Healing What Dieting Destroys
As a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, there’s only one thing I love more than learning about food, and that’s eating it. (Huge foodie here.) But for the longest time, my relationship with food was anything but peaceful.
As a product of the ‘90s, real food was not a mainstay in my childhood. The weekly dinner rotation in our home included boxed or frozen staples à la Hamburger Helper, Hot Pockets, and Rice-A-Roni, and our pantry of processed snacks could have starred in a Little Debbie commercial. (To this day, I can’t walk past a box of Oatmeal Creme Pies at the grocery store without feeling nostalgic.) For the first 16 years of my life, food existed merely to satisfy my sweet tooth.
At 17, my perception of food shifted dramatically. I noticed a few extra inches around my midsection, and I resolved to forego sweets indefinitely. Cutting dessert out of my diet quickly somehow spiraled into cutting my calories in half as the pounds on my already-small frame began to fall off. It felt empowering to exercise complete control over my cravings, and that power was addicting.
Soon after, all food—processed or not—became an obstacle to the body I wanted: thin, dainty, delicate. Every bite was something I’d have to “work off” or make up for later. By the time I was pleased with my reflection in the mirror, I realized too late what it had cost me. Over the course of 11th grade, I had lost 15 pounds—and, not surprisingly, my period.
Fast forward to college. My gut was a disaster and my hormones had bottomed out. Even while subsisting on a dairy-free, gluten-free diet, everything I ate kicked off a chain reaction of symptoms—fatigue, acne, bloating, headaches, anxiety, you name it—leaving me feeling sick and inflamed around the clock. University life did not afford me much time to prepare my own meals, and on my hardest days I relied on caffeine and “healthy” packaged snacks to get me through the next deadline. Eating was how I coped with the stress of it all, and I fell victim to a perpetual restrict-and-binge cycle that saw me through graduation. Food was risky, but it was also my therapy.
Shortly before I got married at 23, I was diagnosed with PCOS—a wake-up call that made me keenly aware of the negative impact my volatile eating patterns had on my blood sugar, metabolism, and hormones. I spent my free time learning all I could about the root cause of this common condition and vowed to do anything it took to heal myself naturally.
This was my introduction to the idea of food as medicine—and while it was a step in the right direction, my renewed enthusiasm for eating well manifested as just another form of restriction. Elimination diets like Whole30 were all the rage amongst those struggling with chronic disease—and even well-intentioned integrative health practitioners—so I attempted it three times, failing miserably. But a low-carb Paleo diet was more sustainable, and I clung to that, convinced it would fix everything.
Spoiler: It didn’t.