When did food stop being just food?
TW: eating disorder recovery, food guilt, calories mentioned without numbers, body image
When did food stop being just food?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and honestly, I don’t remember the exact moment it happened.
I remember how it was before, though.
I grew up in Italy, and when I was little, food was just part of life. It was simple. It was family.
It was weekends at my grandma’s house, where the whole family would gather around the table while she cooked for hours.
It was the smell of tomato and garlic from the ragù.
It was fresh pasta drying around the house before everyone arrived.
It was Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Easter, birthdays, and all those days where my mom and my aunts would spend hours in the kitchen preparing food for everyone.
It was stopping after school for pizza or gelato with friends, covered in chocolate and whipped cream, without thinking I had done something wrong.
Food was just food.
It was good.
It meant family.
It meant being taken care of.
And then, at some point, it stopped being that simple.
I became aware of my body.
Aware that I wasn’t tall and lean like my mom.
Aware that I didn’t look like some of my classmates.
Aware that food could change my body.
I remember going to a nutritionist after one of my breakdowns, because I was supposed to “learn” how to eat properly.
I left with papers, instructions, and a number.
Calories.
And no, I didn’t develop an eating disorder overnight because of that visit.
But something changed.
Food stopped being just food.
It became a number.
Something to count.
Something to restrict.
Something to plan.
Something to overthink.
Something that could either make me feel in control or completely out of control.
And because I was young, I didn’t really understand that information with neutrality. I understood it with the emotional weight I already had around my body.
So that number became a rule.
Then it became a voice.
The voice that made me reconsider food choices.
The voice that praised me when the scale went down.
The voice that made me feel guilty when it didn’t.
The voice that made me proud when people noticed I had lost weight.
The same voice that punished me when I gained it back.
My teenage years became this constant, exhausting back-and-forth between being “good” and losing control.
Sometimes the voice would get quieter.
If I lost weight, or followed the plan, or felt like I had things under control, I would get a break from it.
But it was never gone.
It was more like it was sleeping in the back of my mind, waiting.
Like a cat curled up in the corner, one eye half-open, watching.
And I always knew that when it woke up again, it would come back worse.
What’s strange is that even when I grew up and my life changed, that voice didn’t just disappear.
I wasn’t that little girl anymore.
I wasn’t the teenager anymore.
I had built a life.
I had a business.
I had moved to another part of the world.
I had a husband.
From the outside, it probably looked like I had a lot.
And technically, I did.
But the voice still came back and told me that no, I didn’t have it all.
Because I still didn’t have the body I thought I needed.
I still hadn’t reached the one thing I had convinced myself would finally make me feel enough.
So even when life was good, I wasn’t fully there.
I remember spending mornings working out instead of focusing on my business.
I remember spending afternoons planning meals and calculating what I could eat and what I couldn’t.
I remember planning the one evening out I allowed myself during the week and stressing over the restaurant, the dish, the dessert, because it had to be perfect. It had to satisfy all the cravings I had been holding back.
And then I remember the guilt afterward when I eventually lost control around food.
I kept telling myself I was just trying to be healthy.
That if it was this hard for me, it was because I was weak.
But slowly, everything started to lose color.
I was doing things, but I wasn’t really present.
I was going out with my husband and friends, but half of my mind was on food, calories, the next workout, the next rule.
I was on vacation with family, but I was still calculating.
I was living the life I had worked so hard to build, but I was also destroying myself trying to reach a standard that kept moving.
There was no end point.
No weight felt low enough.
No workout felt enough.
No amount of control felt enough.
Even when my body started showing signs that something was wrong, it still wasn’t enough to stop.
I think my real turning point was when my husband looked at me and told me he didn’t know how to help me anymore.
And that this wasn’t affecting only me.
It was affecting everyone around me.
That’s when I realized something had to change before it was too late.
And I had to be the one to change it.
It wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t quick.
It was not one perfect decision where everything suddenly became better.
It was trial and error.
Steps forward and steps back.
Days where everything felt dark, and other days where things felt a little lighter.
But slowly, I started changing the beliefs that kept me trapped.
I stopped believing food had to be this complicated.
I stopped believing movement had to be punishment.
I stopped believing that my worth depended on being smaller.
I stopped believing there was something wrong with me because this had been so hard.
And now, years later, I can honestly say I’m in a much better place.
My relationship with food is completely different.
But I also can’t pretend I went back to the total unawareness I had as a child.
I don’t think you can fully unknow something once you’ve spent years being hyper-aware of it.
But you can learn how to carry that awareness differently.
An eating disorder is like a wound.
It can heal.
But there’s still a scar.
And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Because that scar reminds me of what my thoughts and beliefs can do.
It reminds me of how easily “health” can become control.
It reminds me that freedom matters to me, even though I once trapped myself in rules I didn’t know how to break.
It reminds me of what I had to do to heal.
Now, sometimes, if life gets stressful or out of control, I can still feel the old urge to control something.
And usually, that something is food.
But it doesn’t command me like it used to.
It’s not that voice screaming in the back of my mind anymore.
It’s more like an echo.
Something I can recognize, sometimes even laugh at, and move on from.
Sometimes I’ll go out for dinner or order something unplanned, and I’ll look at my husband and say, “I would have never done this a few years ago.”
Then we usually laugh over dessert, or a burger.
And for a moment, I feel close to that version of me again.
The little girl eating ice cream with my mom before it melted.
The one eating her grandma’s food without guilt.
The one who didn’t think food had to mean anything more than food.
And I think that’s what I’m trying to hold onto now.
Not perfect unawareness.
Not perfection at all.
Just peace.
Because in the end, food is just food.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated forever.