Calories for the Harvard Soul

Dear bagel scoopers, Brain Break crumb eaters, steamed broccoli mound-makers: This column is for you.

If you’ve used the excuse, “I already had a huge lunch,” to get out of a meal; if you’ve made arbitrary food rules (no meat from now on, a glass of water before for every meal); if you eat uncontrollably during reading period, then this column is for you, too.

Still don’t see yourself yet? Hold on. If you’ve heard the euphemism, “He’s weird about food” or “She’s disappeared,” or if you sensed a little something extra behind your friend’s I’m-too-fat joke, then this is for you, too.

Disordered eating is a serious and rampant problem, far more common than full-fledged eating disorders and far less understood or diagnosed. It is an unhealthy relationship with food, often characterized by an obsession with nutrition, constant dieting and perpetual dissatisfaction with body image. You’ve seen or have been victim to its various incarnations—obsessively going to the gym, binging at the dessert table, constantly strategizing about caloric intake, absurd one-fruit-an-hour diets, screensavers that say, “Diet or die,” Facebook notes that cry out for help, a sudden and inexplicable switch to veganism, etc. While anorexia is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual as failure to maintain body weight within 85% of expected, disordered eating has no such quantitative criteria, falling into the catch-all category “EDNOS,” or Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.

A study conducted in 2008 by Self Magazine in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill estimates that one in 10 women between the ages of 25-45 suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, while a total of three in four suffer from disordered eating. Other studies suggest, unsurprisingly, that the rates are even higher among college students.

I’ll be honest. Disordered eating is not lethal. It is not recognized as an official psychiatric disorder. And it is highly correlated with perfectionism, the single trait that best characterizes Harvard students. But this doesn’t mean that suffering from this condition is inevitable or without consequence. It took me years to realize that even if something wasn’t fatal, it could still be a far cry from innocuous.

The real cost of disordered eating isn’t the fact that it can progress into a full-fledged eating disorder but the immense mental space and psychic energy wasted on obsessing about food. We’re anal about enough things in life. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one less thing to be neurotic about?

On a national level, there’s an unforgivable silence about this issue. This week is National Eating Disorder week and I’m afraid the topic still isn’t getting its due. On the National Eating Disorder Association’s website, there’s not a single mention of disordered eating in the way I’ve described it here. I called their press-inquiry helpline to ask why. Their well-meaning attendant replied, “Uhm. I have some statistics about eating disorders and a study about anorexia, if that’ll help you.”

So if it’s such a widespread issue, why has it gone under the radar for so long? Disordered eating, without clearly established criteria, falls somewhere in the middle of a slippery slope from normal to abnormal. It’s a fuzzy line between caring about what you put into your body and being neurotic about food. As a result, it’s easier to retreat into silence than to press the issue. It also remains a private battle because the national reluctance to address this condition reflects the individual’s reluctance to talk about it. Trust me, I’ve been on both sides and I like writing about it probably as much as you like reading about it. In high school, under the pretense of being healthy, I learned everything there was to know about food. I knew, for example, that drinking cold water burns more calories than drinking room-temperature water. By senior year of high school, food had become as much a game of calculations as an enjoyable sensory experience.

This is something that needs to be brought to light. I know this is far less fun than my usual ode to sandwiches, but it is the other side of the same fascination with food. Just like you can’t talk about the genius of Math 55-ers without mentioning Asperger’s occasionally, it would be irresponsible to fixate on sandwiches and not address the darker side of this obsession. Disordered eating is the white elephant in a room full of foodies.

In college, separated from my manorexic boyfriend and my modelesque friends, I finally realized how unnecessary my neurotic pattern of behavior toward food was. I stepped back and realized the absurdity of equating liberation from unhealthy food habits with letting myself go. Once I started devoting my mind to more important things, food slowly returned to what it once had been: delicious. And I became happier and infinitely more relaxed.

Now it’s your turn. You need to realize disordered eating is not an inevitable way of life. Stop letting it silently slip by because it’s not lethal. There are plenty of resources for you: ECHO offers a great peer to peer counseling service, the Bureau of Study Council has discussion groups and UHS has nutritionists. But none of that will help until you acknowledge that you want to change your attitude toward food. It’s not like flipping a light switch; it won’t be easy. But have the courage to get up, speak up and seek help. Believe me, your mind is much too special to be wasted on counting calories. —Columnist Rebecca A. Cooper can be reached at cooper3@fas.harvard.edu.