After a boyfriend dumped me in my first year of high school, I developed an awful eating disorder and became insufferable to be around. I couldn’t eat without feeling the need to run afterwards. I counted the calories in sauce and seasoning. I became a caricature of myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever grown out of her.
You know the type — because every woman is socialized into fluency in the unspoken language of food. In my past four years at Colgate University, I’ve clocked food as an ever present ghost — conversations about marathon training, the influx of “gym bro” culture, the “freshman 15,” unprescribed use of stimulants and now, the influx of GLP-1s (a diabetes medication now used for weight loss by stimulating a natural hormone which decreases appetite). I’ve seen multiple versions of the same impossible standards, while my body haunts me like a devil in an ever-shifting form. I’ve heard women bash the usage of GLP-1s while actively starving and shaming themselves. I find myself struggling to keep up with the newest trend, as self-hatred disguises itself as a new term every week: buccal fat, cortisol face, etc.
According to a 2021 study from the National Institute of Health on the “sharp increase” in eating disorders after the COVID-19 pandemic, fostered anxiety and depression have created the perfect storm to desire some heightened control that we lost in “multiple lockdowns, self-isolation, food insecurity and e-learning implementation.” However, what underlines this conversation is what New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom refers to as “our coded language of shame, stigma, status and bias around fatness.”
According to McMillan Cottom, there are two types of weight loss: weight loss for health and weight loss for “status and avoiding stigma.” Like myself, I think a majority of women struggle to reconcile these concepts as we transition from the body-positive 2010s to the comeback of the waifish 1990s model-off-duty look. Really, weight has become a social problem that signifies discipline and status. And, even though eating disorders exist across socioeconomic and racial boundaries, skinniness equates to a distinctly white and American ideal.
When I developed my high school disordered-eating habit, I started to believe that skinniness could make up for the half of me that was never going to be the white American ideal. If I could never be “white enough,” starving myself could signify that marker. I couldn’t eat without exercising, and if I did, I felt unclean and undeserving. These ideas were reinforced by perceptions of myself as second best, less desirable next to women who were white and skinny. This is not to say that eating disorders are “worse” for women of color, but to perhaps suggest that skinniness represents a status symbol that is both literally and socioeconomically more difficult for women of color to achieve. Conversely, McMillan Cottom notes that, “Overweight white and Asian women experience the labor market discrimination that Black and Hispanic women already do.” Essentially, weight can function in a manner that worsens labor market discrimination in the same way it already does for women of color.
So, the cycle continues. The language shifts, the aesthetics change, but the expectations remain. College only sharpens these contradictions — where disordered behaviors are normalized under the guise of wellness, where hunger is seen as discipline and where the ability to shrink oneself is still a form of social capital. In the bubble-esque environment of Colgate, we are sucked into a culture where food, weight and appearance become constantly topical, and comparison is the norm. The rise of GLP-1s won’t dismantle this logic — it will only reinforce the idea that thinness is worth pursuing at any cost.
And so, we talk about eating disorders without ever really talking about them. We dress them up in concern, in fitness, in health, in status. We critique the culture while still participating in it. We say we want freedom from these expectations, but most of us wouldn’t know who we are without them.
To my fellow Colgate students: Disordered eating is woven into the culture here through silent competitions over who can eat the least, the unspoken pride in shrinking and the way fitting into Brandy Melville clothing becomes a moral and social victory. I’m no exception. I’ve absorbed these standards without meaning to, but I’m tired of hearing about them because I’m bad at having an eating disorder. I’m tired of knowing your shame so intimately that it becomes my own.
