Wellness Wise is a column brought to you by The Roar’s co-Editors-in-Chief, Amanda Troll and Nishita Viswajith. March’s column surrounds the topic of dealing with eating disorders. We spoke to Wellness Coordinator Lauri Macey who has been working at the Wellness Center for the past five years. She worked for the Young Women’s Christian Association in domestic violence counseling, and has worked for a private practice that specializes in eating disorders.

How would you describe what an eating disorder is?

“I think there’s two things that show up in the eating disorder world. One is disordered eating, which is just having a weird relationship with food. Then an actual eating disorder is a mental illness. It tends to be more severe – your brain gets involved and tells you things about what you should and shouldn’t be eating, how you should and shouldn’t feel about food and your body. Very often, your body image is very tied up in your ideas about food and what you should be eating. There are different types of eating disorders. Some of them involve restricting like crazy, some of them revolve around binge eating, some involve binge eating and then purging either by vomiting or by over-exercising, and some of them involve a combination. There are side-eating disorders such as ARFID, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which is people who just don’t like food, or they are really limited in the things they’re willing to eat.”

Can you walk us through the most common eating disorders?

“Anorexia is probably the most directly dangerous mental illness you can have because it’s the one illness that kills you directly. Anorexia means that you don’t eat – you just restrict like crazy what you’re willing to eat. Eventually, your brain, which is starving, starts to get high on the not eating part of it. Unfortunately, societally, we’re very into being thin, and if you have anorexia, you tend to get really thin, and you get this distorted image of your body that it’s always too fat. Then you keep losing weight even though you’re unhealthy and things are not going well. Usually, you start to feel dizzy, your heart starts racing, you start having a lot of problems with your intestinal tract. Eventually, if it gets bad enough, it can kill you directly. Most other mental illnesses, if you’re going to die from your mental illness, you’re going to die because you do something to make yourself die. But anorexia tends to get people caught up in it in a way that it’s very hard to get out of it. Bulimia is more of a, ‘I want to control my weight. I don’t like the way that I look, but I don’t want to stop eating, or I can’t stop eating.’ Your body is going to fight back when you try to stop eating, so then people eat and then they feel bad about what they’ve eaten so they try to get rid of it somehow. Most people, when they think of bulimia, they think that you throw up, but that’s not necessarily how it works. It may be that you throw up, or it may be that you abuse laxatives or other medication that will help you purge things out of your body. Or it can be that you exercise like crazy. You eat a lot, but then you have to exercise like crazy to burn off all the calories you eat. People get very caught up in how many calories they eat, how many calories they burn off, how much exercise they have to do to compensate for that. You can be not skinny and still be anorexic or bulimic.”

Can you walk me through some common triggers for eating disorders, or how they can develop?

“I think that there’s so many messages out there about how you’re supposed to look, and we can all get caught up in those messages and ‘This is what I should look like.’ You see all these things on social media. I don’t want to blame social media – it was that way long before social media. The thing that happens for teenagers is that you look at all these images of what you think you should look like or what you want to look like, and you forget that your body is the thing that is taking you through your life. Your body is the thing that is taking care of you and trying to keep you healthy and safe and sending you messages about what you need to eat to keep yourself functioning well. We sort of override all that because we want to look a certain way. It’s always very caught up in your body image, how you feel about your body, and sort of not having a lot of compassion for your body. Your body is what it is and born to be a certain way, and we get all these messages that whatever it is, it’s wrong. The other thing that really kills us is the diet culture. The diet industry really has no reason to have you lose weight and keep it off. They make money if you lose weight, and then you gain it all back, ‘So you should try my latest thing or my latest exercise program or my latest dieting fad. That’s how I’m going to make money. My incentive is for you to lose weight. Tell your friends how great I am.’”

How do weight loss tools such as food tracking apps and other “healthy” habits turn negative and harmful?

“Because we get obsessed. We get very hung up on the numbers, the number of calories, and we stop listening to our bodies and start listening to this app, this expert, this podcast, or whatever it is. We override all the signals coming from our bodies and aren’t eating what’s good for us. We eat whatever we’re told is good for us.”

What is a big misconception about eating disorders?

“I think people don’t understand how much of your life it consumes. I think that once you have a full blown eating disorder, you are thinking about food 24/7. You are constantly thinking, ‘What am I going to eat next? What did I just eat?’ You are constantly thinking about how much you weigh, looking at yourself in the mirror, judging yourself harshly. It becomes a full time job. I think people don’t realize how much of your life gets consumed by it by the time it’s full blown. I think people step into the pool, wade in, and then they don’t realize that the deep end of that pool is a pretty awful place to be. You stop having a social life, you stop hanging out with your friends, you stop doing anything except engaging with your eating disorder.”

How long can eating disorders last? How much of a lifetime thing are they?

“They really are a lifetime thing. Once you have a full blown eating disorder, it’s like an addiction. If you come into contact with a trigger for your eating disorder, it can come back at any time. If you feel like your relationship with food is not comfortable with you, seek help now. Start early because you don’t want to end up in the deep end of that pool.”

Are eating disorders hereditary?

“Yes, you can have a propensity for addiction. You can have a propensity for eating disorders. But also, it’s very familial. If you grew up in a family where it was very emphasized how thin you are, you’re going to have a lot more likelihood of having an eating disorder. If you grew up in a household where everyone binge eats a lot, you’re going to be more likely to have a binge eating disorder. Not necessarily because someone wants bad things for you, but we just learn what we live.”

Have you heard the term “almond mom?”

“I have not heard the phrase, but I can tell you what the clinical term is. It’s orthorexia. It means you become super obsessed with eating healthy to the point where you’re unhealthy because you’re only eating almonds or whatever it is and stop eating enough food. It’s almost a form of anorexia except it isn’t. It’s got its own thing.”

How important is it to grow up with healthy eating habits?

“I think we all have whatever comfort foods that are whatever mom cooked for us when we were little, and we all have what is familiar and what our tastes are all shaped by. If you grew up in China, you probably eat something very different for breakfast than what we do in America, not because there is anything wrong with either of them, but it’s just what culturally you’re used to. That’s also true in your house. Whatever you’re culturally used to, that’s what you’re going to feel comfortable and safe around. That can be great, and that can be not so great. You can grow up in a house where you only eat one thing, so you only want to eat that one thing. Or you can grow up in a house where variety and different foods are introduced regularly, then you have a much more broad relationship with food.”

What ways can students reach out for help inside and outside of the Wellness Center?

“Definitely come to the Wellness Center. We can definitely help you, or help find resources if you need them. You can also talk to your physician. You can talk to your parents if you can. People have a harder time with that. In general, I think that the counselors at the front office can help you. If you feel like you are unsure whether what you are doing is healthy or not, the best place to start is your physician because they can tell you if your heart is healthy, if your body is coping well with what you’re doing, or if it isn’t. It’s a medical problem. It’s much more than just a mental problem if you have an eating disorder. You want to be medically stable first, and then deal with the mental stuff after. If you find yourself deciding that you’re not going to eat a bunch of things and then you start craving them like crazy, that’s a sign that your body thinks it’s starving. If your body thinks it’s starving, it’s going to do everything it can to make you eat. It’s going to make you extremely anxious so you will eat, and it’s going to crave the things you’ve been restricting. If you find yourself restricting like crazy and then coming into contact with the thing you’ve been restricting and then not being able to control how much of it you eat, that’s a sign that you’re on your way to an eating disorder. That’s a sign that you’re not listening to signals from your body. You’re trying to listen to your app, your social media, your image in the mirror, your bathroom scale, and you’re not hearing what your body is trying to tell you.”

Anything else?

“I think people like to say ‘Love your body the way that it is,’ and I think that’s good advice, but it’s also hard to do in our society. I would say start with compassion for your body. Your body is with you from the minute you’re conceived to the minute you die, and through all that time, it’s trying to keep you healthy and safe. It takes you on your adventure, takes you places, hugs your friend when they’re having a bad day. It will take care of you better than anyone else. Better than your mom, better than your best friend, better than your life partner. Try to have some compassion for it. It’s doing its very best. Start there.”