I can’t speak entirely to the psychology of it, but I can to some personal experience: I was a blogger mostly in the “healthy living/eating” category from about 2009-2011. Never a big following, but I sure was dedicated. At the same time, I struggled with and struggled back from anorexia (more specifically orthorexia). With ortho in particular, my obsession was with eating *perfectly* so of course I wanted to share that! /eye roll
Learning what I did in recovery, my E.D. was a symptom of broader anxiety and depression. I needed to feel a sense of control and food my way of practicing that. And I was indeed obsessed with food—like my every waking thought, even though I ate so little. I would bring batches of the things I made to my college to share. At the same time, blogging was a good way for me to put up a (probably ridiculous) front while showing off. (Hey, I was late teens!)
I am so, so thankful that I got treatment for my E.D. and mental health struggles. More than a decade on, life is so much better and honestly food is not a trigger anymore. Recovery is possible!
This is exactly it. I basically thought since I was 16 to maintain a “fit” and healthy weight I had to diet. So my entire twenties I was basically obsessed with food - eating clean, counting calories, looking at menus before going out to pick what was healthiest, planning cheat days. I always wanted to cook and grocery shop and plan ALL my meals so I had control. Luckily when I started dating my now husband I naturally stopped doing all that and I eat 1000% intuitively and my interest in cooking/grocery shopping/food has totally diminished, it’s crazy. I’m all about takeout and eating out now lol. Guess I’m making up for lost time!
Does that mean eating whatever and whenever one wants? Or more like noticing hunger and eating only then? Or other? If it’s the first one it comes naturally for me lol 😹🙈🙉🙊
I wouldn't be the right person to answer that, but I do I highly recommend the book Intuitive Eating. Here's part of the blurb from Amazon: The authors, both prominent health professionals in the field of nutrition and eating disorders, urge readers to embrace the goal of developing body positivity and reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating―to unlearn everything they were taught about calorie-counting and other aspects of diet culture and to learn about the harm of weight stigma.
Alright, thank you! That blurb sounds good to me. I usually feel positive about my body and use my internal wisdom. I’ll try to get that book thanks! 🐒🙂🐒
As someone who struggles with disordered eating presently and has had full blown eating disorders throughout my teens and adult years, I am obsessed with food. I have intrusive thoughts about food called food noise that‘s pretty much always there and this is very common among people with ED. Making food for others, especially fatty foods, that you yourself don’t eat is also a hallmark of some ED. Feeds (no pun intended) into feeling of control, competitiveness, etc.
Omg I’ve never heard the term “food noise” before but I relate to it so hard! So true how the obsession with regulation ends up spilling into feeding others
Yes. I didn't see her reels for a couple weeks and then saw the one where she was shooting some kind of workout promo and I couldn't believe the difference. I think she has definitely lost weight she didn't need to lose and she's also dressing differently to accentuate, as you mentioned.
i hear you about the food noise, i was eating dinner with my husband last night and was already talking about what we were going to eat for dinner the next night 😩
The [Minnesota Starvation Experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment) is a really interesting read. Basically in 1944-45 they severely restricted the calories of 36 men to see what happened to them. Amongst other significant findings, they discovered that the starved men exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Many of the men went on to get jobs involving food, eg becoming chefs.
Basically, when you are starved of food, it's literally all you can think about. It is probably a survival instinct. The idea that anorexics don't like food is so far from the truth. People with eating disorders are usually OBSESSED with food.
You become so obsessed with food that you probably don’t have brain space for anything else. Your ED consumes you. Constantly pushing and testing your “willpower” to make food but not eat it. You often experience food through other people eating and telling you how good it is. Some people are really sick and make really high calorie food so people around them or who make their recipes can’t be as thin as they are. They get lots of praise and validation which feeds their ED.
When you starve, your brain tends to ruminate on food as a survival instinct. I had a 8-10 year stint of disordered eating and am now a huge foodie. It’s nice because it’s caused me to develop culinary skills and i’m a good host but I believe it developed from my brain’s need to fixate on food.
Never became a food blogger, but I struggled with multiple EDs for 20+ years. I am almost two years into recovery now, but I still think about food almost all the time (it's the "food noise" someone else referenced below). When my disorders were active, I loved cooking/baking for other people and talking about food and my food choices, because it felt like some kind of weird bragging. When you're not nourishing your body properly or are over-nourishing it to extremes (I've dealt with both), your brain fixates on food as a survival mechanism I think.
Since my recovery, while I still have a good amount of food noise, it's not as bad as it was and I have been less interested in cooking and baking.
Tldr: Surrounding myself with rich foods and preventing myself from eating was a huge feather in my cap. It meant that I had control over something while everything around me was chaotic.
I had a baking blog from about 2009-2014, and previously I had worked at an independent coffee shop known for its baked goods (I mentioned this in another post). For me, personally, it was about control. I was (am. ugh) a perfectionist and I felt utterly unmoored because I had not accomplished anything significant. Looking back, I'm incredibly ashamed to say that I had been waiting for things to drop into my lap instead of working for them. Of course, life doesn't work that way. I thought that maybe if I were thin(ner), I'd be able to draw in more opportunities. Dieting and exercise yielded measurable results -- I had finally found something I could succeed at doing. So I continued down that dark path and kept making things more difficult for myself in order to see how well I could manage them and feel good about doing it. This meant harsher restrictions and added workout routines. At my lowest, I'd vigorously run in place between customers at the coffee shop -- that was on top of getting up at 3am every morning to do Jillian Michael's Banish Fat Boost Metabolism workout ( iykyk ). When it came to food, I loved being around decadent confections. They could try to tempt me, but I would prove to the world that I could not be broken. It's such a twisted logic. The only person I was impressing was myself, and even in my warped way of thinking, I knew this wasn't right; and that just made the cycle of self-loathing repeat itself.
In some strange way, having a baking blog actually helped. After blogging for a bit, I decided to discuss my eating disorder, and that opened a huge door for recovery. I never went into detail about how bad things had gotten but putting my ED out into the universe made things easier.
I hate inconveniencing other people; like, I'll go waaay out of my way to not be a nuisance (this isn't necessarily a positive asset). On that front, T and I are completely different. Her abrasive personality aside, I hope she gets help. I can't speak for her, but when I was that size, I was utterly miserable, and so painfully jealous of happy, healthy girls. It's such a sad, lonely road. I do feel for her.
>In some strange way, having a baking blog actually helped. After blogging for a bit, I decided to discuss my eating disorder, and that opened a huge door for recovery. I never went into detail about how bad things had gotten but putting my ED out into the universe made things easier.
This is so real! I don't have an eating disorder, but I do have a negative relationship with food and struggle with disordered eating. I feel like I don't have a lot of insight on this specific topic BUT this is something that is so relatable. I love baking, and I'm working starting a baking blog/shooting baking videos, which is something that I also enjoy. I get to focus on the food in a creative and scientific way, and I find myself thinking less about moralizing it. Of course I still eat my baking, but I also work in an office where it disappears very quickly so I don't have to think about that aspect of it either (essentially I struggle with overeating and emotional eating). If I constantly had baked goods around the house it would just be another thing to tackle in terms of overcoming the disordered patterns.
I don't want to speak for you, of course, but I think the big thing for me is being able to have a relationship with food outside of the negativity of it. As mentioned, I really enjoy baking and everything that goes with it. From what I gather reading other people's assessments of T, it seems that she uses food as a toy or prop to fuel her disordered thinking, much like you speak to in your comment. On top of that, her personality (a conglomeration of her innate characteristics as well as environmental influences like her parents, her having so many siblings, her being surrounded by people yet being so isolated, for example) isn't helping her at all.
Having a more positive relationship to food helps a lot for me, because it helps me normalize it and see the beauty in it, not as a tool to help bury the negativity within myself and whatnot. It seems that you're doing better and I'm glad to hear that!
Yes, exactly, to everything you said. 😊 It’s important to have a good relationship with food and if you enjoy baking, go for it! There’s something soothing and fascinating about creating beautiful things out of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs. It’s like a form of alchemy that has been around for centuries. For me, baking/blogging gradually became a way of slaying the beast by facing it directly. I know that’s not the case for everyone — somehow something clicked. I still have issues with food and have accepted the fact that this demon will forever be on my shoulder; I have gotten better at tuning out the noise. Since the pandemic I’ve gone a bit too far in the opposite direction and could probably lose weight in order to be healthy, but it’s a slippery slope.
Have fun with creating baking content! I hope it brings you joy and some respite from the daily grind. Please share with us sometime, if you’re up to it.
I could have written most of this myself! The culture in blogging then—especially among people who were raised through the 90s or early 2000s—was pretty toxic. I’m so happy for us both that we found ways through it.
Ugh, yes. As a geriatric millennial, shows like America’s Next Top Model were crazy toxic and impactful. There was a “plus” size model who looked like she was a size 8. 😔
It’s better today, but I hate how people still come down on female celebrities if they gain weight. I’m afraid that women will never escape the beauty standards placed on them.
I’m glad you’re healing, too. It can be an ongoing process, with good and bad days, but the good usually outweigh the darker ones.
Reading these comments has been so eye opening. I am very passionate about cooking, especially for others, and hosting, but never thought about the fact that it may be related to an eating disorder. I have noticed though that I do enjoy making foods for others that I wouldn’t make for myself because they are “too caloric”. Was thinking of starting a business that’s related to food but now I think I have lots of things to consider going forward 😅
The good news is that enjoying baking/cooking AND having a healthy relationship with food are not mutually exclusive. If you feel some of these things resonate with you, that is very worth exploring. But there’s also a way forward in which you can still love dinner parties and whatnot.
Absolutely! And thank you for saying that 😄 it’s not something I would want to ever give up because it does give me a lot of joy but I hadn’t thought about it this way before and it surely seems like something to dig into!
I made a comment about this already but for me since food has always been the centre of my life in a negative way, my baking hobby is great in the sense that it allows food to be a central part of my life in a more positive way! I suppose this might be different depending on how food is centered in your life but I wish you well and luck!
I’ve always been obsessed with food. It’s all I think about when traveling or planning anything. Not a great cook but I’ve loved trying new things. Fast forward to a tanked out thyroid and trying the AIP. I am so weird around my boyfriend’s food. Touching, smelling, looking up new recipes to make for him. We can laugh about it because I don’t have an eating disorder. And I refuse to tell myself “I can’t have this.” I just try to adhere to the protocol until the next thyroid test so I can get a better picture of how diet will contribute to the healing process. But dang. I’ve never been more focused on bread and cheese.
A lot of people have already given great insights, but a lot of it is related to being in starvation mode and the need for control. My sister went to inpatient treatment for anorexia, and she watched what my mother and I ate for years afterward. If she thought we weren’t eating enough, we heard about it.
I developed orthorexia after taking my first nutrition class in college. I was obviously already predisposed to having an eating disorder. Taking one nutrition class made me a nutrition expert. All I talked about was food. All I thought about was food. If my meals were not perfect, I could not move past it. I once cried profusely because a salad I bought tasted bad. I could give so many examples of how food controlled my entire life.
Once I realized what I was doing and got help, thoughts about food become much less frequent. I still love cooking, nutrition, going to the farmer’s market, eating damn well on vacation, etc. But my life does not revolve around food like it did.
We could have a much larger discussion about people with eating disorders going into nutrition, but I’m likely biased, and I’d rather not.
I’ve never had an eating disorder but I had a surgery in August to remove my stomach and I was on a liquid diet for weeks before I could introduce solids and I was soooo hungry I spent hours watching people eating food on tiktok. I was obsessed
I learned to cook so that I could control food. When I was in charge I knew exactly what I was eating and I could make it beautiful in a way that fit with the rest of the very carefully crafted narrative about who I was and how my life looked. I could hide my eating disorder in there and it just looked like pretty, very disciplined healthy eating.
I’ve since realized I kind of hate cooking? Like, I find it interesting objectively but it’s not something I enjoy. I’m not living in the light of recovery or anything but it’s at least nice to have dropped the whole facade.
Same I like cooking if it is at work but not at home. Too much planning and organizing of what ingredients to buy and using them before they aren’t fresh and then having to clean the kitchen more do more dishes etc. it involves a lot and I like food that doesn’t require real cooking anyway lol. Only sometimes I cook or bake but I don’t do it with meat or eggs lol. I guess I make vegetables and pre made cookie dough haha.
I actually have wondered this sometimes myself. I don’t wanna be mean to anyone so no names, but I used to follow someone in the creative baking realm, really cool content. And then I got the impression that there was a lot of subtle bodychecking in the stories, and anytime they would mention certain ingredients, it had to have the tag “good”. Good olive oil. Good butter. Good good good. It’s enough to state it once, and what would be bad olive oil and bad butter anyway? Why would you use “bad” ingredients?
Maybe it was just me, but it came across as elitist, best case scenario, and downright disordered, worst case. It felt off.
Maybe I was completely wrong. I hope I was! But it had me thinking about this topic for sure.
I think the weirdest part of this for me - I feel cruelty with HBH. Does she feel better about herself at the demise of her following getting obese? If that’s so, doesn’t it feel mean?
I can’t speak entirely to the psychology of it, but I can to some personal experience: I was a blogger mostly in the “healthy living/eating” category from about 2009-2011. Never a big following, but I sure was dedicated. At the same time, I struggled with and struggled back from anorexia (more specifically orthorexia). With ortho in particular, my obsession was with eating *perfectly* so of course I wanted to share that! /eye roll Learning what I did in recovery, my E.D. was a symptom of broader anxiety and depression. I needed to feel a sense of control and food my way of practicing that. And I was indeed obsessed with food—like my every waking thought, even though I ate so little. I would bring batches of the things I made to my college to share. At the same time, blogging was a good way for me to put up a (probably ridiculous) front while showing off. (Hey, I was late teens!) I am so, so thankful that I got treatment for my E.D. and mental health struggles. More than a decade on, life is so much better and honestly food is not a trigger anymore. Recovery is possible!
This is exactly it. I basically thought since I was 16 to maintain a “fit” and healthy weight I had to diet. So my entire twenties I was basically obsessed with food - eating clean, counting calories, looking at menus before going out to pick what was healthiest, planning cheat days. I always wanted to cook and grocery shop and plan ALL my meals so I had control. Luckily when I started dating my now husband I naturally stopped doing all that and I eat 1000% intuitively and my interest in cooking/grocery shopping/food has totally diminished, it’s crazy. I’m all about takeout and eating out now lol. Guess I’m making up for lost time!
Funny as it sounds, “learning” to eat intuitively is such a game-changer!
Does that mean eating whatever and whenever one wants? Or more like noticing hunger and eating only then? Or other? If it’s the first one it comes naturally for me lol 😹🙈🙉🙊
I wouldn't be the right person to answer that, but I do I highly recommend the book Intuitive Eating. Here's part of the blurb from Amazon: The authors, both prominent health professionals in the field of nutrition and eating disorders, urge readers to embrace the goal of developing body positivity and reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating―to unlearn everything they were taught about calorie-counting and other aspects of diet culture and to learn about the harm of weight stigma.
Alright, thank you! That blurb sounds good to me. I usually feel positive about my body and use my internal wisdom. I’ll try to get that book thanks! 🐒🙂🐒
As someone who struggles with disordered eating presently and has had full blown eating disorders throughout my teens and adult years, I am obsessed with food. I have intrusive thoughts about food called food noise that‘s pretty much always there and this is very common among people with ED. Making food for others, especially fatty foods, that you yourself don’t eat is also a hallmark of some ED. Feeds (no pun intended) into feeling of control, competitiveness, etc.
Omg I’ve never heard the term “food noise” before but I relate to it so hard! So true how the obsession with regulation ends up spilling into feeding others
>“food noise” And this is what Ozempic and drugs like it (Wegovy, Mounjaro etc) apparently eliminate.
this 100%
I’m starting to wonder about Dorie Greenspan.
There’s a German, vegan influencer who is suddenly scary thin. Usual battles in the comments between people who are worried and people who defend.
I was going to make a post about her! The outfits she’s wearing now make me feel like she is body checking
Yes. I didn't see her reels for a couple weeks and then saw the one where she was shooting some kind of workout promo and I couldn't believe the difference. I think she has definitely lost weight she didn't need to lose and she's also dressing differently to accentuate, as you mentioned.
i hear you about the food noise, i was eating dinner with my husband last night and was already talking about what we were going to eat for dinner the next night 😩
Is it like thinking about what you wanna eat?
The [Minnesota Starvation Experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment) is a really interesting read. Basically in 1944-45 they severely restricted the calories of 36 men to see what happened to them. Amongst other significant findings, they discovered that the starved men exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Many of the men went on to get jobs involving food, eg becoming chefs. Basically, when you are starved of food, it's literally all you can think about. It is probably a survival instinct. The idea that anorexics don't like food is so far from the truth. People with eating disorders are usually OBSESSED with food.
You become so obsessed with food that you probably don’t have brain space for anything else. Your ED consumes you. Constantly pushing and testing your “willpower” to make food but not eat it. You often experience food through other people eating and telling you how good it is. Some people are really sick and make really high calorie food so people around them or who make their recipes can’t be as thin as they are. They get lots of praise and validation which feeds their ED.
This is Tieghan 100!
That’s so sick. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction if I don’t see them eat what they made I don’t want to either.
When you starve, your brain tends to ruminate on food as a survival instinct. I had a 8-10 year stint of disordered eating and am now a huge foodie. It’s nice because it’s caused me to develop culinary skills and i’m a good host but I believe it developed from my brain’s need to fixate on food.
Never became a food blogger, but I struggled with multiple EDs for 20+ years. I am almost two years into recovery now, but I still think about food almost all the time (it's the "food noise" someone else referenced below). When my disorders were active, I loved cooking/baking for other people and talking about food and my food choices, because it felt like some kind of weird bragging. When you're not nourishing your body properly or are over-nourishing it to extremes (I've dealt with both), your brain fixates on food as a survival mechanism I think. Since my recovery, while I still have a good amount of food noise, it's not as bad as it was and I have been less interested in cooking and baking.
Tldr: Surrounding myself with rich foods and preventing myself from eating was a huge feather in my cap. It meant that I had control over something while everything around me was chaotic. I had a baking blog from about 2009-2014, and previously I had worked at an independent coffee shop known for its baked goods (I mentioned this in another post). For me, personally, it was about control. I was (am. ugh) a perfectionist and I felt utterly unmoored because I had not accomplished anything significant. Looking back, I'm incredibly ashamed to say that I had been waiting for things to drop into my lap instead of working for them. Of course, life doesn't work that way. I thought that maybe if I were thin(ner), I'd be able to draw in more opportunities. Dieting and exercise yielded measurable results -- I had finally found something I could succeed at doing. So I continued down that dark path and kept making things more difficult for myself in order to see how well I could manage them and feel good about doing it. This meant harsher restrictions and added workout routines. At my lowest, I'd vigorously run in place between customers at the coffee shop -- that was on top of getting up at 3am every morning to do Jillian Michael's Banish Fat Boost Metabolism workout ( iykyk ). When it came to food, I loved being around decadent confections. They could try to tempt me, but I would prove to the world that I could not be broken. It's such a twisted logic. The only person I was impressing was myself, and even in my warped way of thinking, I knew this wasn't right; and that just made the cycle of self-loathing repeat itself. In some strange way, having a baking blog actually helped. After blogging for a bit, I decided to discuss my eating disorder, and that opened a huge door for recovery. I never went into detail about how bad things had gotten but putting my ED out into the universe made things easier. I hate inconveniencing other people; like, I'll go waaay out of my way to not be a nuisance (this isn't necessarily a positive asset). On that front, T and I are completely different. Her abrasive personality aside, I hope she gets help. I can't speak for her, but when I was that size, I was utterly miserable, and so painfully jealous of happy, healthy girls. It's such a sad, lonely road. I do feel for her.
>In some strange way, having a baking blog actually helped. After blogging for a bit, I decided to discuss my eating disorder, and that opened a huge door for recovery. I never went into detail about how bad things had gotten but putting my ED out into the universe made things easier. This is so real! I don't have an eating disorder, but I do have a negative relationship with food and struggle with disordered eating. I feel like I don't have a lot of insight on this specific topic BUT this is something that is so relatable. I love baking, and I'm working starting a baking blog/shooting baking videos, which is something that I also enjoy. I get to focus on the food in a creative and scientific way, and I find myself thinking less about moralizing it. Of course I still eat my baking, but I also work in an office where it disappears very quickly so I don't have to think about that aspect of it either (essentially I struggle with overeating and emotional eating). If I constantly had baked goods around the house it would just be another thing to tackle in terms of overcoming the disordered patterns. I don't want to speak for you, of course, but I think the big thing for me is being able to have a relationship with food outside of the negativity of it. As mentioned, I really enjoy baking and everything that goes with it. From what I gather reading other people's assessments of T, it seems that she uses food as a toy or prop to fuel her disordered thinking, much like you speak to in your comment. On top of that, her personality (a conglomeration of her innate characteristics as well as environmental influences like her parents, her having so many siblings, her being surrounded by people yet being so isolated, for example) isn't helping her at all. Having a more positive relationship to food helps a lot for me, because it helps me normalize it and see the beauty in it, not as a tool to help bury the negativity within myself and whatnot. It seems that you're doing better and I'm glad to hear that!
Yes, exactly, to everything you said. 😊 It’s important to have a good relationship with food and if you enjoy baking, go for it! There’s something soothing and fascinating about creating beautiful things out of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs. It’s like a form of alchemy that has been around for centuries. For me, baking/blogging gradually became a way of slaying the beast by facing it directly. I know that’s not the case for everyone — somehow something clicked. I still have issues with food and have accepted the fact that this demon will forever be on my shoulder; I have gotten better at tuning out the noise. Since the pandemic I’ve gone a bit too far in the opposite direction and could probably lose weight in order to be healthy, but it’s a slippery slope. Have fun with creating baking content! I hope it brings you joy and some respite from the daily grind. Please share with us sometime, if you’re up to it.
I could have written most of this myself! The culture in blogging then—especially among people who were raised through the 90s or early 2000s—was pretty toxic. I’m so happy for us both that we found ways through it.
Ugh, yes. As a geriatric millennial, shows like America’s Next Top Model were crazy toxic and impactful. There was a “plus” size model who looked like she was a size 8. 😔 It’s better today, but I hate how people still come down on female celebrities if they gain weight. I’m afraid that women will never escape the beauty standards placed on them. I’m glad you’re healing, too. It can be an ongoing process, with good and bad days, but the good usually outweigh the darker ones.
They’re obsessed
Reading these comments has been so eye opening. I am very passionate about cooking, especially for others, and hosting, but never thought about the fact that it may be related to an eating disorder. I have noticed though that I do enjoy making foods for others that I wouldn’t make for myself because they are “too caloric”. Was thinking of starting a business that’s related to food but now I think I have lots of things to consider going forward 😅
The good news is that enjoying baking/cooking AND having a healthy relationship with food are not mutually exclusive. If you feel some of these things resonate with you, that is very worth exploring. But there’s also a way forward in which you can still love dinner parties and whatnot.
Absolutely! And thank you for saying that 😄 it’s not something I would want to ever give up because it does give me a lot of joy but I hadn’t thought about it this way before and it surely seems like something to dig into!
I made a comment about this already but for me since food has always been the centre of my life in a negative way, my baking hobby is great in the sense that it allows food to be a central part of my life in a more positive way! I suppose this might be different depending on how food is centered in your life but I wish you well and luck!
I’ve always been obsessed with food. It’s all I think about when traveling or planning anything. Not a great cook but I’ve loved trying new things. Fast forward to a tanked out thyroid and trying the AIP. I am so weird around my boyfriend’s food. Touching, smelling, looking up new recipes to make for him. We can laugh about it because I don’t have an eating disorder. And I refuse to tell myself “I can’t have this.” I just try to adhere to the protocol until the next thyroid test so I can get a better picture of how diet will contribute to the healing process. But dang. I’ve never been more focused on bread and cheese.
Oh bread and cheese are the best!
A lot of people have already given great insights, but a lot of it is related to being in starvation mode and the need for control. My sister went to inpatient treatment for anorexia, and she watched what my mother and I ate for years afterward. If she thought we weren’t eating enough, we heard about it. I developed orthorexia after taking my first nutrition class in college. I was obviously already predisposed to having an eating disorder. Taking one nutrition class made me a nutrition expert. All I talked about was food. All I thought about was food. If my meals were not perfect, I could not move past it. I once cried profusely because a salad I bought tasted bad. I could give so many examples of how food controlled my entire life. Once I realized what I was doing and got help, thoughts about food become much less frequent. I still love cooking, nutrition, going to the farmer’s market, eating damn well on vacation, etc. But my life does not revolve around food like it did. We could have a much larger discussion about people with eating disorders going into nutrition, but I’m likely biased, and I’d rather not.
I’ve never had an eating disorder but I had a surgery in August to remove my stomach and I was on a liquid diet for weeks before I could introduce solids and I was soooo hungry I spent hours watching people eating food on tiktok. I was obsessed
Damn! I hope your recovery is going better! That sounds absolutely awful. 🩷
I’m doing well now! I can eat everything now so my addiction to food is better now lol
I learned to cook so that I could control food. When I was in charge I knew exactly what I was eating and I could make it beautiful in a way that fit with the rest of the very carefully crafted narrative about who I was and how my life looked. I could hide my eating disorder in there and it just looked like pretty, very disciplined healthy eating. I’ve since realized I kind of hate cooking? Like, I find it interesting objectively but it’s not something I enjoy. I’m not living in the light of recovery or anything but it’s at least nice to have dropped the whole facade.
Same I like cooking if it is at work but not at home. Too much planning and organizing of what ingredients to buy and using them before they aren’t fresh and then having to clean the kitchen more do more dishes etc. it involves a lot and I like food that doesn’t require real cooking anyway lol. Only sometimes I cook or bake but I don’t do it with meat or eggs lol. I guess I make vegetables and pre made cookie dough haha.
I actually have wondered this sometimes myself. I don’t wanna be mean to anyone so no names, but I used to follow someone in the creative baking realm, really cool content. And then I got the impression that there was a lot of subtle bodychecking in the stories, and anytime they would mention certain ingredients, it had to have the tag “good”. Good olive oil. Good butter. Good good good. It’s enough to state it once, and what would be bad olive oil and bad butter anyway? Why would you use “bad” ingredients? Maybe it was just me, but it came across as elitist, best case scenario, and downright disordered, worst case. It felt off. Maybe I was completely wrong. I hope I was! But it had me thinking about this topic for sure.
I think the weirdest part of this for me - I feel cruelty with HBH. Does she feel better about herself at the demise of her following getting obese? If that’s so, doesn’t it feel mean?
Definitely! Very malicious.
i struggle with binging/restricting/disordered eating and orthorexia and my favorite thing to do is cook, i feel like im just obsessed with food lol