CW: disordered eating and weight loss
My love of cooking started young. The first thing I ever remember creating was a jammy, fruit enchilada dish with rice...not my best work but my parents were gracious enough to pretend to like it. My connection to creativity has always been cooking. But in middle school, I saw the beginnings of an eating disorder that would consume me for the next decade. My relationship with food soured, and there’s little need to cook when you’re not eating, so I stopped cooking for a long time.
Eventually, I realized not eating was going to get me caught and I would have to stop engaging in those behaviors, which I was not ready to do, and so I found “wellness.” Or the cult of wellness as I now call it. I was able to hide my disorders by cloaking them in socially acceptable behaviors like diets, cleanses, and an obsessive emphasis on fitness and running. Unsurprisingly, moving from not eating to wellness didn’t solve any of my problems. I still had body dysmorphia. My anxiety was consuming me from the inside out. Stress was taking a heavy toll on my life.
But during this time I got so many compliments. “You look amazing.” “Have you lost weight??” “Tell me your secrets!” “You must practice such restraint! I could never do that.”
I was getting compliments on my eating disorder. Because that’s what we think wellness is, don’t we? Thinness? Being physically fit?
It’s not. You can be thin and unwell. You can be fat and well. You can claim to “eat clean” (not a thing) and be mentally unwell. You can be fit and struggling with body dysmorphia.
When wellness focuses on physical appearance it fails us. It makes assumptions and judgments that are often false. It’s reductionist. It loses the context of community, it disregards the impact of racism and bigotry on our physical health, it forgets that wellness isn’t a rich (thin, cis, white) woman’s game.
I found my way back to my body through cooking. And therapy. I slowly realized that the walls of wellness I had built around me were actually prejudiced, insidious things built to make me feel safer because society told me that if I was thin I was good. I was better. I was best.
Eventualy I started eating bread again. And then I started baking it. And then I made pastries. And hand pies. And slowly. Over many years I peeled away the layers of diet culture. I continue to do so now.
When we created our Nourishment Beyond Food workshop it was to help others also get back to a connection with their food—to see food as nourishment but also a way to build community, to connect with the earth, to celebrate culture. It was also to get one to consider other areas of nourishment in their lives. As we often say “all the kale in the world won’t help if you’re not dealing with your stress, or if you lack joy, or if you’re ignoring your mental health.”
I challenge you this week to rethink what you think you know about wellness. Investigate your assumptions. Dig into the history of BMI. Do research on how the medical industry continues to fail BIPOC men and women every day. Research how fatphobia affects the mental and physical wellness of those living in stigmatized bodies. I challenge you to get back in the kitchen as a celebration of community and togetherness.
-Elizabeth Moore