Healing My Relationship with Food

A journey of learning that how we eat matters more than what we eat

A photo of the author and her grandpa enjoying food together circa 1996

I still remember one Summer afternoon from my childhood when a friend and I ordered ice cream. As soon as my brownie sundae arrived, I dove my fork straight through the creamy vanilla and into the molten chocolate core. As I brought it to my mouth, my eyes must have shown pure joy because my wide-eyed friend said, “You love food more than anyone I know.”

I did love food. I loved the taste of fresh roast chicken and watching the juices and fat run, the smell of meat chili simmering on the stove for hours, and the perfectly salted, incredible truffle cheese my Mom brought home once a year for Christmas. But my greatest passion was chocolate. No matter how well my Mom hid it, I would scale the kitchen counter and cupboards as if they were Everest to find the last chocolate bar.

Apart from a few snide remarks about my “chubby thighs,” most people around me were amused that I could go as crazy for smoked salmon with horseradish and lemon as I could for a browned butter chocolate chip cookie. In any case, I was too happy with my food and life to care.

‘Boys Want Skinny Girls’

Then Middle School happened.

I heard girls clustered by lockers whispering about other girls — whose noses were cute, who shaved their legs, who was prettiest, who was getting fat. Even my Mom suddenly started eyeing me when I reached for chocolate after school. “Be careful you don’t get fat. Use some self-control.”

Within a few months, my 12-year-old brain became certain of two things: “Boys want skinny girls” and “Skinniness means having self-control.” I began watching the shape of my stomach religiously and learning what kept it skinny. Salads and fruit kept it skinny, less food kept it skinny, less breathing kept it skinny (something I’ve spent years undoing). If I was going to see a boy I liked in class, I would only eat an apple before school. I was light-headed and a bit tired, but skinny.

What I would now call “disordered eating,” my teenage self would proudly call “self-control.”

Looking back, as soon as self-control found its way into my diet, it overtook the rest of my life as well. Though I had loved playing tennis and harp since I was young, I suddenly started competing in both. It was suddenly not enough that I loved playing music and sports — if I wanted to be good, I needed to control my hands, my muscles, myself.

Eventually my body began to balk. By age 16, as I was practicing for a major pre-college harp audition, my hands began to shake. The harder I practiced, the worse it got. The tension that started in my wrists rose into my shoulders and closed around my chest.

It came to a climax at one of my most important high school harp auditions. I walked into a cold auditorium with two even colder judges and hands shaking uncontrollably. As they nodded silently, I started to play but my fingers couldn’t hold steady on the strings. Within a few bars, my performance was crumbling but I kept playing as tears filled my eyes. A desperate voice in my head screamed, “Why won’t my body do what I want?”

Happy Chaos

As I stopped competing and went to college, my body relaxed. I found a close group of friends that became my housemates, explored every corner of Philadelphia, and found my passion in neuroscience. In the process, I let go of extreme self-control and slid in the opposite direction.

I bounced around campus, fueled by caffeine, and ate meals whenever I was ravenous. Since my friends and I didn’t cook — or even have a proper kitchen — we grabbed whatever food truck or cafeteria food looked best at the moment.

I struggled with skin issues, energy and mood swings, and insane sleep patterns — but I was largely too happy to care. What I would now see as the tell-tale signs of poor blood sugar regulation, my college self would call “happy chaos.”

I kept up the same frenetic lifestyle when I moved to New York City and started work. I was constantly stressed out and vaguely anxious, but so excited by life and adventure in NYC that I glossed over all that.

Until I was 25, and my body ground to a halt.

Food As a Battlefield

I woke up one morning to find I couldn’t move my hands without pain. I hopped from doctor to doctor until one diagnosed me with arthritis related to chronic Lyme disease- for which there was no clear cure. Unable to play harp or work or even comb my hair, I tried every treatment from harsh antibiotics to homeopathic remedies.

In the end, a nutritionist changed my life. He tested me for food sensitivities and discovered I was highly reactive to dairy, soy, and corn. But if I gave those up and cleared sugar and alcohol from my diet, he suggested, I would see major improvements within weeks.

So I removed every sensitivity from my diet and within two weeks, my hands started to move without pain. Energized, I kept up my discipline and began strength training and dancing to give my body strength back.

The only problem was that I was always on the brink of a flare-up. If an absent-minded barista used regular milk or heavy work stress hit me, tension rose from my hands into my shoulders and pain returned. I began cooking all of my meals at home, not thinking of joy or pleasure but only what was “good for me.”

Looking back at myself, I was back in the grip of self-control and stress, convinced it was for my own health.

After I moved to Germany at age 29, the situation became untenable. After 6 months of dealing with the pressure of immigration, healthcare, a new apartment, job hunting, and life in a new language, my arthritis returned — this time to every joint in my body.

On one of my first visits to a new doctor, he performed an updated blood test for food sensitivities. He smiled sadly as he handed me the results stating I was reacting strongly to milk protein, soy, corn, gluten, eggs, oats, garlic, paprika, and oranges.

I looked him in the eyes and told him, “Please, I can avoid these foods for a few months but I can’t live this way. I want to enjoy food again. What can I do to heal?”

After a few minutes of thought, he gave me two recommendations that changed my life: begin water fasting to heal your gut and change your stress response.

A Healed Relationship

While fasting accelerated the healing of my gut, working on my stress response transformed my life. I began a brain training program called Dynamic Neural Retraining System (DNRS) that helps those with limbic system impairment heal their stress responses.

The premise of DNRS and similar programs is a brain that has been subject to prolonged stress and inflammation — whether from pathogens or emotional stress — is altered over time. The patterns become so deeply etched and reinforced that the emotional center of the brain, the limbic system, gets dysregulated. By then, even if the stressor is removed, the brain remains stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode.

The good news is that a nervous system stuck in a chronic stress response can also be rewired. For me, this meant interrupting habitual reactions to stress and consciously coming up with new beliefs and programs. It also meant examining the old patterns of perfectionism and competition I picked up as a teenager.

One of my biggest relationships to heal was with food itself.

I replaced thoughts such as, “I can’t eat what I want” or “that food will cause inflammation” to “I wonder what dish I could make with what I have. I choose to try something new today.” Slowly, I became hopeful and curious, and then creative. I tried out new chicken marinades, scoured German farmer’s markets for in-season produce, made colorful salads and bowls, and planned picnics in nearby parks to eat in the sunshine.

Food became my playground and for the first time in my life, I was happy, eating a balanced diet, and my body was healing. One particular day, I whipped up crackers topped with a spread of sun-dried tomatoes, eggplants and tahini, and mashed chickpeas topped with lemon and sea salt. As I bit in, I felt the same joy I experienced as a kid eating an ice cream sundae in summer sunshine — pure satisfaction and bliss.

Coming Full Spiral

Over time, I realized the best predictor of my overall health hasn’t been the exact foods I’ve eaten — it’s been my relationship with food itself.

Despite my anti-inflammatory diet and militaristic discipline in my mid-twenties, I was always a few steps from a flare-up. Now at age 30, as I reintroduce foods into my diet that previously caused arthritis, my body is calm. And though I generally eat a balanced, whole food diet (no more mountain climbing for chocolate), I’ve made room for pleasure as well.

In the end, I’ve learned to care for my relationship with food and my body because it sets the tone for every relationship in my life. As a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner through the NTA, it’s a relationship I help other women cultivate as well. Food is not only a potential source of energy, nourishment, pleasure, and connection — it’s one of the best teachers.