Writer's Block Magazine

Photo by Casa Propia Colombia

TW: Eating disorders

Food permeates my mind. All the time. Growing up in Colombia, especially in the coastal region, I learned to associate food with community and celebration. On birthdays, my grandmother and great-grandmother would set the alarm for 5 in the morning to start the preparations for the event. This would be preceded by careful consideration and one question directed at the birthday person: What do you want to eat? Family gatherings or your friends visiting revolve around sharing a meal, an unspoken but certain agreement. People don’t invite you for dinner or lunch; they invite you over and assume you’re staying for dinner or lunch. Festivities such as carnival consist of dancing and partying, but also an incredible variety of food: shaved ice; empanadas; beef, chicken, and chorizo skewers; pork meat or chicken tamales; tripe soup; flan; you name it. In Colombia, it is considered bad manners to decline a second serving, to not finish your plate, or to say no to a loved one offering you food. 

When I think about food in my childhood, the first memory that comes to mind is sneaking in the kitchen to grab the biggest spoon I could find, and opening the door of the fridge just wide enough to steal a mouthful of my grandmother’s potato and beet salad, well before the guests for whom the dish had been prepared arrived. Years later, my mom would surprise me with this recipe on a Dutch Christmas Day, the homesickness weighing heavily on my chest. I remember sleeping in on a Saturday morning and waking up to a plate of chopped fried sausage and French fries, carefully covered with aluminium paper by my great-grandmother, who would leave to run errands or go to church or visit a friend but would never fail to prepare my all-time favourite breakfast. I remember an always overflowing fridge and pantry, the women in my family spending hours in the kitchen to not only feed but amaze all the mouths of our multigenerational home. Food was a source of comfort, of joy, of connection and love.

However, I do not fail to remind myself of the times when food was a source of unease. My family enforced a strict policy of finishing one’s plate, no exceptions. Even if I had to sit at the table for hours on end until I did, even if I was already satisfied and didn’t feel like eating more, even if the food served was something new that I had mustered the courage to try but strongly disliked. It was acceptable and even natural to sometimes overeat so drastically that there was no option but to lie down for a while. This phenomenon is so entrenched in Colombian culture that there is even a specific word for it: reposar, the colloquial meaning being “to lie down after a meal”. I was blessed with a voracious appetite that my family loved tending to, but also a particular liking for foods that weren’t necessarily nutrient-dense or amounts that didn’t make me feel good after consuming them. 

But there is a lot more that influences one’s appetite, especially as a little girl. I started mulling over my food intake after the boy I fancied commented on how skinny I was – I then decided to eat more. Simultaneously, every woman I was surrounded by would complain and worry about their weight, so I learned that it was my job to worry about it, too. Instead of viewing food as the energy that this machine called my body needed, I perceived it as something that needed to be scrutinised and controlled in order to embody the only acceptable shape to have, an abstract idea that inhabited the gray area between skinny and fat. In my inner circle, the word fat was weaponised as the nastiest insult one could serve and receive. I might have grown up loving food, but that joy quickly became entangled with conflicting feelings of misery as I watched most women in my life go through a vicious circle of diets, pills, weight loss, then weight gain. The only unwavering factor that didn’t change despite their size was the palpable self-hatred.

According to official reports, approximately 200.000 people in the Netherlands suffer from eating disorders. It’s important not to gloss over the words “official report” and “approximately”, as I have yet to encounter an individual who has a perfect relationship with food. Unfortunately for all of us, disordered eating comes in a variety of packages. There is the feeling of being so incredibly depressed and/or anxious that eating becomes a strenuous task in itself, forcing you to find creative solutions: How can I make this headache go away with the least minimum effort, consuming the highest amount of calories, while eating the smallest amount of food possible? Likewise, there is the feeling of being so incredibly depressed and/or anxious that eating becomes the only way to feel something, so you resort to it repeatedly. There is chronic dieting; sleeping in so you skip a meal; the growing cult behind intermittent fasting (which might actually bring us closer to sickness than to health); excessively thinking about food; excessive exercise to make up for what you ate. Feeling ashamed. Feeling guilty. Feeling a terrible, sickening amount of responsibility over the fuel that you quite literally cannot live without.

The language of weight loss is perplexing to me. In a logical sense, I’m able to grasp the concept that weight loss occurs through a caloric deficit diet, and that that’s just a biological and scientific fact. If we unpack this, though, weight loss occurs through eating less than what your body needs in order to force it to eat away at you: first the fat that we all seem to despise, and then our muscle if we take dieting to an extreme. The word “deficit” means insufficiency, shortage. In my search for weight loss videos for the purpose of this post, there were plenty backed up by science and delivered in a non-judgemental, constructive manner, but it was also painfully easy to find those that were not. The god on which “tough love” weight loss is built is self-control. The worship consists of no indulging, no cheating, no messing up, no condoning, no accepting. If you do, these self-proclaimed gurus advise you to “give yourself a good scolding” and get back on track, because “you are the only reason that you are fat. You are the only reason that you’re not where you want to be right now”. I will not attach the link to this particular source for obvious reasons. Though extreme in 2025, this was a perfectly good take on weight loss ten years ago.

Eating disorders are not communicable diseases in the traditional sense, but they are understood in contemporary research through the concept of social contagion: behaviours, emotions, and conditions can spread from person to person through observation of or social interaction with someone displaying these traits, leading others to unconsciously adopt these patterns. Pamela K. Keel, et. al (2012) explored how exposure to dieting behaviours by parents and college roommates impacts long-term disordered eating behaviours, particularly in women. They found that women with mothers who dieted frequently developed a higher drive for thinness – the effects lasting throughout 10 years. Similarly, women’s roommates’ dieting behaviours predicted a higher drive for thinness, higher bulimia scores and purging behaviours despite their friend groups and environments changing over those 10 years. It is too easy to internalise the belief that thinness is essential to self-worth when so much around you, from family to friends, from Kim Kardashian’s new slimmer figure to the countless of already skinny celebrities on Ozempic, from the return of the heroin chic era to influencers’ obsession with clean eating, is telling you so.

I am lost for answers. I don’t have a neatly packaged conclusion, a mantra to follow, or a perfectly balanced, healthy piece of advice. My relationship to food, like that of many others, remains far from balanced or healthy. It resembles a sibling who at times is the bane of my existence; at others, a source of uncomplicated joy; and always, someone to whom I owe the grace of meeting halfway. My wish for myself, and for you if needed, is to eat when we’re hungry, to stop when we’re full, to feel neutral about gaining weight, and to feel neutral about losing it. To enjoy the ice cream, the salad, the chicken, the cake. And maybe, too, to learn to meet ourselves halfway. 

Written by Lhya Munive