Listen to Your Gut

Design by Abigail Summers

Abby Neff

Miliana Bocher was 14 when she first started picking out the flaws of her body. She was running track and field for her high school team when she noticed she had gained weight from muscle. That summer, without the distraction of school and friends, thoughts about her body overwhelmed her.

As a way to control the situation, Bocher, a sophomore studying data science, web design and political science at New York University, says she began restricting her diet and exercising twice a day, often in the middle of the night. She was diagnosed with severe anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphia the first week of her sophomore year of high school.

“It wasn’t until two years later where I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that was an eating disorder,” she says. “But at the time, I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m making healthy decisions for my body,’ but I just never realized that my body was healthy the way it was the first time around.”

Delaney Murray, a graduate student in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, questioned if her body belonged for the first time in middle school because her body was “bigger” than the popular girls, who were “shorter and petite.”

In high school, she swam for her school’s team, and used that to justify her clean eating behavior.

“And I just would think about food constantly, and what I was allowed to eat, how much I was allowed to eat, if I looked weird compared to other people, what was a good food, what was a bad food. If I ate too much this meal, I had to restrict it the next,” she says.

She remembers girls on her team behaving in cruel ways towards her because she was not as athletic as them, causing her to develop anxiety around exercise during her undergraduate years. Murray would make it a competition with herself, for example, that she could finish writing a paper even when her body felt weak from hunger.

“I spent a lot of my brain power thinking about food, and that’s kind of how my eating issues have always manifested,” she says.

According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), 28.8 million Americans, or 9% of the U.S. population will have an eating disorder within their lifetime. Additionally, BIPOC are less likely than white people to be asked by a doctor about potential eating disorder symptoms, and more than half as likely to receive an official diagnoses and treatment.

Kate Hibbard-Gibbons, a counseling psychologist at OU with an interest in eating disorders and trauma, says that the process of making peace with food and body image is important to heal one’s relationship with their body.

“It depends on where they’re starting in their journey in regard to how someone begins to love their body and have a better relationship with food,” Hibbard-Gibbons says.

“Body satisfaction is about liking your body all the time. It’s not about thinking positive thoughts all the time, but it’s about accepting, you know, where your body is at.”

Murray was never officially diagnosed with an eating disorder, yet her disordered eating habits like exercising instead of finishing a meal align with Bocher’s. Both neglected their body’s hunger cues because they believed that was the healthy choice for their body.

The idea of eating less and exercising more is not exclusive to eating disorders. Diets like Keto and intermittent fasting promote the restriction of carbohydrates, sugar and sometimes food all together, as a way to force the body to burn fat.

Evelyn Tribole, a registered dietitian in Newport Beach, California, and Elyse Resch, a nutrition therapist in private practice in Beverly Hills, created a framework for a new way of eating that’s based on 125 studies that eliminates all dietary restrictions that aren’t medically necessary. It’s called “intuitive eating.”

“Part of what this work is about, you know, it’s really about cultivating a healthy relationship with food, mind and body, and that is that food is not inherently good or bad, nor is it inherently moral,” she says. “And yet people describe so much guilt and shame around the eating, so part of this is about removing that.”

Tribole, who has written three books about intuitive eating, two which she is a co-author of, and seven about food and nutrition, says the alternative diet promotes a return to listening to natural hunger cues without a focus on weight loss. “Interoceptive awareness”, she says, is the body’s ability to recognize physical sensations, such as hunger and fullness, and is vital to eating intuitively.

“When you are connected to your body and those very important messages, it helps you get your needs met, whether it's biological [or] psychological, and so it's really, really profound,” Tribole says. “But when you are at war with your body, there's a tendency to dismiss this, and it has profound implications in terms of your quality of life.”

In her practice, Tribole often recommends intuitive eating as a part of eating disorder recovery.

“One of the things that I look at, when someone’s in the throes of an eating disorder, there’s a cost that they are paying, even if they have no desire in that moment to change,” she says. “And I start looking at what’s going on with the quality of your relationships, what’s happening with you socially. Do you turn down things because you’re not sure about the food that’s going to be there?”

Murray first heard about intuitive eating from her mother, who is a registered dietician. After reaching out to a therapist, Murray began implementing intuitive eating into her lifestyle. She says she feels a bit freer with the food she eats.

“I still struggle with it a lot, but I've tried to be a lot more gentle with myself in terms of what I can eat and how I can eat and when I can eat and I think that is sort of where the intuitive eating comes in as well,” she says.

Bocher’s road to recovery was strenuous. She battled her disordered thoughts the most in the first six months of recovery. She says schoolwork kept her grounded and focused on things other than her eating disorder.

After working with a private therapist and dietician for four years, Bocher says she realized she didn’t have to live her life through restrictive diets. She stopped exercising in the middle of the night her senior year, and her hunger cues returned within the last year.

“For instance, perfect example; this morning, I woke up, I wasn't hungry, so I didn't eat,” she says. “But I know that once I get off this interview, I'm a little peckish, so I'll probably eat something, even though it's not, like, lunchtime.”

Intuitive eating is an option that’s not always considered when someone is looking to heal their relationship with food and their body, but has proven vital for the recovery of many.

“And with time and treatment, it’s actually possible–I think that the largest message I want out there is that recovery is possible, and just depending on where you’re at, you may need more support than others, and that’s okay,” Tribole says. “There’s no shame in that.”