Since I’m new here, there are some things you should know about me.
I like to write about illness and how it shapes my life. I also like to write about what I notice about the culture we live in, through a very distinct lens.
I am fully recovered from my nine-year-long stint with an eating disorder.
I downloaded a pedometer app.
To someone without an eating disorder, this is not a big deal. A pedometer app may even be helpful for some, if you’re using it for the right reasons. It’s good to get out and walk around. It makes you healthier and more alert. I also am totally not against people wanting to lose weight for health reasons. I get it — not everyone is going to develop an eating disorder just because they want to lose five pounds. I know that I am in the minority.
However, in a terrifying turn of events, the minority is becoming the majority. Statistics from the National Eating Disorders Association support this. Each decade since 1950, the rate of diagnoses of anorexia in women ages 15-19 has risen. And between 1988 and 1993, the rate of diagnoses of bulimia tripled. Think about what a massive jump that is, and that’s only over the course of five years. Keep in mind that that statistic is from over 10 years ago. Imagine how much that number has probably risen.
There is a biological component to eating disorders, the element that draws a firm distinction between an eating disorder and a diet. Still, not everyone who is biologically predisposed to an eating disorder will develop one. So what separates someone with the eating disorder gene who develops an eating disorder from someone with the gene who doesn’t?
Well, back to my pedometer app.
I can think back to as early as elementary school and remember how my friends used to talk about how fat their thighs were. It was before I even knew that “skinny” and “fat” were words that people besides adults use. Maybe that’s where we learned it from; many from the generation before ours instilled in us the principle that we must be skinny because skinny equals successful (which is BS, but that’s beside the point). From listening to our elders reject the notion that food is necessary, we, however subconsciously, stored that information in our impressionable brains and began obsessing over it from an earlier age than any generation before us.
And now, here we are at BU, with its campus that is, according to Google, just about a mile-and-a-half long. But even if I had not googled it, I would know how long it is. Why? Because no one ever shuts up about it.
In my few weeks here, I don’t think I’ve had one meal that hasn’t been prefaced with, “It’s OK if we eat this. We walk so much that we’ll just burn it off anyway.” As freshmen, we are all terrified of the infamous “freshman 15,” but “we won’t gain it here because we burn so many calories walking across campus.”
Before I even realized it, I too wanted to figure out just how much I was walking, so I downloaded that pedometer app. The homepage shows how many steps you have taken (obviously), how long you have spent walking overall, the overall length you traveled and, of course, the calories you have burned taking all those steps.
Every time I opened my app to check my steps, I was assaulted by these numbers that I thought I had stopped caring about long ago. Why do we care so much about counting calories when calories are merely units of energy that we need to live? I could write an entire novel about why the concept of counting calories is completely unrelated to health, but that’s a column for another day. The fact that these arbitrary numbers — calories eaten or burned, weight gained or lost, steps taken — dictate our lives and our choices in such a profound way is so telling about the way this society normalizes diet culture and glorifies thinness.
“Fat” does not always mean unhealthy. “Thin” does not always mean healthy. Yet we terrorize people about the “freshman 15” while lauding the people who’ve lost weight due to an eating disorder. Our culture and its perception of ideal and healthy is not okay. We need to purge ourselves, if you will, of diet culture — right now.
And so, I have deleted the pedometer app, because I, like everyone else, should be able to walk when I want to, take the BU Shuttle or the T when I want to and eat what I want to and not worry about how many calories my Cheeseology mac & cheese contains. I encourage you all to do the same.