Last month I was in the kitchen at work, preparing a salad for breakfast. The lettuce took up a lot of the plate. I had a little bit of goat cheese and a slice of meat on the side.
I nodded, but kept my head down.
“It’s just that I never see you eat that much food,” he continued.
This time I didn’t even nod, I kept cutting my avocado onto the plate, a plate that now appeared to me to be an enormous mound of nothing but fat.
My eyes started to well up with tears, but I couldn’t let him see me cry. I took my plate to my desk and it remained there, untouched until the end of the day, when I scraped all of it into the trash can.
I still can’t get the feeling of helplessness, anger, fatness, hopelessness, shame and sadness out of my being. Why? All because of one man’s thoughtless words about what I was preparing to eat?
It doesn’t make any rational sense, but then again, most eating disorders aren’t about rationality.
Why are we obsessed with what women eat at work? Why do we know who is dieting, who is “letting themselves go,” who doesn’t eat carbs, and so on?
I have overcome my battles with anorexia and bulimia, which I have suffered from since I was 16. I no longer starve myself for days, binge and purge, or take laxatives after eating a sandwich.
But I still have a vulnerable relationship with food and my body at 40. When I am in control of my diet and am able to exercise, I am fine, but I haven’t fully confronted the pain I feel when people comment on the food I eat, or don’t eat.
“You eat like a bird,” they say.
“I didn’t think you ate bread?”
“Aren’t you a vegan?”
“Why don’t you have a hamburger?”
“I don’t eat peanut butter, because it has too much fat in it.”
Comments like this send me into a spiral of self-doubt and insecurity. My whole body tightens. I want to throw up anything I’ve eaten, and I never want to eat again. I feel weak, and insignificant, and more than anything I feel as if I don’t have control.
But that’s my problem. Why should anyone change his or her behavior? I’m the one who suffered from an eating disorder. Well me, and about 8 million other people in the United States, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.
That means about 7.84 percent of the American workforce has or has had an eating disorder. I wouldn’t be part of that statistic because I was never formally diagnosed with an eating disorder.
So there is a good chance that when you’re in the kitchen at work discussing whether or not to eat a doughnut, someone around you might be excruciatingly uncomfortable. Shouldn’t that be enough of a reason to pause before commenting? Why talk about what people are or aren’t eating?
Instead think about what your relationship to food says about you. Why is it so hard to just eat what you want, and let others be?
What women put into their bodies is already scrutinized enough.
Rebecca McInroy is a host, show creator, and senior producer for KUT and KUTX in Austin Texas and is a Public Voices Fellow with the Op Ed Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
