Let Me Have My Hunger

On behalf of all women

In the 11th grade, I learned how to make truffles with Oreos and cream cheese. I would eat a dozen before I’d feel remotely full. Each rich truffle felt like a drop in the ocean that was my stomach. The only sensation that would stop me from eating was the growing, gooey lump of cream cheese in my throat. Then a warm blanket would slowly pull itself across my eyes as my friends' voices faded into the shadows of the room.

That was the same year that I discovered Nutella and would keep it in a far cabinet in the kitchen to hide from my brothers. After school or late at night when I was alone, I’d defrost hot dog buns that my dad kept fully stocked in the freezer. I’d toast them, then slather the insides with Nutella and peanut butter. Ten minutes later, I’d curl myself under a handmade blanket in the dark den and fall into a slumber, still wearing my winter jacket.

In college, I gained access to every food imaginable from 7am-10pm seven days a week. I was terrified. Terrified that I wouldn’t stop thinking about food. Terrified that I’d have to walk past the three varieties of tortellini at the pasta bar, a six-foot tall case of assorted pastries, and pizza of every kind. Foods I had always adored but never had access to until now. My appetite felt more insatiable than ever. Although I was eating more than I had in my entire life, I still felt empty unless I immediately followed up my dinner with a Larabar or spoonful of white chocolate peanut butter. Why were my nutrition classes teaching me about the mechanisms of appetite but not why mine seemed unrelenting? I couldn’t satisfy it, so a buffalo chicken wrap and UConn’s famous 500 calorie chocolate chip cookie became an essential meal. My friends would save their cookies in their freezers, while I swallowed mine whole, desperate for my body to feel calm.

Over the four years that I studied nutrition, I learned to submit. I learned that my degree wouldn’t teach me how to cope with my appetite. In fact, my education told me that I had to eat two thirds as much as I was actually eating to maintain a “healthy” weight. But if I tried to get remotely close to that 2,200 calories per day, my body would scrounge for every morsel of available food.

During my summers in college, I marched in a few different drum corps. For three straight months each summer, I spent twelve hours a day running around a football field in the hot sun. I hoped for every day to be “chicken patty day”. I’d fill my lunch plate with two chicken patties on buns, a cup of tater tots, ranch dressing, and a bowl of salad on the side. After washing the meal down with two cups of mystery-flavored Gatorade, I’d make a PB&J to top off my meal. My tongue would play catch with the jelly oozing out of the sides of the bread as I made my way back to the field. Sometimes, I’d question making a second but would compromise by grabbing a third slice of bread, slathering one side with peanut butter, one side with jelly, and folding it in half. Somehow a single slice folded onto itself made the bread softer and more satisfying to bite into. I had spent years trying to hide my appetite, but the physical exertion I was putting my body through in the summer was too demanding. Despite my hunger making me gain weight during the school year, I was now losing weight while eating 5,000 calories per day. It was useless to fight. Those summers taught me that eating food was the only way I could stop obsessing over it. 

A few months after I graduated college, I met a boy on Tinder who took me to a tapas bar after a few dates. We were given bread for the table and he asked the waitress for a small bowl. He then filled it up with the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, red pepper, and salt that was on the table. He dipped his bread in the bowl, crushed an olive with his teeth, and spread it on the bread before taking a bite. “In college I used to bring whole avocados to the library. I’d cut one open, sprinkle some salt on it, and eat it with a spoon. That was dinner.” He had ADHD. I fell in love.

We dated, and I finally allowed myself to fully explore the cavernous pit that was my appetite. We’d snuggle in his dad’s basement and watched every episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix. I tripled the size of my vegetable garden in my parents backyard. In April, I started working in a farm kitchen where I learned that I actually do enjoy eating strawberries but am happiest when their flavor is carried into the air by steam as I cook them down into jam. On my one day off a week, my boyfriend would come over to eat remnants of the toast that I used as props for my food photography. We’d finish a night of age-appropriate drinking with a large slice of loaded-potato Bar pizza. The following morning he’d pick up a $2.50 breakfast sandwich on a Portuguese roll at Pickles before driving me home.

We moved in together. I learned to make gumbo, tom kha gai, pad thai, pierogies, gyoza, baguettes, octopus, gnocchi, mushroom ravioli, caesar dressing, bulgogi, and more. Usually on his dime, we ate out at least once a week, enjoying the various Asian dishes in Seattle. More abundant in variety and quality than our home in Connecticut. But we still had a fondness for our small-states food, as evidenced by the time when we ate New Haven pizza after it had been sitting in my suitcase for 38 hours. (It was still better than Seattle pizza).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we embraced family meals. The two of us sat down to caramelized lamb chops, shakshuka, or chicken caesar salad with our homemade dressing. With his pinchers, he’d hold up the remainder of each lamb chop to our dogs mouth so that Smokey could rip the last few strands of meat from the bone. On the weekends we walked our dog to bakeries or picked up “to-go” cocktails from our favorite restaurants whose dining rooms were closed. My boyfriend would spend $60 on a single box of French pastries. I try to avoid being the food police, but I did give him a scolding when he came home with three dozen-sized boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts. He said he bought them for his co-workers, but the following day after he left for work, there were still two boxes on our table.

I thought you were bringing the donuts to work.

I did. The other two are for me.

Grocery shopping became our favorite activity as we were both enamored by all the fresh, colorful produce at our local high-end grocer. He couldn’t resist his weekly fix of Met Market’s “seasonal” cookies, which were really just the same sugar cookie recipe but cut with rotating seasonal cookie cutters. We’d go out to eat and if he loved the food enough, he would ask for an additional order to bring home in a box. With him, I was not only able to freely enjoy food, but I was no longer obsessing about it.

At one point during this time in my twenties, I received a question from a family friend. Her teenage daughter was obsessing over food. She couldn’t stop eating. She would come home from sports practices devouring bread. She required seconds or thirds after dinner. This mother wanted to be careful about how to approach the situation, but ultimately felt concerned that her daughter was eating too much.

What could it be? Her mom asked.

Maybe she’s just hungry. I offered.

I felt sad. This loving mom could not relate to her daughter's insatiable hunger. Or had she forgotten her own?

One February, my boyfriend and I stopped grocery shopping together. By April of that year, we split up. In grief, my body devoured itself. So quickly that within a month it resembled a teens body- one that I realized I never had. When I became a woman, I had never known any other body than that of a child’s. In 6th grade, my body was stocky and straight. By 8th grade, it was curvy and full with round hips and thighs that you could dig your fingers into. It became the receiver of honks when I walked alone on the sidewalk in our suburban neighborhood. But now for the first time in my life, my body was somewhere in between. With sagging skin to remind me of the adult memories with my ex that my body was desperate to shed.

For the first time in my life, my body was begging me not to eat. Fighting it, in fact. I had to trick it just to get enough nutrition in. I liberally bought mochas from the coffee shop below my apartment. I mindlessly stuffed cliff bars in my mouth on the way from one place to the next. I’d practically choke on torn pieces of baguette that didn’t dissolve quickly enough in my mouth between appointments at work. I allowed myself to spend money on take-out and grocery deliveries that I absolutely could not afford. One time I stuffed an apple in my purse before going to a club. The bouncer didn’t question it, but a tequila shot gave my brain permission to spend money on a gyro that my body was desperate to devour on my way home that night.

You can imagine the mental gymnastics it took to have been forcing myself to eat while continuing to show up at my job as an eating disorder dietitian. I didn’t feel like a hypocrite because my body didn’t let me. Instead, it had completely forgotten that food had existed, and therefore I had forgotten whether or not I was eating. I was grieving. My body was grieving. But I had to remind myself to be patient and kind with my body while it was actively processing grief every second of the day. I did not argue with it. I chose to love it, mourn with it, and tried my best to be kind.

After a few months of riding an emotional roller coaster, my body finally started restoring itself but my appetite never returned. I was finally feeling normal and healthy again but was still forcing myself to eat. Food-the very thing that my life was centered around- felt completely alien to me. I would sit down to a bowl of sweet and sour Tom Kha and taste nothing as I forced each bite into my mouth. The stomach that used to wake me up every morning was now refusing to be woken up. A teenager arguing with me to have a few more hours of rest.

While trying to come to terms with my changed hunger, I had a brilliant teenage client who after years of restricting, started allowing herself to eat outside of her recovery meal plan. I realized that I had seen this type of client show up over and over again throughout my years as an eating disorder dietitian. An athletic, teen girl who starts restricting in response to others pointing out that she gained weight at an accelerated pace. She’s told to ‘watch her figure’, but no one tells her that she is in a short window of life in which her body was designed to gain somewhere between 5-20 pounds, including fat. In recovery, she trusts a meal plan, regains weight, but in her body's effort to heal, finds that her appetite is even stronger than before. But her relatives, parents, and especially her dad, feel threatened by the idea that her appetite is larger than a grown mans. Her brother's appetite, which is roughly the same, gets applauded or overlooked. He’s the one who is supposed to be growing. The one gaining muscle and losing fat. Her parents applaud his transformation into adulthood, but must step away from supporting her in recovery as they still can’t comprehend how her fat gain is equally as developmentally required.

I want to scream for every woman inside of me who was denied to embrace their hunger as a girl but lost it as a woman. Scream in response to the fact that I have to use “evidence-based” equations to estimate caloric needs that clearly do not match the needs of many of my teen clients. Scream in response to the fact that health teachers lecture their students to stay within BMI categories that were made for adults, not children. But are not educated enough to share the illustrations of growth charts that represent the continuously developing bodies of their students. Scream because doctors tell teens that they are “done growing” when they reach a certain height, but fail to inform them that the several pounds of lean body mass that follow in later adolescence is also growth. 

Why do pediatricians warn teen girls of developing chronic health diseases when they gain fat, despite that fat gain being a requirement to maintain both short and long-term female health? Why are millions of girls shamed for having a “sweet tooth” when their body is simply begging them to eat enough? While burgers and fries are willfully thrown at teenage boys? When will our nation stop pushing boys to become men and stop terrorizing young girls from becoming women?

As a provider, I cannot put into words the resentment I have toward our nation for denying teens of their physiological youth. For expecting them to be adults as soon as their bodies no longer look like children, their bodies and minds compromised by that pressure. I mourn for every woman that was barred from experiencing hunger and gaslit to believe that something else must be wrong with her if she does. And that now at the age of twenty-nine, when for the first time in my life I feel like a real woman, the hunger that I spent most of my life being forbidden from satisfying has now escaped me. How many other women are shamed from honoring their appetite but lose it as soon as they find freedom? Lose it to our youth and premature bodies. If maturity helps us find freedom but lose our appetites, what do we even gain?