Fuel for the fire

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Food: this is the part of an eating disorder (will refer to as ED) that most people are more familiar with. Only, in my experience, I have found that the knowledge stops right about at the question “oh so you don’t/didn’t eat?”

The approach to eating varies greatly for each person and it is impossible to talk about every experience- especially to start out- so I will focus on mine for now!

I want to preface with saying that there is not one reason an ED forms. I am still coming across new little facets of it with my care team which I will share as they come up.

So, to jump in, let’s start with one of the primary contributors to food struggles for me: the influence of those around me. As I go into detail, please understand that I am not trying to blame anyone for why I am recovering from an ED. I simply want to bring awareness to some triggers that contributed to the formation for me.

I grew up around a grandma who presented herself as an expert on food and nutrition. Being a young girl, I didn’t question it until much later when many of the habits had already seeped into my subconscious. I’m sure some of these will resonate: making reasons why I can’t go out to eat with everyone else and if I did end up going, just getting a light appetizer or salad; always choosing the low-calorie, non-fat foods; eating less because I loved dessert and thought I’d get fat if I had it in addition to regular meal; practicing frugality at the grocery store to a point where I was not getting the nutrition I needed.

It’s gotta be in the grandma genes or something because looking back, I took elements from my other grandma, Mimi, too. These included not eating much and doing diets and eating trends like keto. I’ll pop back to some of these areas in future posts to talk about them individually.

Additionally, like many of us, I was influenced by my peers. The grandmotherly ‘kindling’ was set and social media and middle school were happy to throw on the pieces of wood.

In middle school I used Snapchat, Kik (ancient I know), Vine (rip), and Instagram. It started out harmless- I would message my sports teammates and friends, make cringey insta posts and watch funny videos. This continued into high school and transitioned to snap, insta, vsco, and tik tok. Honestly it wasn’t until I stopped using these platforms that I realized how much they were hurting me.

Sure, they weren’t all bad, but they did more harm than good and I’ll give you some food-disorder specific examples: promoting diet crazes, only showing the best and filtered versions of yourself, bikini pics, influencers who show their ‘food-in-a-day’ and you’re left thinking “wait, how do they only eat that?!” For me, these were all very easy and quick ways to compare; the result being that I felt less-than and ugly and was left to mimic the idealized posts in hopes that I would look and feel more like them. As most of us know, not only does it not work like that, but it creates a cycle that is very hard to escape.

I’ll hit on social media a lot because the role it played in the beginnings of the eating disorder cannot be understated.

Looking back on that time in therapy, I do believe that combined with the boredom of the pandemic, therein lied the perfect conditions for a fire to light and light it did- just in time for freshman year of college!

~Another day, another slay~

Lydia