An Apple a Day: When Dieting Isn’t a Cure
It took a chronic illness for me to realise that I had an eating disorder. I left the doctor’s office with the life-changing diagnosis of an illness with no cure, his sole advice being to follow a “good diet.” The idea of discovering what established a diet as “good” terrified me, fearing a confrontation with long-held eating patterns that were not as “healthy” as I had once believed. Crucially, the thought of altering anything about the way I ate made me feel sick.
Before getting ill, I had the privilege and ignorance that comes with a lifetime of good health to believe that wellbeing was something that could be measured by a rule or seen in a mirror. Society categorised my body as one that fit an image of health. This advantage was a new phenomenon for me, as my appearance had changed a lot in the recent years after picking up unhealthy habits around food. The way I looked when my eating disorder was at its worst was praised unanimously. Family gatherings were a parade of “you look great” and “you’ve lost so much weight,” leaving me with the bitter aftertaste of what they must have thought of me before. I was not feeding my body the sustenance it needed, in fact, I was starving it. But because my average-sized body didn’t fit into the dominant, mistaken belief of what an eating disorder looks like, no one—and most importantly myself—could tell.
This all changed with the onset of my illness. Following the standard advice of following a “good diet,” I turned my eating habits on their head, striving to give my body the perfect amount of what it needed. I scoured the internet for answers beyond an illness without a cure. Time and time again, it was the solution of a diet that arose like a beacon of light. Gluten-free, low histamine, Mediterranean, raw vegan, carnivore—I tried them all. Surrounded by messaging that promoted restrictive eating, I fell back on the habits that I had mastered over the years of my eating disorder. Everything around me seemed to encourage a relationship with food that didn’t feel quite right. But I was desperate, so I ignored it. I took to my body like a scientific experiment, pouring over all the information I could find about what food would make my body healthy again. Notebooks were crammed with detailed annotations, colour coded captions and subheadings; meal plans were posted across my walls, boarded with scribblings of calories, protein, carbohydrates, and vitamins. I felt calm and clear. If I provided my body with the fuel that it needed, everything would be okay.
It is only through hindsight that I realise how naïve this approach was. Chronic illness is laced in fluidity and uncertainty, culminating in the wisdom that you will never come to the end of understanding what it means to be ill. My body is a whack-a-mole of pain, something I am unable to win. Symptoms flare like old friends bringing the nostalgia of aches past, taking me travelling through states and times to then land on ground that disappears under my feet. I followed the advice over what to fuel my body like I was revising for an exam, and yet nothing changed. All I could do was sit and watch as my health slipped between my fingertips, stripping me bare. Sometimes you can do all the right things and still, everything goes wrong.
It was at this point that I realised where I had made my mistake—I had bought into a myth pushed by an industry that was never meant to help bodies like mine. Diet and wellness culture promote a model of health focused on the individual, promising optimisation to secure capitalist success. The harm inflicted through this framework becomes glaringly obvious when applied to chronically ill and disabled individuals. For some, my body is a lucrative opportunity—a cash cow of despair, desperation, and fear. While the wellness industry serves only a minority of privileged individuals, its messaging is disseminated throughout society, leading to the dominant ideological construction of ill-health as something you can avoid by purchasing the right product. Health has become a commodity, ill-health the most profitable of them all. But adequate treatment will never come in the form of a singular expensive product or programme. Collectively, we have accepted “wellness” as a model of healthcare to strive for. We can dream so much bigger; a system instead based on principles of community, mutual aid, and accessibility.
Dieting is a fragment of a much larger picture that maps the interactions between chronic illnesses and eating disorders. While there is clear evidence that highlights the ways those with chronic conditions containing dietary components are at a greater risk of developing eating disorders, the research that has been done merely skims the surface of the multifaceted ways the two complex conditions co-exist. For instance, chronic illnesses commonly contain states of isolation, uncertainty, self-esteem issues and lack of stimulation, all of which can trigger disordered eating patterns. Being a subject that only addresses the ill, this topic is deemed too niche to be worthy of sufficient research, and therefore I can only talk from my own experience. However, I have a suspicion that I am not the only one who feels this way.
Another aspect of this picture is the way appearances can shape perceptions of the sick, even for those with illnesses that are “invisible.” It is a constant struggle for patients’ symptoms to be believed, and this is heightened when your body does not fit into the box of what some have drawn a “healthy” body to be. It is the marginalised who suffer when those in power decide how people should look and give diagnoses and treatments accordingly. Care should not be given and refused based on appearances. But patient’s own diagnosis are regularly dismissed for assessments based on prejudices about the way they look, placing them at great risk. There is an anti-fat bias in society that seeps into the distribution of healthcare; a hierarchy within caregiving that creates a space for eating disorders, self-esteem issues and fatphobia to thrive.
There is no neat ending to this narrative—a tale of recovering from an eating disorder while being chronically ill. If I’m honest, it’s a tug of war that I’m still in the middle of, floating somewhere in the shades of grey. I can, however, tell the story of the new ways that my sick body is learning to meet food. Food is something that I have loved passionately and is one of the only experiences that I can still access while being ill. There is no break when you’re chronically ill—even when your symptoms are mild the weight of illness casts a shadow over your very existence. It is exhausting and can feel never-ending. While I know I may never get a holiday from this, food can offer me a sort of break. While I’m eating, all the pain and the fatigue and worries melt away, my mind focused solely on the sensory activity of chewing and tasting and digesting. I can sit with a meal and forget everything else. These respites structure my days—when the calendar stretches out like a murky street at night, I break each day into pieces navigated by the meals, like crumbs of bread to follow.
In part, food is my greatest form of medication. Planning meals gives me a creative outlet—compelling me to become resourceful, crafting meals while only using the ingredients that my stomach can handle. Old recipes are tinkered with, finding new and innovative ways of tasting the flavours I used to love. On the mornings I feel up to it, my mum brings over a tray stacked with small bowls of deconstructed porridge so that I can carefully take my time building my plate. A dollop of soy yoghurt swirled into the oats, sliced tinned peaches arranged in a circle, pecans split in my hands and crumbled on top. When I feel my lowest, it is food that my body looks to for comfort. Feeling so fatigued that I can’t move or think or speak, I sit with a punnet of raspberries to slowly make my way through or break off a chunk of dark chocolate and wait as it melts on my tongue. The food doesn’t make it go away, but it gives me something to hold on to, a feeling of comfort that protects me from the pits of hopelessness. Sometimes, within the isolation and seclusion of being ill, food can give me a secret loophole for connecting with others. Sharing a meal allows an avenue of socialising, giving me the companionship I long for, while the activity of eating offers me a get out if I feel so fogged up that I can’t string two words together. Food can be a form of care, a way for those around me to communicate their support in a tangible act that I can hold on to and swallow to make me whole. Food can make me feel better, a shift within the stagnant pain of illness.
I used to love apples when I was well—I would eat them all the time. But now they’re too tough for my gut, so I go for oranges instead. When I eat them, I don’t think of the fruit as a remedy, clinging on to a belief that if I just eat it right, it might cure me, keeping the doctor away for good. Instead, I roll the waxy ball between my fingertips and feel its weight in my palm. Peeling open its flesh, I take a segment out one by one, and place them into my mouth—breaking open the juice, tasting the sensation on my tongue. And then I smile, feeling happy to be alive.
Cover Photo by Alina Kurson. Edited by Madison Case.