in life fully without allowing insecurities about my body to hold me back. because i understand the mind-body connection, i am capable of making decisions with food that make me physically and mentally healthier, and because doing so makes me feel better in every conceivable way, i want to continue extending the gift of wellness to myself through a well-maintained diet. i feel optimistic about my future and proud of the decisions i have made to protect my health. i can gratefully and sincerely say that i am no longer digging my own grave with my goddamn fork and knife.

food is more than food. depending on how you engage, it will be the salve for your wounds or the bullet that takes your life. there is an unshakeable connection between what we put into our bodies and how we move throughout our life. by listening to my body and accommodating its needs, i was able to heal myself from an eating disorder in a culture built on a foundation of disordered eating.

and for that i am so, so grateful.

thanks for reading.

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