There are common misconceptions that when a person develops an eating disorder, the only factor that has changed and must change to recover is how or what they eat. Not only is this culturally and socially limited, but it strikes blame on the person suffering. Food is one of the core pieces of survival that we all share, along with sex, air, and water. But what happens when food feels like our enemy?
In this article, we will cover the ways that eating disorders change everything from your thought patterns and ideas of self to socialization and relationship-building, to the most mundane events of life, such as grocery shopping or lunch breaks. The hope we are looking for when identifying these various habits and patterns is that when we examine them together and hold them up to the light, we will find a new and better path forward.
Our Narrative Around Food is Learned
Our relationship with food starts from a young age and is influenced and molded by cultural and familial influences. Food is considered an identity marker of culture or religion, and often preserves connections to ancestry and lineage. However, along with grandma’s recipe, we are also often handed down unhelpful attitudes when it comes to food.
For example, in many cultures, it is considered rude to leave the table without finishing whatever was on your plate. Leaving leftovers can be taken as a sign of disrespect to elders or those that prepared the meal. Similarly, a penny-saving family may also require a clean plate before you’re allowed to leave the table in order to avoid waste, or a parent’s ideas about diet and guilt about eating sweets may be passed along to an impressionable teenager.
These seemingly innocent and subtle ways of relating to food can grow even more complicated when we consider social messages we receive about our bodies.
“Don’t eat too many carbs, you’ll get fat!”
“Eat more fruits and vegetables.”
“Don’t order anything that will make you look unladylike.”
“Are you sure you need to eat that much?”
“Looks like you need to watch the sweets!”
These messages are loaded with sexism and fatphobia that make us grow exceedingly conscious, not just of what we put in our bodies, but how we see ourselves. Women are particularly influenced by this messaging, though beauty standards and diet culture impact people across the gender spectrum.
The Everyday Effects of Eating Disorders
There are three important facets of the conversations around food:
1) We need food to survive
2) Many people establish a sentimental connection to food based on upbringing
3) Social messaging about appearance affects our relationship with food
While the development of an eating disorder is not specific to a locus of time, cultural group, or set of circumstances, these three facets influence how much conversations around food are ingrained into us from a young age.
We have included examples below of how our social relationships, thought patterns, and everyday tasks are affected when pressures around food manifest into an eating disorder.
Everyday Tasks
As an eating disorder evolves, you’ll notice you start to see food everywhere, and your internal food dialogue tries to steal your focus at all hours of the day. Lunch breaks may become particularly challenging. Your takeout options might be limited if you live in an under-resourced part of town, are not able to bring your own food for financial or time reasons, or fast food is just what is available. At the grocery store, you might find yourself reflexively flipping to the ingredient panel to see how many calories and servings are in each product, and put something back down you got excited about because it’ll cost you more than you burned in your workout.
Thought Patterns
In line with everyday tasks, your thought patterns are constantly attuned to what you are going to eat (or in cases of restrictive eating, not eat) next. You are preoccupied with the idea of not only the quality of what you eat, but the quantity. Your inner critic fires up its typewriter to send off messages of shame, guilt, and anxiety over how you’ll rid yourself of that extra piece of bread. Eating and food become your primary cognitive responsibilities out of hatred or punishment instead of excitement or plain hunger.
Personal Relationships/Social Impact of Active Symptoms
If you are naturally in your head or preoccupied by thoughts, guess where you aren’t? Usually, present in your relationships. The cognitive load it takes to meet the expectations of the eating disorder, the rituals/behaviors of active symptoms (e.g., purging, binging, restricting), and the psychological pain that comes as a result is a toxin to our personal relationships. Not only do we become enslaved to our inner minds, but it often drowns out the concerns of family, friends, or communities, and isolates us. When we are active in eating disorder behaviors and mindsets, we lose opportunities for the love, compassion, and empathy that our personal relationships afford us.
A Promise of Hope
There is light shining at the other end of the dark, winding tunnel that is our thoughts, fear, and shame…a promise of hope and recovery. Recovery is not only pivotal – it’s possible. Eating disorders are insidious, pervasive, and cancerous to our whole system. This is why it takes a whole system approach within eating disorder treatment to create long-lasting joy and relief.
This looks like
- Honoring the whole person through mind, body, spirit approach through nutrition, mindfulness, therapy, and community-building.
- Using practices grounded in research, such as Dialectal Behavior Therapy, that incorporates mindfulness and cognitive-behavior approaches that grant permission to exist in the “both/and” of what is possible, tolerating physiological and psychological distress, and making conscious movement toward awareness and action.
- Love. Just the love of your systems of support that can be friends, family, community, or a group of providers – these connections help us transcend the pain that comes from the individual battle of eating disorders, and ultimately restores us to a place of self-compassion and care that we all need.
To learn more about our eating disorder programming and our perspective of whole-person care, contact us now!
