When I arrived in Santa Fe last year, it was apricot season. It seemed as though the trees lined every single street, the fruit ripe enough to fall to the ground in sunset-orange smatters. In Taos, and a store owner offered me a whole box of them: he couldn’t keep up with what the tree in the courtyard produced, even with a wife and family.
It was part of the reason I signed my lease. Apricots have always been one of my favorites, and their ubiquity made this small desert town feel like a kind of Eden. But as I walked through its streets, I only haltingly dared pick and eat one. After all, apricots were fruit, and fruit is sugar. And sugar makes you fat.
An apricot seed yet to flesh out — Santa Fe, 2018
Even at my thinnest, I was not the picture of disordered eating. IÂ looked healthy and strong, and I still had enough excess body fat to keep anyone from thinking I was starving.
But I was starving, nearly all of the time. Regaining weight was the worst fate I could imagine, so I desperately beat back my appetite with massive salads, feeling guilty for adding seemingly-innocuous toppings like sundried tomatoes. I remember feeling my hunger in the evening, capitulating to grilling up a chicken breast. What was wrong with me, that I couldn’t subsist on broccoli alone — that despite my carefully-curated diet, my body stubbornly refused to look like an Instagram model’s? Why would my hunger never quiet, until I inevitably found myself sating it by running to the kitchen cabinet again and again to consume paleo-friendly protein bars en masse?
Looking back, my eating disorder is pretty obvious — not only in its definitive binge/restrict cycle, but also in its physical consequences. I’d brag about my 100-over-60 blood pressure and 50-bpm heart rate, citing my (frantic) daily hour of cardio. I was an athlete!
But meanwhile, I hadn’t had a period in six months and was developing every exercise injury in the book, including stress fractures. Guess what underlies bradycardia and hypotension and can also decrease bone density and keep you from menstruating? Yup: not eating.
I’d also developed crazy psychological hangups around food. Obviously, eating with others was out; restaurants were terrifying. But I’d also notice that even the sound of food-related words, like “breakfast” and “dinner,” were grating. I had these long, prescribed rants about how brunch and tacos were overrated. I mean, it’s just food, right? It only exists to make sure you don’t die. Why were people making such a big deal out of it?
Obviously, this was all just a sour grapes reaction — pun intended. By prioritizing thinness above all else, I’d locked myself out of the majority of foods on the planet, as well as the social events we create around them. And I was pissed. For one thing, I was hungry. But for another, it was just unfair: while I watched other thin people enjoy waffles and donuts, I knew I was just masquerading. There was still a fat girl looming inside me, silent and famished. If I wanted to keep her quiet, to keep my societally-compliant body, I had to cut myself off from those things entirely.
If. If.
I actually can’t tell you exactly when it started. It was slow, and then suddenly fast: the cheese and salami I specifically stopped for on my way home from a particularly brutal hike, thinking, fuck it, thinking, I’ve done enough to deserve this. Besides, at least they were low-carb.
Or the almond butter I bought to put on the apples that fell off the tree in my Santa Fe backyard last fall — raw and unsalted, which made it more expensive but also, I thought, less likely to cause a spoon-in-the-jar binge. I was wrong, of course. My body thrilled at the influx of fat and calories, and tasteless or not, I found myself waking up from a deep sleep to consume half the jar at midnight.
For a long time, I still tried to maintain control while slowly letting in foods that weren’t quite “bad,” but certainly weren’t “good.” And, of course, I found myself binging on each new food item I added to the register — because it was one of the few truly delicious things I was “allowed” to have, and because I’d been fetishizing and limiting it for so long.
And then, things really started changing. I went to therapy. I ditched my calorie tracker. I let myself have a few bites of chocolate cake while dining with a friend in a restaurant.
Finally, I said: fuck it. I was exhausted and pissed off and hungry. Weight be damned, it was time to eat.
Intuitive eating is a phrase that’s bandied about a lot online, and often, it’s just a fancy way to sneakily stay on a diet. It’s about sitting monk-like in front of a beautifully-plated, tiny portion of food, chewing each bite at least ten times and putting your fork down at regular intervals while you scan your body for the merest hint of fullness.
That is not what I’ve been doing.
I have been, for the first time in my entire life, eating exactly what I want, in exactly the amount I want, whenever the fuck I want it. Full stop. I am no longer eating with the intention of manipulating my body size. I’m just… eating.
I’m not going to pretend I instantly emerged from my decade-long famine still selecting broccoli over bread. In the first week of true “fuck it” eating, I consumed:
- Two donuts in one day — and later that night, a quarter of the homemade cheesecake I made for a friend’s birthday, donuts notwithstanding. (P.S. if you live in Santa Fe, this vendor at the Farmer’s Market makes these blue corn lavender donuts and I swear to god that shit is FIRE)
- Re: cheesecake, the ENTIRE BOX of chocolate graham crackers I used to make the crust, one after another, in bed, from the sleeve.
- So. Many. Tacos. (All homemade, all dope AF. I had taco night with a friend and then I copy-catted a recipe from a restaurant I love dearly in Jacksonville; I made a batch of pulled chicken that was spicy enough to make me cough while it was cooking.)
- A bavarian-style pretzel with beer cheese dipping sauce which I paid SEVEN dollars for at a local pub (and also which required me to sit through being talked at by the guy next to me at the bar, i.e. was not worth it on a variety of vectors).
- Cookies after lunch AND dinner, two days in a row, including the so-so chocolate chippers from Starbucks that I know are mass-produced and frozen. STILL BOMB.
- A dinner of, literally, pretzels and peanut butter, washed down with a large glass of whole milk, and an entire small package of those Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups for dessert.
- Speaking of peanut butter: I’ve consumed at least one jar of peanut butter a week since I even began to consider this, which was about a month ago. Real peanuts this time, crunchy and salted, please. (I did accidentally buy creamy once, and I was going to return it, but I just decided to eat it anyway. It wasn’t as good, but it was still peanut butter.)
I also ate: strawberries by the handful, greek yogurt swirled with honey, ciabatta bread with fresh olive oil alongside a caprese salad. Some of the things I most missed, I’m not even all that tempted by; I’ve only gotten ice cream once, for instance. (It was definitely awesome, but just wasn’t what I was craving.)
So while my package of sugar snap peas is going moldy in the fridge, it’s not like I’ve given up fruit and vegetables entirely. I’m just taking a moment to bask in my new ability to enjoy these foods I’d categorically avoided for so long.
While I won’t get into all of the mechanics of intuitive eating here, the basic idea is to come to a place where no foods are weighted by a value judgment: be it a cookie, an apple, or grilled chicken breast, it’s all just fuel. Eat whatever sounds delicious. Over time, you’ll learn to listen to your body’s natural cues — we’re mammals, after all, and every other creature on Earth can figure out how to properly feed itself. Once you’re no longer clouded by the diet mentality and “rules” you’ve developed over the years, you’ll learn to suss out exactly what you’re hungry for — and eat it, guilt-free.
For chronic dieters, the first part of intuitive eating is convincing your body and brain that, hey, it’s cool, we’re done with the self-imposed starvation — which, after all, is indistinguishable to your system from an actual famine. That’s part of the reason regaining weight after dieting is so common. It’s not just lack of willpower: your body reacts physically and hormonally to calorie deprivation, lowering your metabolism and causing you to obsess over food because, um, it doesn’t want to DIE.
Which is what I’ve been focused on for these past couple of weeks. Even if I binge, even if I skip the gym, I’m still going to feed my body when it’s hungry. I’m still going to take care of this soft animal that moves me through the world.
From a diet mentality, intuitive eating sounds bonkers. If you’re “allowed” to eat whatever you want, won’t you give up everything that isn’t drenched in chocolate? Won’t you erase the word “vegetable” from your vocabulary?
But even just a couple of weeks in, I can tell you, that’s not the truth of the experience — and that’s its magic.
It’s kind of like that exhausted (but, sigh, important and true) mantra about loving with an open hand. The harder you want something, the more you cling to it, the more likely it is to evade you. Relentless pursuit and fixation is never the answer. And as it turns out, the less of a big deal you make out of food, the less of a big deal it is.
I have, right now, in my freezer, an entire industrial-sized package of those dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joe’s. They’ve been there for three days, and I haven’t even opened them. In fact, I forgot they were there — a sentiment I would have laughed at three years ago. But now, when I can have them whenever I want, they just… aren’t that big a deal. They’re really good, of course, and I’m happy that I get to eat them. But I also don’t want to eat peanut butter cups, and only peanut butter cups, for dinner.
Figuring out what IÂ do want for dinner has been its own challenge — a fun one, but also still sort of overwhelming. I turn 30 in less than two months, and I’m having to relearn something as fundamental as eating. What does hunger really feel like? When does it start? What counts as fullness? And what, what, what in the world do I even LIKE to eat, now that I’m not limited to three different preparations of cauliflower?
And it’s not just food. Now that I have the brain space to focus on something aside from what I look like and what I can/should/have to eat or not eat to keep myself that way, I have some work to do to figure out who I actually am. So many parts of my life are weight-adjacent: Do I actually like hiking, or did I just take it up because I knew it was a non-gym way to burn calories? What about weightlifting? Do I really hate winter, or was I just terrified of the way the cold weather reliably made my body a little bit bigger?
It’s freeing, of course; I now have the space and energy to become who I am. But it’s also dizzying and scary. For the last decade, a major part of my identity — my IDENTITY! — has been my ability to make myself take up as little space as possible. So now I’m facing 30 close to tabula rasa. I’ve always been a writer, but… what else? What else can I be, now that food isn’t all I think about? I don’t want to be remembered at my funeral for how well I could count and cut carbs.
One shocking breath of fresh air I know for sure: I’m no longer afraid of food. (And yes, I’ve obviously come around to the gospel of tacos. Consider me a whole-hearted convert.)
And I’m also definitely a little bit bigger, and maybe set to become bigger yet. I have no idea what my body will look like at the end of this process, what set point I’ll settle at where my weight will just take care of itself. I won’t lie and say gaining weight hasn’t been scary downright fucking petrifying, but it’s also been freeing in its own way.
Even at my thinnest, my body was never “right;” even at size four I was afraid people would think I was fat. Which… again, there’s lots to stay about fatphobia in our culture, and I can’t get into all of it here. But suffice to say I spent my dieting years more afraid of becoming fat than of becoming unkind or lonely, a twisted prioritization that I think speaks for itself.
Untangling my self worth from my physical presence has been monumental. I’m worth more than my body, can do more than walk through the world in the smallest vessel possible. On my best days, I see the weight I’ve gained, my re-emerging “flaws” like arm flab or double chin, as symbols of my newfound freedom. I am feeding myself. I am living my life. And I have more to offer the world than being “fuckable.”
Now that I’m not hungry all the time, and decreasingly focused on my physical presence, I have so much more room: to be warmer, to be stronger, to be more productive. I can interact with people for reasons aside from my desperate attempts to garner their sexual attention or attraction; I’m kinder and actually more confident, most days, than I was at my thinnest. I’m also more apt to speak up for myself, to ask for what I want, and to tell people when I’m not getting it. I can spend a couple of hours in the morning finishing a blog post without panicking that I’m not at the gym, knowing I can find other ways to move my body today — and that skipping a day (or three!) doesn’t matter. I can wear clothes that fit me, no matter what the fuck the number or letter on the tag says.
I. Can eat. Peanut butter.
And while my body and I may disagree on what the “right” weight is, I’m learning that it’s more trustworthy than an arbitrary health or beauty standard.
**For more information and support on intuitive eating and letting go of diet culture, I recommend:
The Trust Your Body Project podcast and Instagram page, run by dietician Whitney Catalano
Health at Every Size, by Linda Bacon (not an affiliate link)
The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner (not an affiliate link)
The She’s All Fat podcast, written and produced by Sophia Carter-Kahn and April K. Quioh
Listening to SO MUCH LIZZO