*Trigger warning for eating disorders*
Caio, mi amici. This week’s topic is perhaps less lighthearted than the other articles I have planned, like my favorite places I have visited in Italy, cultural shocks, or coffee culture. However, it is something I want to vulnerably address, particularly since last week was National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. If you don’t know about eating disorders, be sure to check out my fellow Her campus writer Julie Rubino’s comprehensive article, “Learn More About Eating Disorders Awareness Week.” For now, I’d like to offer what I have learned and share my story with disordered eating in the hope that I can help inspire someone else in their attempt at recovery.
I think my eating disorder started when I was a freshman in high school. I was bullied throughout middle school for my looks; I wasn’t skinny or blonde and I didn’t play sports. I was a normal weight, but I wanted to be “thin,” what everyone else seemed to look like. It seemed as though loving the person in the mirror was a matter of losing 10 to 15 pounds. I’m not going to talk about how I did it, lest someone reads this and then thinks that my story is a how-to guide.
I started to restrict my calorie intake well below recommended and experienced a degree of guilt if I went over an arbitrary number some cookie-laden “Lose Weight Fast” website spit out at me my sophomore year. Losing weight is usually seen in society as a good thing, and people even remarked, much to my chagrin, “You’ve lost a lot of weight.” With that kind of praise, it’s easy for an eating disorder to become dizzyingly beneficial and normalized.
I was giddy that people were beginning to notice that I looked “better.” The problem is that once you start, it becomes almost impossible to stop. The one moment of clarity, which made me realize something was wrong, was almost four years later in the spring of my senior year. I found myself at Wawa attempting to buy dinner before a play practice at six. Only my best friend, Ryan, noticed how I stared at the screen, hovering over a cookies and cream mint milkshake I desperately wanted to have but didn’t want to buy because it would put me over my allotted calorie count for the day. Ryan came over, and somehow immediately understood. He clicked the screen and said, “Go for it. And you have to get whipped cream, it’s a necessity.” I still get whipped cream every time I buy a drink at Wawa, but more importantly, I knew then that I had a problem.
Realizing you have a problem and doing something about it, however, are entirely different things. Eating disorders tend to be framed as a positive thing, which makes it all the more difficult to stop. Ultimately, I decided it was easier to do nothing about it. Like I said, it’s easy to fall in love with something that makes you thinner, even if you suffer as a result.
That summer, things changed for the better, as I visited Italy for the first time. I didn’t have access to a scale, and in Europe, calories aren’t written on labels. This of course caused me anxiety, because I couldn’t tell how fattening something was, and I would spiral into wondering how much I’d eaten. I would barely eat meals and then justify it by having two gelatos later. My new friends started to notice. Eating disorders are much less common in Italy, but they started to realize something might be wrong.
A friend who is a chef in Milan brought me pasta with mushrooms one day, telling me I was skinny and needed to eat better. His basic gist was, “We have good food, eat it, because I don’t think the Americans are feeding you well.” That was the summer I finally started to eat and not care. It is of course much easier because portions are different, food is better quality, and you walk everywhere, so somewhere in the balance of all these things I was healthy, eating what I wanted when without any of the previous guilt. Of course, all too soon I went back home, and while my healthy eating lasted the remainder of the summer, as anyone with an ED can attest, the vicious cycle went back around again.
In my freshman year of college, old patterns almost immediately resumed, until one spring night, having eaten nothing but fruit all day, I nearly vomited into a trashcan outside of GLM. I was nauseous and hungry, but I didn’t want to eat. My friends, who knew firsthand what an eating disorder looked like, pulled me into their dorm to have a sit-down, about how I’d barely been eating, and that I needed help. My boyfriend, the loving and supportive person he is, came in with soda and begged me to eat crackers he found at Provisions on Demand. I think more often than not, it’s easy to forget that the people we think we have to impress, are the people who love us and just want us to be healthy and safe.
This past fall semester, my weight fluctuated again, but with the support of my friends, I tried to be fair to myself, and meet my body’s needs. I resolved not to have two meals of salad and a coffee each day, but to eat balanced meals. It mostly worked, until I went home for the holidays and was surrounded by copious amounts of food.
The holidays are always hard for me, my ED is always screaming to not eat, but every bit of me wants to eat everything in sight. Being Italian-American means I have been raised with a love of food. Good food, not what my family would call “bunny food,” which made up a terrifying amount of my meals, but pasta, meats, cheese, etc. Pasta tastes like home, no matter where in the world I eat it.
Recipes in my family are sacred and passed around like precious trading cards. Food connects me to my Italian roots, so having a complicated relationship with food has always marred what should be a celebration of a piece of who I am. In the past, I rarely let myself enjoy meals, worrying over how much I had eaten and what number would be on the scale the next day. Perhaps somewhere there is some irony about an Italian-American having an eating disorder.
The Feast of The Seven Fishes particularly terrifies me each year, because I know I’ll gain three pounds from all the food, which my brain screams at me is horrific, even though it is completely normal. Over break, I wouldn’t eat lunch if I knew we were having company in the evening, so I would keep my calories down. This made me constantly tired, and I avoided even my favorite foods if I deemed them “fattening.” I’m not proud of this behavior, but to completely lose an eating disorder is so difficult, I’m not sure I can put into words how hard it is to try and fail your body or your brain every day of your life.
But now, I’m back in Italy. I was initially apprehensive; worried that a lack of a meal plan meant I’d starve myself. Of course, the little voice in the back of my head was completely on board with this plan, but I dragged myself to the supermarket twice the first week and bought pasta, salad, cheese, bread, meat, and gelato (yes they sell tubs of gelato).
In the two weeks that followed, something shifted. After two weeks of traveling and intense classes, I learned it is impossible not to eat. Food is fuel, food is life. And in that respect, I have been eating three full meals a day, plus coffee, sometimes followed by Gelato. Actually, a lot of the time dinner is followed by a gelato run to a cute place just up the street with little tables
outside, and an adorable white awning. Of course, I still feel a stab of guilt when I order my biscotti or lemon gelato from the graying man behind the corner, but somehow the minute I start eating it, the little voice in the back of my head that usually screams, “You’re fat,” finally shuts up.
A large reason for this personal shift is the culture around food here in Italy. Interestingly, while 3 million people (of reported cases, because many cases go unreported) in Italy suffer from eating disorders, that number is 10 times higher in the U.S. Interestingly, while most women with reported cases of eating disorders are primarily young in the U.S., it is among the older generation in Italy, meaning it is the aging population, not the young who make up most cases. So, what is Italy doing differently?
The answer seems to come from Italy’s culture and mindset around food. A study by Aine M. McGinn for The Universe of Texas at Austin entitled “Eataly: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Likelihood and Development of Eating Disorders in America and Italy” found that, “Eating disorder(s) are more likely to develop given different cultural attitudes and understandings of food, body image, and eating disorders themselves,” hence why they are far more prevalent in the United States than Italy.
Attitudes about your body and food are completely different in Italy, and I do think I am influenced by such a culture about food is infectious. As I mentioned before, I don’t have a scale. This is not just in my student housing, but in friends’ and families’ homes as well. Unlike where I can walk into Target, CVS or even Five Below and find a scale, I have not found a single store here that sells one, despite how much I have been searching. Without a scale, or even a clue about where to buy one (shipping something via Amazon is a little complicated with studying abroad), I can’t check my weight two or three times a day obsessively. I just have to be satisfied with how I look and love myself.
I’ve also felt better after eating the better quality and better-portioned food. Better quality food and less fast food means that after a meal I don’t feel sluggish and instead feel energized. With different portion sizes than in the U.S., I feel happily full instead of stuffed. Oftentimes in the U.S. after a meal, I don’t feel great, but here I feel fine. Substituting fresh products for fast food plays a big role in feeling good after eating. Essentially, if I don’t feel sick to my stomach after eating, it means I also feel less guilt about the meal.
Further, people talking about their weight in a negative connotation seems non-existent here. I went for bottomless sushi with my friends last week, and it was maybe the best sushi I have ever had in my life (Who would have thought?). While I fretted over how much I was eating, my friends weren’t worried about what they were eating, or how much they were there to enjoy good company, decently priced unlimited sushi and good company on a Friday night. I was encouraged to take seconds, and neither during the meal nor as we were leaving did anyone talk about how they were going to gain weight, even in a joking manner.
Finally, savoring food here is an important part of culture. It’s corny, but food brings people together here, they meet friends around 5:00 PM for appetizers and drinks and then eat dinner together, as a family, every night. My parents were always pretty adamant about eating dinner as a family when I was a kid, but here there is an augmented magnitude of its importance. No one misses dinner with their family unless they’re with their friends. In this way, food is at the heart of life here in Italy. Laws regulating food are strict because it is viewed as important. Italians savor their food, and because of this it brings people together and reflects their culture. Each region specializes in different food, and each household cooks traditional dishes from their
home. They embrace food, as a positive, meaning that food quickly takes on a positive connotation regardless of the ingredients or calorie count.
Changing any mindset is difficult, but I do think that minimizing things that make people experience guilt about food, and framing food and eating in a positive light can truly help American society reframe its stigmatism around food, and with it, set people struggling with an eating disorder on the road to recovery.
Overall, my story is mild, and I know that. I’m lucky. I have friends with cases far more difficult than my own. I only hope that by sharing my experience I can encourage those suffering from an eating disorder, or maybe even just struggling in their relationship with food to consider what I have learned from the Italians which has immensely helped me in my own journey.
I want to call on those struggling with eating disorders, to reframe their focus around food. I know it’s not easy, and believe me, I struggle with it every single day of my life. However, learning from other cultures can change us for the better, and I truly believe that Italy’s food culture has changed mine. Stay strong <3
Works Cited:
Parliamentary question | Eating disorders: the situation in the European Union | P-005594/2021 | European Parliament (europa.eu)
Eating Disorder Statistics | ANAD – National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders
Eataly: a Cross-Cultural Examination of the Likelihood and Development of Eating Disorders in America and Italy (utexas.edu)