For me, it can be all too easy to neglect self-care when my schedule gets hectic and even, unfortunately, to slip into self-destruction because I feel stressed and incapable of handling everything on my plate. I’m a perfectionist and a procrastinator wrapped up into one. In high school I already had a reputation for skipping out on sleep to get my work done. Until recently I wore that reputation with pride, thinking that my frequent neglect of my health was a badge of honor marking me as a serious student but in the past several months I’ve let my mental health hit an all-time low and recognizing that fact has given me the motivation to try to start caring more about myself and “looking out for number one.”
School is stressful, and several people have assured me that no one has ever had a perfectly smooth first year of college. It’s a brand-new situation with brand-new people and brand-new independence, and it can be hard to maintain control over everything. I started to take medicine for OCD for the first time a few months before starting college, and I don’t think I realized how much it had helped me to feel in control until I had to stop taking it due to side effects from too high a dosage at the beginning of spring semester of my freshman year.
The adjustment to not taking medicine coupled with stress didn’t sit well with a control freak like me, and I developed some unhealthy habits to take some of that control back: namely, a totally dysfunctional relationship with food. I have been a fruit and vegetable lover all my life and a vegetarian and (for the most part) a health nut for years, but I’ve also historically been very good at reminding myself that an occasional cupcake never killed anyone.
Somehow, around a month into that spring semester, I became obsessed with food and calories, eating and not eating. I would throw food away or flush it down the toilet just for the sake of destroying food, leave parties with my friends or wait until my roommate was asleep to binge and purge in the middle of the night, attempt to calculate and keep lists of exactly how many calories I ate, stay up all night to make sure I would be awake to exercise in the morning, and label foods as acceptable and unacceptable; for the first time in my life, I emotionally ate or withheld food to punish myself and associated my identity and self-worth with my weight and my “self-control” around food.
A consistent (but probably completely irrational) anxiety of mine is that I’ll somehow let my appearance or dress style deteriorate over the summer and subsequently return to school with my peers judging me, thinking I’ve “let myself go.” I studied abroad in Barcelona the summer following my freshman year, and during the month I spent at home between spring semester and the summer program, I obsessed over how I planned to avoid the dreaded study-abroad weight gain. In my mind, completely preoccupied with maintaining my weight at that one specific number and inexplicably angry with myself every time I ate, the weight gain was a looming roadblock and I would irreversibly ruin my body, opening myself up to the disdain of everyone at school who knew me as a “skinny girl,” unless I focused meticulously on staving it off.
I’m glad I studied abroad, but I spent every day of the six-week program desperately wanting to go home because the risk of letting myself overeat and gain weight was so terrifying. Every single website about dieting I’d visited had told me that eating in restaurants was the biggest possible mistake, so I ate almost all of my meals alone, buying my own groceries, and trained myself never to finish what was on my plate whenever I did eat out with my study-abroad group. Trips to the grocery store always left me near tears, not because the aisles were labeled in Catalan when I’ve only studied Spanish and French but because I was so afraid of losing control and letting myself buy and eat something “bad.” I did eat because I knew simply refusing to consume anything was unsustainable and I wanted to avoid sabotaging my metabolism with the “starvation mode” I’d read about online, but I felt sick and wanted to cry if I violated my self-imposed “rules” for the amount and type of food I ate.
By the middle of my program, I recognized that my obsession with food was keeping me from connecting with my peers and enjoying my only chance to live and learn in another country, but if I stopped my preoccupation there was still, in my mind, the risk that I’d gain weight. I would “go back to normal,” I decided, once I got home: I’d ask my mom to pick out all of my foods and control my portions. She’d cooked my dinners and shopped for my lunches and snacks for eighteen years, so how could her judgment go wrong now?
In spite of how much I wanted to “go back to normal,” I found myself paranoid that my mom was trying to overfeed me once I’d returned home. I knew I’d lost weight while abroad, and I thought she had a nefarious motherly plot to make me “healthier” by stuffing me with extra calories. At around the same time, I started to take a lower dosage of the same OCD medication I had previously taken; even though it hadn’t caused me to overeat the first time I started to take it, suddenly whenever I ate more than I’d allotted myself I feared that I was “gorging” as a side effect of my medicine and I’d never be able to stop. Certain foods that I’d associated most with fear or “unhealthiness,” especially sweets, triggered urges to binge and purge: I couldn’t purge around my family, but I slipped up and senselessly raided the pantry or dessert stash on a few occasions and then tried to compensate by restricting my food intake over the following days. I didn’t feel “back to normal,” and much to my despair I couldn’t even remember how I ate when I was “normal.”
Now that fall semester is underway and I’m living away from home again, I can’t rely on my mom to regulate my food intake and retrain me how to “eat normally.” As much as that terrifies me, I know that that plan didn’t work as well as I’d hoped after I came home from Barcelona and I know that I need to trust my own body if I expect to learn to be healthy on my own. I also know that I’m lucky: too many people struggle with disordered eating for years before starting to recover, and after just months of those patterns I want to recover and I’ve admitted to myself and to my family that I’m not healthy. I have the support system that I need to get better, including my family, a psychiatrist at home, and on-campus resources; I’m back on medication to temper the obsessive thoughts that contribute to my urges to fixate on calories, and this time I know not to ask my doctor to raise the dosage so I won’t have to stop taking it again.
My medicine, however, is not a magic pill, nor is asking my mother to dictate everything I eat a simple solution to all of my woes. The onus is on me to apply the same “self-control” that I used to turn down ice cream and churros and skip out on snacks and meals to eating three meals a day and some wisely chosen snacks, retraining my brain to think of food as fuel rather than the enemy. I need to recognize that my logic was flawed when I participated in a walk for eating disorder awareness and lauded myself for skipping dinner the same day, when I felt indignant about the food desert that exists in DC’s Ward 7 while turning down the privilege that I have (and yes, it is a privilege!) of access to nutritious food. Skipping meals and restricting calories make me feel in control, but funneling the time and energy that I waste worrying about food into doing my homework, designing set details and costumes, or building lesson plans for DC Reads would be taking real control and initiative and making myself a better, stronger person.
I’m writing this both to state it as the truth and to convince myself to keep believing it, because I want to say honestly that I’ve reconciled my relationship with food and that I occupy myself more with what actually matters to me than with whether I’ve gained a pound or allowed myself too many treats one day.
I know I still have a ways to go in becoming healthy and “normal,” but I believe I’ve decided permanently this time that I will change my outlook on food to one of appreciation. Earlier this week, I was at work, looking at an Excel spreadsheet and eating my lunch; that day I had brought an organic gala apple that my mom sent me from the Whole Foods in my hometown. Lately I’ve spent too much time looking up “how to enjoy food again” and “how to have a good relationship with food,” and a common tip I’ve seen and decided to test out on that apple is that eating slowly and savoring every bite enhances appreciation of food. I took a bite of the crisp, juicy apple and chewed it slowly, and I thought, this tastes like fall. The fruit brought back memories of apple-picking trips from my childhood, which led to thoughts of gratefulness for the fact that my parents send me care packages and have the means to buy fresh produce, which in turn led me to decide that that apple was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. Since that day, I’ve still caught myself thinking about calories, eating alone on account of anxiety at being seen in the act of consuming food, and wondering if it was “bad” that I ate frozen yogurt in Leo’s, but I’d like to say, if a bit overdramatically, that that apple marked the dawning of a new age in my relationship with food.
I want to be an attentive and capable student and participant in the extracurricular activities that I love; I want to give my friends and family the attention they deserve and be able to go out to eat with them and actually enjoy myself again. I want to be able to go for a run and focus more on the sights I’m seeing and the rush of endorphins than on the calories I’m burning and the pain and exhaustion of trying to exert myself without proper fuel in my body. Someday I want to be a mother, and I want to teach my children to feel comfortable with themselves and appreciate their health: they won’t learn that if the only example I give is one of miserable self-criticism. The past few months have taught me that sabotaging my physical and mental health will make me miss out on life when there’s a lot out there to love and enjoy, and going forward with this fall I want to redefine – for the better – not just the way I interact with food, but the way I interact with my entire world.
