Food Restriction In Response To Global Crisis
Reframing restriction as a physiological response
In the past several months, a TikTok has circulated around the internet suggesting that the body ideal tends to slim down in response to global crisis’. In the last 10 years, the American female body ideal gained some weight- a noticeable difference from a rocky decade in which heroin chic reigned. But in the past year or so, waistbands have dropped, and as early -00’s fashion is coming back into style, so is an extremely thin ideal female body type. Some on social media have pointed to the genocide of Palestinians and the U.S. governments attack on women’s rights as a cause for the most recent shrinkage in the body ideal. Although I agree that body ideals tend to be influenced by sociopolitical events, I think the factors that contribute to this trend are more biologically wired than we might think.
In my newsletter titled, “Kate Moss is Not Responsible for Your Negative Body Image”, I walk through multiple body ideal trends in the past 70 years. In this essay, I note how most body positive activists tend to blame media for creating body ideal trends but ignore that art and media are a recreation of the human experience. Therefore, body ideals promoted by the media are a reproduction of modern social issues. One example of the thin ideal comes from the hippie movement of the 60’s. As the counterculture that protested war and industrialization was run by young adults, the poster child of the hippie movement was young, energetic, and carefree. The ideal hippie was young, and as youthful bodies tend to have less fat, a slim immature body represented alignment with the hippie movement.
Additionally, many hippies feared that society was on the brink of major conflict. These subgroups dedicated themselves to fasting and restricting calories, hoping that dietary discipline would help them train their bodies for famine that could arise from global conflict.
In recent conversations about the relationship between body ideals, disordered eating, and global conflict, many have argued that dietary restriction helps some feel “in control” when everything around them feels “out of control”. But in the several years that I’ve worked as an eating disorder Dietitian, I can’t stop asking, why? As I’ve continued to learn about physiology, neuropsychology, and gastronomy in the past several years I’ve learned that our universal human behaviors tends to serve some physiological function.
Loss of Appetite as a Stress Response
Once upon a time, the only problems our ancestors were concerned about were meeting their basic needs such as eating enough food, getting enough sleep, and staying safe from predators. Food gives us energy to function, sleep gives our body an opportunity to repair itself, and a safe home provides us the time and space to effectively accomplish both. But when any of these needs are unmet, our body becomes stressed. A surge of cortisol gives us energy, encouraging us to seek out our needs. Until these needs are consistently and reliably met, our body is unable to feel relaxed. This pattern helped establish the fight-or-flight response, a reaction from the body to change our feelings and behavior in response to stress and inflammation.
Although access to adequate food and housing is still a concern for many across the globe, many humans in 2024 experience additional stressors such as poor cell service, repairing their car, or a stressful work deadline. Our problems may not be as dire, but our stress responses are the same as our bodies struggle to recognize the difference between stress from a work presentation versus stress from predation.
When the body experiences the fight-or-flight response, it often loses it’s interest in eating. During periods of acute stress, the vagus nerve turns off the stomach to help redirect most of your blood and oxygen to your muscles and brain as opposed to your digestive system. Doing so gives you enough energy to physically get you out of the stressful situation as opposed to ‘wasting’ energy on digesting food. Your entire digestive system will tell you not to eat food by shutting off your stomach, giving you a stomach ache, making it difficult to swallow, or even preventing you from being able to taste food. In the most extreme cases, the body might expel undigested food by vomiting or inducing diarrhea. One of many reasons why #mentallyillgirlies struggle with digestive issues.
Losing your appetite in response to acute stress is commonly understood. But what I find interesting about the acute stress response is ones thoughts about food tend to change too. Many who find themselves struggling to eat when stressed also find themselves obsessed with restricting their intake of food.
Food Restriction as a Tool for Safety
Many folks who struggle with eating disorders express that restricting their intake helps give them a sense of agency. Both eating disorder providers and clients will insist that social pressures encourage them to trim their bodies, yet restriction as a means of control has not only been historically documented for centuries, it is even found as a common behavior amongst stressed animals.
When a person does not have access to adequate fuel, rationing their intake can help them survive. For some, this can look like decreasing portion sizes, loading up on fluids (if they are available), filling their stomachs with non-food items (dirt, fiber, mud, air), fasting for the majority of the day, and more. In an effort to both seek and conserve food, the undernourished brain becomes obsessed with food. Because food is so scarce, the brain becomes hypervigilant about the safety of food as well. The stressed brain becomes more alert to every detail about food, making tastes, smells, and texture more powerful to your senses. Is it clean? Moldy? Stale? Is it ripe enough to eat? All of these symptoms will persist until the body is consistently adequately fed.1 To those that have experienced or are familiar with Anorexia, this stress response doesn’t sound much different than the eating disorder.
The brains obsession with the quantity and quality of food is chemically created by the stress response. When a stressor encourages us to behave a certain way, the behavior can be reinforced if it benefits us. As our species as been rationing food during periods of famine for quite a long time, eventually this behavior becomes part of the stress response - a reflex to protect us without our conscious knowledge. But since many of us now experience a wider variety of arguably less dire stressors, our body may unnecessarily respond to modern-day stressors with primal instinct. In other words, it may interpret stress as a threat to the bodies basic needs and resort to rationing food, money, etc. to ensure the likelihood of survival.
It’s no wonder than that when people experience general stressors, or witness multiple global crisis’, their body encourages them to ration food. Although many in our culture will resort to dieting to change their body shape or size, it’s important to acknowledge that many do so in response to a stressor or loss of agency. 2 Does pursuing the thin ideal really make them feel “in control”, or does the pervasiveness of the thin ideal assign language to their primal reflex? Although rejection of the thin ideal is an important step in healing from social pressures, is it enough? Our bodies have been developing over millenia, creating pathways to help protect and sustain our lives. I wonder what would happen if we shifted towards educating folks on this adaptation, as opposed to blaming superficial factors such as “the media”. And although I provide this argument to encourage others to see their psyche as physiology, it’s not lost on me that the harm that created this restriction reflex is still being forced on innocent people across the globe every second of every day.
#freepalestine
If symptoms do persist after a long period of adequate intake, it is often due to unresolved trauma or PTSD. Regardless, food trauma cannot be healed without an adequately fueled body.
This is not to minimize racial fatphobia which created the thin ideal to create a “caste system”, as Jessica Wilson RDN describes in her book It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies. Instead, I make this argument to acknowledge the restrictive reflex that has evolved with our bodies long before the development of modern American racism.