Fight Fire with Fire: Finding Drive in Nutritional Truth
Written by Molly Warren
Anyone who knows me well knows that I’d like to consider myself a person driven by logic.
While this logical nature has brought about many of my most distinctive personality traits and ideals, overly-strict conformity to such reason was a key in fueling the development of my eating disorder in late 2014. At that time, I was dealing with personal issues, such as my anxiety and familial strain, that were not easily regulated by the logic I was so fond of in math and science. Instead, I found the reason of eating disorders: self-driven feedback loops of calorie counting, bingeing and purging, fasting, weighing, and measuring.
Although the past few years of recovery have allowed me to mostly escape these habits, I still find myself comforted by the rigidity of the system: life with an eating disorder was a pattern, just like one I’d find in the chemical structures of hydrocarbons or the numbers of algebraic sequences. For a long time, I’ve felt like this addiction could only truly be overcome by rejecting logic, choosing instead to be driven solely by emotion, but I found emotional eating to be just as disordered and unfulfilling.
For me, I’ve found that the healthiest solution has been to fight fire with fire; or rather, fight eating disorders with science.
Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly interested in understanding the science behind nutrition and wellness. We have these societal ideas of health, promoted in magazines and online, but they’re built around arbitrary numbers and inexact calculations and ultimately, oversimplification.
Take macronutrients for example: there are few, if any, common foods that we can boil down to only containing fats, proteins, or starches. Most foods, from breakfast cereal to avocado and broccoli, are built from a combination of all three necessary nutrients. But if we can’t boil foods down to one macronutrient or another, how can we look at solely counting macronutrients as an accurate measure of how well we are nourishing ourselves? And how can we look at diets like keto, which aim to cut out entire macronutrient groups, as even being scientifically possible, much less healthy? These questions reveal that diet culture has been lying to us all along, and that logically, the only way to achieve wellness is through a balanced, filling diet based on intuitive eating.
Beyond that, calorie-counting and macro measurements are such relative, inexact calculations that they are not practically helpful. Firstly, calorie counts on food packaging are calculated using a difficult, inexact experimental process (which I learned firsthand from a food calorimetry lab in my chemistry class). On top of this, there is little regulation to ensure that food labeling is accurate: the United States Food and Drug Administration allows up to a 20% margin of error on nutrition levels, which applies to both caloric and nutritional facts. This means that for every “100-calorie” snack pack a person consumes, the actual caloric measurement of the snack could legally range from 80 to 120 calories. These values can also range amongst each individual morsel of food; in fruits and vegetables, nutrient content varies drastically by season, variety, ripeness, farming type, and hundreds of other factors. Therefore, these caloric values we might obsess over on food packaging are approximations at best and deception at worst. No matter how pretty or perfect those numbers might seem, we have no reason to place so much value in them.
And most importantly, simplifying ourselves and our food down to numbers takes away one of the most necessary elements of ourselves: emotion.
When we look at our food, we should see a product that is more than the sum of its parts. We may try to define foods by their calories, or their fat percentages, or a number of other nutritional facts, but we would simply be ignoring a much more inconspicuous aspect of their value: the role they play in our social, emotional, and mental well-being.
From the holiday dinners to the comforting pints of ice cream, the pre-test breakfast to the post-therapy snack, the truth is that we need food in a way that is about much more than macros and calories. We need food for the way it fuels us, brings us together, gives us comfort, allows us freedom.
We need to treat food like more than numbers on a package, and we need to treat ourselves like more than measurements on a scale, if we want to achieve a true state of well-being and self-love.
About Molly
Hi, I’m Molly and I study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, NC. I am pursuing my undergraduate degrees in Nutrition Science & Research and Mathematics, with hopes to pursue graduate school. In her Body Banter column, Molly discusses her experiences as an eating disorder survivor, a public health student, and a social justice advocate.
I am an executive board member of the Embody Carolina, an organization on UNC’s campus which shares Body Banter’s goals of debunking diet culture and embracing food freedom. I also serve as a Social Justice Advocacy Board Member on campus, where I work to promote awareness of eating disorders and mental health struggles amongst college-age students. I also helps to develop content for Banter Basics modules, which serve as introductory curriculums for Body Banter discussion groups.
I Banter because as many as 1 in 4 college students will experience an eating disorder while in college, a trend driven by widespread diet culture and fatphobia on college campuses. I aim to reshape the narrative around health for college students, encouraging food freedom and intuitive exercise over strict diets in fear of the “freshman 15”. A holistic view of health, framed by body neutrality and food freedom, is essential to address the impact of eating disorders among college students.