The Plea of Half-starving student

A serious question about disordered eating, and a serious answer. Please know this before reading on.

Before I begin: Feast On Your Life is coming to London. I’ll be at Cooking the Books Live with Gilly Smith on February 10, 6-8:30, at Honey & Co. Lamb’s Conduit on February 11, 7-8:30, and Quince Bakery on February 12, 7-9. Get tickets! Come say hi!

Now, onto this week’s letter…

Dear Tamar:

I am a student (3rd year, only one more year to go!) and I miss eating good food. My roommates are concerned with what I eat sometimes. I don't eat unhealthy. I just don't eat enough. I am constantly half starving, but I feel that if I were to try to fill that hunger I could never stop. I know it's also a way for me to control my life. I've been diagnosed with PCOS recently as well and I do know that I need to fix my alimentation to start with. I can't bring myself to do so. Everything people suggest doesn't seem that good or I already do it. I feel at war with my body and as if nobody could understand what I am going through. I always say that I will eat decently when I have money. I wish food was free and I could cook or bake decently because I really do love it.

-Half-starving student

Dear Half-starving student,

Dear, dear, dear human. I’m not qualified to answer this question. I’ll go further and say that the only people who are qualified are those who can travel your path with you. This means professionals—like therapists and intuitive eating specialists—and family and friends. Please, please reach out to both.

What I can offer: As a younger person, I grappled with disordered eating of all varieties. It was cyclical and inescapable. If I ever let my guard entirely down, one of the varieties snarled back to life, ever more vicious, its tricks and traps better honed and better hidden. It’s only since having a child that I’ve felt a measure of security—my body has become, variously: an ocean, a boat, a port, a dock. My body must now be what my erstwhile sea creature needs, for as long as it can. I breathe easier, believing that any desperate flailing for control or escape I indulge will take another form.

What you describe is disordered eating. It’s a way you’ve found of managing the world’s demands. It’s something to which you cling, terrified of the consequences of releasing it. I recognize that terror. I’ve been in its grips. So you must trust me: Before doing anything else, find a close friend, or find a support group, or an anonymous group, or a community. Find someone to whom you can say words out loud as they rise up in you. This is essential. I’ve sometimes thought that eating disorders are made of clotted up words—words that never made it out of their thinkers’ minds and, feeling stuck, began an anguished claw and scrape in search of escape.

Here is my second piece of advice: Walk headlong into your fear. Do it afraid. What “it” is in these circumstances is to eat the other half of what you need to eat to live. “Eat” doesn’t mean just one thing. That’s where an already tricky task—giving advice I’m not qualified to give—becomes trickier. To eat can mean to find the fastest way to sate your hunger. To eat can mean to commit to a minimum of calories and fats and carbohydrates in your body to keep it running safely. To eat can mean to find pleasure in food three times (or two or five) a day. To eat can mean to be in touch with the material world and transmute it into the soulful being of your one self in your one life, ever growing and ever diminishing. It does not mean one thing, and so it is hard advice to give.

You say you love to cook and bake but that you’re frightened to, because you’re frightened you’ll lose control. You cannot choose to not be frightened—or I’ve never figured out how. You can only choose to remain, for now, afraid, and do the version of “eat” that you must. The longer you wait—for food to be free, or to trust yourself more, or to feel more responsible for managing your PCOS—the longer the disorder has to root and the larger the fear can grow.

There are plenty of ingredients that are inexpensive and unarguably good for you. Lentils fit this description. So do farro and quinoa and rice. Olive oil. Citrus. Parsley. Beans. Chickpeas. Cornmeal. Whole-fat yogurt. Canned fish. Rye bread. Soba. Dark chocolate. Put these on a list and add more. Let yourself cook simple things from this list and eat them until you’re not hungry anymore, thinking of them not as forbidden fruit, but as good food. You are, currently, deeply hungry, which might mean a ravenous pendulum swing toward wanting to eat all of whatever you make. That is natural. Look back at your long and growing list and remember that you will eat the things on it for another meal soon. Tell your half-starving body that you understand why it is so ravenous, why it doesn’t want to let the rest of the farro go. You can say “I hear you,” out loud. You can say “I understand.” You can say “I’m trying to listen to you.”

Dear cook, in long ago, more innocent times, I remember hearing the question: “What if they threw a war and no one came?” I was a child. I found it poignant beyond belief. It lodged itself in my mind in the metaphysical place I’ve begun to recognize as where I let hope flourish, occasionally. What if you didn’t show up to the war with your body, but instead woke and, afraid, stood at your kitchen stove and made Jamaican cornmeal porridge? What if you made pasta with chickpeas. Make minestrone. (Here's a video of me making it.) Make rice. Make eggs. Dear cook, stretch out your hand and ask someone to hold it. Thank your sweet body for carrying you this far. Give your body—your horse, your hound—grains and broths and herbs to eat. If your body does not know when it is full, and you are not at war, then you will speak to it peacefully. “I hear you,” you will say. That is what I say to you: I hear you. Now find some help, and make your peace.