When diet culture sneaks up on you

And a health update

A couple of months back I alluded to receiving some health news that I was privately mulling over and not yet ready to talk about, but am now ready to start talking about along with some capital-T Thoughts. (Also if anyone was wondering about the antidepressant I had just started taking back then that were making me feel insane, life has become SO MUCH BETTER SINCE THEN. Turns out a Wellbutrin a day makes your girl feel like she can see straight again.)

A disclaimer and a content warning: The following is all based on my personal experience and should not be taken as medical advice. I am (clearly) not a doctor. There is some talk of disordered eating patterns. If this isn’t content that’s right for you, please take care.

When I last went to the doctor for some routine bloodwork, I found out my A1C (a sort of snapshot in time of your average blood sugar levels over the past few months) put me squarely in the prediabetes range. What does that mean? As I understand it, it means my body is not using the insulin it produces to efficiently convert glucose from foods into energy (put another way, my body isn’t turning the food I eat into energy the way it used to). It also means that while I do not have diabetes right now, I have a higher risk of developing type-2 diabetes in the future. (FYI I will not be sharing specific A1C or blood glucose numbers here, so please don’t ask.)

When delivering these results, the doctor I had seen—who was new to me as part of my forever-disparaging search for a good New York City PCP—sent me an unhelpful message along the lines of, “Reduce sweets/bread/rice/potatoes/corn. Do more cardio. Lose weight. Come back in three months.” Oh, OK, thanks, I’ll do that. (She also told me unprompted during my exam that I “seemed like I was in a rut,” one of the various reasons I will not be going back to this particular doctor again, thanks!)

I saw my old friend food anxiety hurtling toward me before it actually hit me. But even with such a clear view of it approaching closer and closer, I was still surprised at how easy it felt to slip back into old thought patterns and familiar binaries, newly bolstered by the fear that if I didn’t figure it out this time, there would be permanent health consequences. Whole grains (aka “complex carbs”): good. Cookies: bad. Noodles: bad. Pita, chips, even granola: bad, bad, bad. Steer clear of the bad for a whole day and you can check it off as a day that was “good.” But ate half of a chewy oatmeal cookie from your favorite bakery? No checkmark for you, failure!

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In the past, here’s how this would play out:

Stage 1 - Identify completely arbitrary “problem of the day/week/month/year” with current diet/eating patterns. Become convinced that if you could just muster up the willpower to make “healthy changes” stick this time, all of your problems—dietary and otherwise—would be solved.

Stage 2 - Determine new plan of action (“diet”) and start strong. Eat kale, feel elated. Maybe this lasts for days, or even weeks, all of which are completely consumed by obsessive thoughts of shopping for, preparing, cooking, and eating only the foods you have decided to allow yourself to eat—like kale. This takes so. much. time. and. energy. Slowly fill with dread that your Kale Era will end because thoughts of eating a cheeseburger with fries and a cold martini have slowly grown deafening inside, and also, this takes so much time and energy. Eat the cheeseburger and the fries, eventually. Follow this up in quick succession with all the other things you weren’t letting yourself eat these last few days or weeks.

Stage 3 - Be unreasonably, unrelentingly hard on self. Punish self for lack of willpower. How could you do this to us when we were *positively thriving* in our Kale Era? Find new “problem of the day” with current diet/eating pattern. See/repeat from Stage 1.

When I read about engaging in this cycle in an old newsletter I wrote three years ago, it makes me incredibly sad for how hard I was being on myself, and how obvious that is to me now when it was completely obscured and normalized for me then.

Three years later, I have better tools and a broader, more nuanced, more forgiving perspective.

But still, diet culture found me.

After I found out about the prediabetes, I spent the next few weeks spiraling, asking myself questions such as, Can I eat ______ anymore? What does navigating this condition mean for my career in food? What’s the right way to eat? Can I even put pasta recipes in the book anymore? I checked out medical nutrition textbooks from the library. I looked up articles about reversing prediabetes with Traditional Chinese Medicine principles. I lurked in Reddit threads and the depraved comment sections of NYT Cooking recipes. My anxious obsession was hungry, and I was more than happy to feed it with whatever it wanted in its insatiable search for answers.

Wanting to maximize my health insurance benefits before I lose coverage at the end of the month (bye, COBRA), I booked a few sessions with a dietitian via Diabetes Digital, a new virtual nutrition counseling service specifically for diabetes and prediabetes management founded by the women behind the popular Food Heaven podcast. I had recently listened to an incredible podcast on

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

with Diabetes Digital founders Jessica Jones, MS, RD, CDCES, and Wendy Lopez, MS, RD, CDCES, linked to below. (The post is paid. It was a really great conversation that I gained so much value from, and I am forever and always going to be out here encouraging people to pay for

Virginia Sole-Smith

‘s work. But you can also check out this free interview Wendy and Jess did with

Julia Turshen

on her newsletter

Keep Calm & Cook On

.)

You Don't Have To Lose Weight to Improve Your Blood Sugar

This wasn’t my first time working with a dietitian, and I was skeptical that the experience would cause the disordered eating triggers I’d been working so hard to move away from to come flooding back. The last time I had worked with a dietitian, I remember during one conversation she gave me an example: “When you’re out to dinner and there’s wine, a bread basket, and dessert, do we need all three?” It wasn’t long before I realized this wasn’t the right fit, and I’m pretty sure I retaliated by eating my weight in focaccia. So when one of the first things this new dietitian said to me after I told her about my doctor’s recommendations was, “You don’t need to run on a treadmill four times a week. That sounds horrible.” followed by, “You CAN have carbs and it IS fine,” I developed immediate trust. She talked me through options that didn’t involve changing my diet if I didn’t want to (revolutionary), like incorporating a 10- or 15-minute walk into my routine, or eating a handful of nuts along with my beloved bakery cookie, both things that can help manage blood sugar levels without engaging in restrictive behaviors. She reminded me that my blood sugar does not have a moral value, and that it doesn’t reflect who I am as a person.

But still, I had questions: What if you’re at a birthday party and there’s cake but no handful of nuts to eat with it? Are cheat days a thing? What about when you’re driving in a car and all you have available is gas station food and fast food? What if you go to an event and there’s a welcome cocktail but no food yet? What if, what if. There was a part of me that so badly wanted to “catch” her, to root out a previously unthought-of scenario that would surely spell out doom if we didn’t suss it out in advance and know exactly what to do in case it happened. It took me under two sessions to realize that all the questions I was asking her were a variation on a single master question: But what if it’s not okay?

I’m thankful that she—with immense grace—reminded me of how much I already know (insert “I’m something of a food professional myself” meme here), and how much my anxiety convinces me in stressful moments that I know much less than I do. One of the most insidious things about diet culture is how well it convinces you that you must be doing something wrong, otherwise you wouldn’t be like (*waves hands around*) this. And one of the most insidious things about using food to control your anxiety is that it seems like it makes so much sense: Control what you put in your body, and by extension control what your body will do and how it will perform with those “right inputs,” and by extension prevent anything bad like disease or death from happening to you. The end.

It’s ironic coming from a food professional, but the times when I’m not thinking about food are generally the times I know I’m in my healthiest place overall. I’m slowly learning to recognize that when this particular kind of food anxiety sets in, it might be a sign there are some underlying feelings I haven’t processed yet. I’m trying to clock when I feel the compulsion to Google “healthiest foods for prediabetes” and gently ask myself if I’m feeling scared, overwhelmed, unsure, out of control, or all of the above in this moment. I try not to punish myself if I spend two hours link-surfing anyway. Am I just looking for someone, somewhere (Google) to tell me that everything is going to be okay because I have not yet made peace with the fact that you cannot possibly know whether everything is going to be okay? Almost always, I’m finding, the answer is yes. At least for now.

I’ve also been having feels about some new choices I’m experimenting with that don’t necessarily feel rooted in diet culture for me, but I still fear that they come off as diet culture-y. For example, yesterday I baked a gorgeous almond streusel coffee cake with pockets of blueberry jam (from Mother Grains by Roxana Jullapat, highly recommend). I’ve been choosing not to eat the cake right before sitting down to my desk for a few hours to work, because I’ve learned from experimenting that that’s a surefire way to make me feel sluggish quickly when what I need is clear, steady, focused energy for writing. But if I know I’m running errands on foot or going on a walk with a friend for an hour, I will eat the cake, and then maybe even more than I normally would because I know that the cake will provide the energy I need for the walk. The internal voice that clamors, “What if I can never have pasta again?” is slowly sounding more like, “You can eat pasta whenever you damn want and for whatever reason you want.” The conversation inside is more like, “What’s important to you about this decision? Is it about being able to celebrate an occasion (a birthday, an anniversary, the first nice spring day and scoring an outdoor table at Via Carota)? Is your goal to have a long streak of sustained, focused energy to work at your desk on a deadline? If so, would it give you what you need to have some chicken with a side of pasta, or to just have pasta another night instead?” I don’t have all the answers right now—far from it. Which is to say, this is all an ever-evolving work in progress.

None of this is really sexy to talk about, especially not in the food world. You tend to only find out behind the scenes who doesn’t eat gluten/dairy/sugar and who’s the gym rat who eats protein bars for lunch and who secretly makes all their pasta dinners at home with Banza or whatever even though they publish lots of regular pasta recipes (nb: These are fictionalized examples, but definitely inspired by real life.) And that’s not to malign or judge anyone’s personal choices around food and what they put in their bodies—what you eat should always be your business. It’s more a comment on how unwilling we are as a collective to talk about these things publicly, and how isolated and confused many of us continue to feel as a result.

In the spirit of more transparent conversation, this post is free to all, as being transparent about these topics is important to me. But later today I’ll be starting a new Substack Thread for paid subscribers only, which IMO is most easily accessed via the Substack app. (Threads are like private messaging groups where you can group chat with other folks who subscribe to the same newsletters, like this one.) You will only be able to read and comment on this thread if you’re a paid subscriber, for community care and safety reasons. My goal is to foster better conversations that will help us to take better care of ourselves and each other. If for any reason you can’t afford to pay right now, email gentlefoods@substack.com and you’ll receive a one-year comped subscription, no questions asked. If you *are* in a position to pay, your support is enormously valuable and enables me to keep experimenting with new things here that may or may not work. You are the safety net that makes trying new things possible. So, hope to see you in the Thread.

Big love,

Chaey

P.S. I took this past Sunday off from writing From The Pantry as I was traveling back to the city, but I will be back with another edition this Sunday with some crAaaAAzy new editions such as multigrain sticky rice with adzuki beans that are circa I Literally Can’t Remember, and the Chunk Of Tamarind in the back of the cheese drawer in the fridge.