Better Than Skinny Feels

On food, fitness, fasting, and feasting.

This essay is the second in a series, A Brief Foray Into Everything, in which I write about the arts from an amateur’s perspective. Subscribe to hear further thoughts on music, film, and more. Read the first essay in the series, on color, here.

I wrote most of this essay standing at a kitchen counter, as I cooked. A brief note: this essay talks about eating disorders, weight loss, body image, and struggles with fasting. If reading about any of these topics prompts unsafe or unhealthy thoughts for you, please skip this one and come back for the next essay.

Paid subscribers: You can find a PDF of this essay in the next Midstream newsletter, for anyone who wants to read this longer essay on paper or an e-reader.

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When I was seventeen, I developed a food allergy out of nowhere. Overnight, I went from no allergies to avoiding a laundry list of foods rather than risk anaphylaxis. One wrong bite, and my mouth itched, my throat tightened, and my tongue broke out in mottled white patches. I had to carry Zyrtec in my purse everywhere and I spent New Year’s Eve of 2020 knocked out by Benadryl after my first serious reaction. The allergens: most processed/packaged food, any kind of bottled condiment, soda, store bought dips like humus or guacamole, chips, bell peppers, salad dressing, and more—the list grew daily. The likely suspect? Sodium benzoate, or a similar preservative also found in some natural foods. It’s possible I developed this allergy from an antibiotic I was taking for hormonal acne at the time, since my allergies went away eight months later and haven’t come back. Around the same time, I also realized I’m lactose intolerant, so between the allergy and the intolerance, the food groups I could eat flattened from a pyramid to a triangle.

Since I didn’t know exactly what caused these reactions, I went on a modified Whole 30 diet, cutting out dairy and gluten and most processed food, to try and control my allergies. In theory, this should have meant I was eating high protein and lots of vegetables. In reality, it meant I was living on protein bars. Then the COVID lockdown hit. Spring of my senior year, I was stuck at home, with no way to see my friends and too much free time. So I started to run. On my first jog, I pushed my body too hard and had to crouch on the sidewalk to fight a wave of nausea, trying not to throw up. But I kept at it. Twenty minutes a day turned into thirty, and then an hour. I also started to work out: planks, push-ups, crunches, weight lifting. I had nothing better to do. By the summer, I was running for an hour a day and working out for another hour.

Two hours a day of exercise. What was I eating to fuel it? On average: a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, a salad or a can of tuna for lunch, a smoothie post-workout, lunch meat and almond crackers for dinner. On nights when I worked (I was a grocery store employee and therefore an “essential worker” during the lockdown), I ate a single protein bar for dinner. Between the lean diet and the two hours of exercise, my weight dropped—fast. By the end of the summer, I weighed under a hundred and ten pounds, which, at almost five foot six, put me in the orange zone of a BMI metric: underweight. I had to drill holes in my belts to keep my size double zero jeans on my hips.

Although I’d started my diet because of allergies and my workouts because of boredom, I soon fell in love with the fact that I was too small to borrow my sister’s clothes, with how all my jeans were too big, even at a brand’s smallest size, and with the sharpness of my hipbones and the flatness of my stomach. My arms and legs were toned, my cheekbones were hollow, and people kept commenting on how tiny I was. It was great. I loved being thin.

Then, I moved to Tennessee for my freshman year of college. I did not gain a “freshman fifteen.” My school had no campus cafeteria, so I cooked for myself, though “cook” is a strong word for my slow starvation. In the morning, I would eat a protein bar in the car on the way to class, if I ate anything. More often, I started the day with two cups of black coffee and an empty stomach. When I got home from class at three p.m., I would crawl into bed and lie there, head aching, battling nausea, too weak to move, until the need to do homework dragged me to the fridge, where I would force myself to eat a few slices of lunch meat and stagger upright. After a few hours of homework, I’d microwave a frozen meal or make a bowl of oatmeal, chug a RedBull or a few more cups of coffee, and get back to my assignments. At two in the morning, I’d fall asleep, wake up hungry, and start the cycle again. I ate the minimum needed to not pass out. I was faint, nauseous, moody, and fatigued every single day. But at least I was thin.

Then, the second semester of my freshman year, I ended up homeless, along with two friends. A friend offered the three of us a place in her two-room basement apartment. This friend—M—and I had grown close during the summer before my freshman year as we shared workout routines, bonding over fitness and messy break-ups. By the time I moved in with her, M had started to unpack her own issues with food and obsessive exercise. We talked late at night about hunger and our bodies and how, when you fixate on staying skinny, even a healthy weight seems gross. Like Kai in “The Snow Queen”, we had demon glass in our eyes, only instead of warping how we saw the world, it distorted our vision of ourselves.

M told me that she’d started to work out because her ex had been a fitness buff and how, after they broke up, she stopped exercising because every time she tried, she heard his voice in her mind, talking about her body. “I get that,” I told her. My first boyfriend would go on and on about how “tiny” I was and how he thought it was cute, which my seventeen-year-old heart translated to the twisted converse: if you’re not tiny, if you have any body fat, you’re not cute.

But in her bed, late at night, M and I also talked about how she was learning to love food. During that month at her house, I would sit at her kitchen table and watch her cook. “I’m trying to have fun with food,” she said, as she packed cheese and crackers for her school lunches or baked chicken for dinner. “When I go to the grocery store, I let myself choose a few things I’m excited about, little things like fancy cheeses. Just so I’m excited to eat.” Her relationship with food, though not perfect, seemed playful and fun in a way I’d never experienced. She was learning how to delight in her daily bread.

I loved to watch M cook. It wasn’t fancy: chicken with herbs and roasted vegetables, easy soups, taco salad. But she didn’t cook to get protein as quickly as possible and then get on with her day. Instead, she took time to enjoy the rhythm of cooking. Rinsing cucumbers or asparagus. Chopping carrots and potatoes. Adding onions and garlic to sizzling olive oil. Browning ground beef or baking salmon. And that wasn’t all: “I’m kind of curvier now,” she told me with a smile. “And I actually think my body looks better this way.”

Okay, I thought. Cooking can be fun. So I started to try to enjoy it. I set aside time to make dinner. I bought vegetables I’d never tried because they looked interesting. I saved stacks of recipes to my Pinterest board for later. Nothing I made was fancy: pasta, fish, Greek wraps, pancakes for dinner. But I started to look forward to grocery trips and to spend longer in the kitchen. I asked for a nice kitchen knife for my birthday and my parents gave me a Victorinox that became the only piece of kitchenware I’ve ever loved to use.

My sophomore year of school, I did okay at eating. I still skipped lunch most days, but made real dinners. I also started to work at a brunch restaurant, which covered weekend meals and set me up with more leftover cinnamon rolls than any woman needs. I gained a little weight, moving up a jean size. More importantly, I was falling in love with food. My Pinterest board was full of pasta recipes, latte art, and artsy photos taken on film of women at farmer’s markets, their crochet bags full of colorful produce, or friends gathered around wooden tables laden with wine glasses and overflowing charcuterie boards. I took myself to coffee shops for cappuccinos while I read or out on picnics with friends on Sunday afternoon. Food was fun. More than that, it became part of the story I told myself about how happy I was to be alive.

Carafe and Dish with Citrus Fruit, Vincent Van Gogh, 1887

Then my junior year knocked me back off-track. I was working two jobs, taking six classes, trying to keep up friendships, and battling chronic insomnia and stress that culminated in frequent panic attacks. I also moved apartments, into a townhouse with five roommates. Still nervous about my newfound relationship with food, I hated to cook with other people around, especially if there was any chance that someone might tell me what I was doing wrong. (“I know I’m bad at this—please don’t comment on my grocery list. Or my technique. Or my recipe choices. Or whatever—it’s hard enough as is!”) So I tried to avoid the kitchen whenever my roommates were using it and since I lived in a house with five other women, that meant I rarely cooked a full meal.

Another circumstance also changed how I ate that year. Before I share that story: this essay is not a rant about how or how not to fast. It’s not a soapbox about spiritual practices or an invective against anyone’s instruction. I’m only interested in talking about my individual experience with spiritual fasting during my junior year of college and how it affected my relationship with food. I spent my junior year as an Inquirer at an Antiochian Orthodox Church. I was there from September of 2022 to August of 2023, almost a full church year, and participated in multiple fasts. For context: in Christian traditions that follow a liturgical calendar (Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutherans, and some local churches in other Protestant denominations, like Presbyterianism), the Church marks its year by two major feasts—Christmas and Easter. The seasons that precede both are historically times of fasting and spiritual preparation, i.e., Advent and Lent. The Orthodox Church observes more rigorous fasts for both Advent and Lent than other Christian traditions. On paper: no meat, dairy, fish, wine, or oil, though my Orthodox friends will tell you that any fasting should happen under the guidance of your local priest, with exceptions for the sick or elderly. The goal isn’t to punish the body or hold yourself as holier than another person, but to practice self-control and spiritual discipline. But for me, it meant physical—and spiritual—starvation.

I once again stopped eating. During both the Nativity and Great Fasts, I lived off peanut butter toast, corn chips and protein bars. I didn’t have time to cook and when I did, it would be with rice, lentils, and chickpeas—Lent-approved foods. I found myself again on my bed after classes, too weak to walk to the kitchen to eat. I had constant headaches. My moods spiked into intense anxiety or dipped into depressive episodes. I didn’t lose weight, but I felt sick all the time, hungry or nauseous or bloated and always too weak, like I might pass out at any moment. Several times, I almost did, dropping to a knee at work or in church to catch my breath and wait out the pulsing in my head and dark stars at the corner of my eyes.

I came to these fasts with a disordered relationship with food. I have friends for whom the fasts are sources of spiritual blessing, who don’t have my history to shape their practices. I’ve also wondered whether I have some thyroid imbalance or hormonal issue that makes my body more prone to crumble without protein than other people. (I’ve learned that if I don’t eat meat or some other major source of protein, three times a day, I feel faint and low energy, to the point where I cannot get out of bed. Enough work shifts where I almost passed out and I finally realized that I have to be proactive about food, not just reactive to hunger.) So for me, multiple long fasts that prohibited animal products wrecked my body and my energy levels—that’s not to say that’s the case for every Christian. One of my friends cautioned me that fasting so intensely can be dangerous for someone who’s new to it. But during my time in the Orthodox Church, my messy relationship with food and my physical limits got tangled up with spiritual anxiety. Instead of dieting to stay thin, I was fasting to become holy, and just like a diet, any step off the path made me unworthy and unlovable. “Yeah, okay,” I thought, “they said the fast isn’t about being ‘better’ so that God loves us more, but also, there are all these stories about saints who basically starved themselves to death, and saints are super holy and we’re supposed to imitate them. Also, the way everyone acts about fasting—and about attending services, or serving the Church, or pursuing holiness—is like we’re supposed to do more and more and more, as much as we can, even when it seems too hard.” I heard refrains of: “Protestants don’t take the spiritual life seriously.” Or: “This is what the Church has always done. Modern Christians just don’t care about historic practices.” Or: “We’re learning to control the body and our passions so that we can become more spiritual.” Well, I wanted to take the spiritual life seriously and I cared about historic practices and I wanted to control my passions—so I kept fasting.

I also stopped taking Communion during this year. In the Orthodox Church, as in some other traditions, they practice closed Communion, which means that only chrismated Orthodox Christians can receive the Eucharist during Divine Liturgy. As an Inquirer, I could’ve alternated between Orthodox and Protestant churches, maybe, and continued to take Communion, but I was intent on my journey towards the Orthodox Church, questioning whether Protestant Communion, especially in churches with memorialist tendencies, could even be called true Communion. So for a month less than a year, I didn’t receive the Eucharist. If you’ve heard my testimony, you know that I was saved through an encounter at the Lord’s Table—how God’s presence in the bread and wine pulled me back from self-harm, intellectual despair, and suicidal urges when I was fifteen. If you know me now, you know that I still cry at the altar rail, that I believe (passionately) in the real presence of Christ, and that, to me, the Eucharist is the source of our union with Christ and with His people. (There’s an irony in that, in my eating disorder, my hunger, my starvation, and how, in the midst of all that, God drew me to His Table.) During that year when I abstained from the Eucharist, I not only stopped communion, I stopped everything. I stopped praying, I stopped reading Scripture, I stopped believing that God loved me and that I could draw near to Him. Like my body, my soul was hungry for the goodness and gentleness of God, and I was starving myself.

I left the Orthodox Church, for a number of reasons. It has everything to do with my own spiritual journey and nothing to do with doubting that Orthodox Christians are faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, beloved by God. I’ve been reading about The Jesuit Guide to (Almost Everything) by James Martin, and I love his emphasis on how God communicates to all of us in unique ways and leads us all on different, equal spiritual paths. For me, that path lead to the Anglican Church. I started to read my Bible again—slowly, fearfully, looking for God’s disappointment and only finding His love. One of the first passages I came across was Colossians 2:

“So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ. Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.

Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations—“Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle,” which all concern things which perish with the using—according to the commandments and doctrines of men? These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.”¹

This passage is, of course, not an indictment of fasting, which is a historic practice of the Church and one that Christ Himself recommends. It is, however, a reminder that we have died and come alive with Christ and that we should not subject ourselves to the regulations “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle” that come, not from God, but from men—especially when that “man” is our own self. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t practice liturgical fasts or let priests, pastors, and other spiritual mentors guide us in certain disciplines. But what it does mean is that in everything, we should hold fast to our Head, who is Christ, and remember the radical freedom that belongs to us as believers. When Jesus and His disciples picked grain to eat on the Sabbath, they scandalized the Pharisees. But how did our Lord respond to their critiques? “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”² In other words, God gives us spiritual disciplines or commandments to help us cultivate our humanity, not curtail it. Fasting, feasting, and food all exist to help man flourish.

In De Anima, Aristotle separates the human soul into three faculties: vegetative, sensitive, and rational. (“Soul” for Aristotle means the unseen, living powers of an animal, rather than a spiritual or personal thing.) The rational faculty is unique to man alone. The sensitive faculty we also share with animals—the ability to sense and remember. The vegetative faculty we share with all organic things, the power of “self-nutrition”, or the sheer originative, living power of plants and animals, the power by which things grow and change.³ The vegetative faculty includes the nutritive power, or “the function of absorbing food.”⁴ In classic Aristotlean fashion, he spends the next section analyzing what food is in philosophical categories: a substance, acted upon by the soul, that has a power to extend the being of other substance.⁵ Food is that which gives the soul more zoe, more life. In the same way, the Christian finds an abundance of life in Christ, which flows from our participation in the Eucharist. We feed on Him, we receive His life, and we are transformed into what John Williamson Nevin called “a new order of existence.”⁶ Christ is for us “a principle of organic renovation”: when He calls us to take and eat, the food He gives us—His Body—changes who we are. In this new life, we die to the principles of the old world, as Paul says. Therefore, everything, from our fasting to our feasting, should serve our new life with Christ. Spiritual starvation is not from God. A few weeks ago, my friend C quoted this passage to me, as counsel for another spiritual struggle: “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” When we ask for bread, God doesn’t give us a stone, nor does He make us starve. Instead, He offers all of Himself, the Bread of Life that satisfies every hunger pang and craving. And trust me, I know about hunger.

These days, my relationship with food still isn’t perfect. Last fall, I went through a rough break-up and a depressive episode in which I lost so much weight that a professor’s daughter told her mom, “I’m worried about Liv. She looks kind of thin.” I know this because my professor gently told me when she took me out to ask me how I was doing and to buy me a hot apple cider. I love apple cider—it reminds me of my mom’s house in the fall, of pots of apple cider heating on the stove top, spiced with cinnamon sticks and garnished with slices of orange. I make cider every fall, just like I make at least one of my mom’s many Christmas cookie recipes when the weather gets cold and I start to play “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” Orange shortbread, molasses, mint chocolate, snickerdoodle, sugar cookies—I associate the smells with my mom’s kitchen and holiday carols in the background, weeks of preparation for our Christmas feast.

I still struggle to cook, especially during a busy week. Some weeks I’m good: I make tikka masala with rice or baked salmon with lemon and herbes de provence. I chop bell peppers and cucumbers to snack on during the week. I eat breakfast every morning, making sure I have carbs and protein and fruit first thing in the morning, and I don’t drink my coffee on an empty stomach. Other weeks, it’s harder. I skip breakfast, skip lunch, eat protein bars or half a serving of yogurt, and microwave chicken nuggets for dinner. (Yes, the dinosaur ones—they’re really easy to make, okay?) But for the most part, I eat. I still struggle with insomnia some weeks, but for the most part, I sleep. I still feel anxiety, loneliness, sadness, anger, but for the most part, my old erratic mood swings only surface when I haven’t eaten. I don’t lie on my bed for an hour in the afternoon, too weak to move, and I don’t almost pass out at work. I have energy. I have so much more energy—an abundance of new life.

I’ve also gone up two jean sizes. I have to remind myself that size four is not huge, just because there are pants on the rack that are too small for me. But I’m not tiny. I’m not a size double zero and my hipbones are no longer sharp. There are plenty of clothes I can’t fit into anymore. I’m kind of curvier now, but, like my friend M, I kind of think my body looks better this way. I’m learning how to eat, like I’m learning how to live my life, how to be a woman, how to listen to God. To practice cooking for this essay series, I made pork chops, which was a whole process of seasoning, searing, simmering, and reducing sauce that I rarely attempt. They turned out a little overcooked, due to a faulty meat thermometer, but they tasted great. The kitchen is still a mess, as I finish typing this essay late at night, but I ate a good dinner, my own small feast. I’ll probably eat protein bars and peanut butter toast and leftovers tomorrow, and, if I’m honest, for most of the week. But I know I won’t starve.

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“Julia Hungry”, Hannah Louise Poston

Looking forward…

Next Monday, paid subscribers will receive a new issue of the Midstream newsletter. In it, I’ll share quotes from my commonplace book, current reads and favorites, and a sneak-peak into my next essay. I’ll also talk about how I write an essay, from idea to first draft to revision.

1. Colossians 2:16-23, NKJV

2. Mark 2:27, NKJV

3. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. by Richard McKeon, (New York: Random House, 1941), Bk II Ch 2, 413b

4. Ibid, 416a

5. Ibid, 419b

6. John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence, (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), p252, 257