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Kate Gies teaches creative non-fiction at George Brown College and is the author of It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: A Memoir of My Body.
For years, my body felt like an adversary I had to push against. Born without a right ear, I spent a good part of my childhood in and out of surgery to build the outer appearance of an ear. Many of the surgeries failed. I’m also deaf on the right side, and have an inoperable eardrum rupture in my other side, making me quite hard of hearing. I’ve spent years closely monitoring my body’s performance, both aesthetically and functionally.
It was during a rough time in my thirties when I turned to food for solutions for my “unruly” body. I was grappling with the throes and heartaches of internet dating, dealing with a precancerous lesion on the man-made earlobe that was bringing up all sorts of childhood trauma, and then my only hearing ear plugged up. Not an infection, as I suspected, but a blocked Eustachian tube. “Nothing can be done,” my doctor said. “It will clear on its own in a few weeks.”
I left my doctor’s office in a panic, unsure of how I was going to make it through the next month. Navigating everyday communication is already difficult for me as a hard-of-hearing person. It requires laser focus on deciphering spoken words, ear strain, neck strain, cognitive strain on puzzling out context, lip-reading and various other acrobatics. I am constantly apologizing for a missed “excuse me” behind me, for asking people to repeat themselves multiple times. A blocked Eustachian tube, further dampening my hearing, felt like suffocation, like being trapped in a glass bubble – with all the responsibility of being in the world, but no access to it.
A few weeks of this was not a viable option for me. Not only would it put a major strain on my relationships, but I’m also a teacher. Navigating the complexities of classroom interactions for weeks on end would become near impossible.
So, when my doctor told me there was nothing to be done, I did what many of us do when Western medicine shrugs its shoulders: I went to the internet. Alternative health blogs, Reddit, subreddits. And I found my solution: a low-mucous, anti-inflammatory diet. I could eat my way out of this blocked Eustachian tube crisis. Or, more accurately, not eat. A low-mucous, anti-inflammatory diet is mostly a diet of exclusion. No red meat, no wheat, no sugar, no soy, no dairy, nothing processed. No caffeine, no alcohol. But also, no eating certain fruits, vegetables and legumes – things I thought were healthy.
While some may have been deterred by this strict diet, I ballooned with optimism. I could control this! The disorder of my body.
I wasn’t entirely new to food restriction. After I turned 12, my vision slivered several times a month, and a sharp pain and roiling stomach kept me bedridden for hours. Migraines. And the main culprit? Chocolate. I was, of course, heartbroken. My mother, an amazing baker, filled my childhood with brownies, fudge and homemade chocolate sauce. I loved chocolate; I loved it more than any other food. But I was determined to fix this new problem in my body. I was astoundingly good at not eating chocolate. Of sitting calmly while those around me partook guiltily. My mother, a chocolate-lover and migrainer herself, wouldn’t give chocolate up. “It’s worth the migraine” she’d say. I was baffled by the idea that there was something she could do to prevent her body from going off the rails, and she refused.
Not surprisingly, I took to the low-mucous/anti-inflammatory diet instantly. A typical dinner was organic vegetable broth with lemon and cayenne pepper flakes, or organic boiled chicken with cayenne flakes and organic romaine lettuce with no salad dressing. A typical breakfast: plain oatmeal (at first with blueberries added, but then the sweetness of the blueberries made my ear feel heavy). And lunch: toasted, naturally-sprouted bread with mustard or olive oil.
The ear did clear in about two weeks. The diet, however, continued. I was worried the ear would plug up again. And, since I’d eaten “pure” for a couple of weeks, every time I tried to eat something on my restricted list, I would feel my sinuses begin to clog.
What started out as a desire to purify my body in order to hear, turned into a food obsession that lasted the better part of a decade.
I read the ingredients lists for everything I ate. When confronted with a new food, I checked the internet before indulging. Sometimes I would eat something the internet okayed and I’d nonetheless feel my mucous membranes inflame, and thus remove it from my list of acceptable foods. My restrictions soon surpassed those of the internet – I was writing my own food-restriction bible. Anything remotely sour or particularly delicious or flavourful made my sinuses swell. So they got cut. Kale? Bad. Mangoes? Bad. Rhubarb, strawberries, apples? Bad, bad, bad. Whenever I tried a new food that didn’t agree with me, I’d spend the next several days adding extra cayenne to my vegetable broth, extra lemon in my hot water, to wrestle my body back into purity.
I stopped going to dinner parties. I stopped going to restaurants. I fantasized of a pill that I could take instead of eating. Eating felt like a chore. Food was not for pleasure, but a necessary evil to keep me alive. I never felt full, nor did I feel hungry. I shrank. At 5 foot 9, I was a frail 110 pounds. My hair thinned; I experienced occasional dizzy spells; my energy levels plummeted.
For a while, I dated a guy with irritable bowel syndrome who would often eat what was bad for him and get sick from it. He told me that my strict diet was a form of loving myself. I remember nodding, but the assertion didn’t land for me. It didn’t feel like love. More like survival. Smoking out the bad of my body so it could reach for some baseline of normal. My body was naturally unruly and impure and without discipline, it was unacceptable. It was never enough for my body to just be. It needed to be cleansed, its natural inclinations fought against, whether it be migraines, or a missing ear or muted hearing. I had to work hard to have a “good” body in the world.
It didn’t occur to me that I was dealing with disordered eating. I knew of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and none of those seemed to apply to me. I wasn’t throwing up or counting calories. I wasn’t trying to be thin, I was just trying to make my body healthy.
The first time I heard of orthorexia, I was funnelling down an internet hole about the dangers of spelt, an alternative type of wheat. An article popped up from a woman who’d become obsessed with healthy eating after doing a 12-day cleanse. Her food journey was eerily similar to my own: cutting out bad foods, then cutting out more. Obsessing over ingredients lists, avoiding restaurants, constantly monitoring her body when new food was encountered. An all-consuming mistrust of food and her body. Orthorexia is the term she used to describe her habits. Although not an official diagnosis, orthorexia is a type of disordered eating defined by an obsession with eating only the most healthy and “pure” foods. I knew the instant I read it that this was me.
It still took over a year to get myself off the strict diet. My body, after years of “pure” eating, did not tolerate other foods well. It wasn’t until I started treatment for PTSD related to childhood medical trauma that I was able to stick a food from my restricted list into my mouth and not feel my whole body recoil.
While my friends made new year’s resolutions to eat healthier, my resolutions were to eat more cakes and hamburgers, to not obsessively check ingredients lists or health-food blogs. It was a slow climb back, with many hiccups along the way (most notably when I became pregnant and fell into restricting all foods that anyone on the internet suggested were bad for growing fetuses).
Four years on, I have regained a pleasure for eating. I have gained my weight back, and even added in a good 15 pounds on top of it. I’m solid in my body. I married a man who is a former chef and he oversees cooking our dinners. I don’t know the ingredients lists for our meals, and that is a relief.
There are health conditions where food restriction is necessary, and, of course, healthy eating in general can lead to very good outcomes. Most things taken to the extreme are not good for us. And we also need to recognize that the “healthy food” industry, while it has benefited the lives of many, is also a business that profits off our mistrust of our bodies. Some of us are very mistrustful of our bodies.
A problem with willpower can be having too much of it. Strong willpower, coupled with a health scare and the right media messaging, can quickly flip into obsession. For someone like me, who has a history of medical trauma, of wrestling against my body, willpower can be downright dangerous.
I’ve had to learn to not deep dive into internet rabbit holes when it comes to my health and my body. I’ve had to learn that there is a certain level of control I don’t have. That sometimes bodies get sick and there’s not much we can do about it but wait it out and trust that our bodies will get through it. And the hardest lesson of all: I’ve had to learn to refrain from punishing my body through discipline and restriction. To trust that my body is my ally.