Edited by Sanjana Hira
TW: Eating Disorders
You often wake up before the alarm. Sleep isn’t something you are quite familiar with, though you wish to be. There’s plenty of time to make breakfast before your first class but you choose not to. Your stomach is grumbling but it’s not ‘cool’ to have breakfast in college. Hard pass. Your class is done and you have this awful headache. It’s a sign coming from your body saying that you should eat something. Hard pass. However, coffee can be breakfast.You like it with milk and sugar, but since it’s too ‘high in calories’, you pass. You choose to get that bitter brown liquid instead. Everyone around you looks so perfect.Their hair is perfect, their clothes look like they had been planned in advance and you hope that you will look like them one day. Not eating is the solution to that, everyone does it anyway, so it’s okay. Right?
Why are eating disorders so glorified in college? College is a new experience. In a typical Indian household, you eat what is given to you without much say about what you want. College opens up new roads; you’re living on your own, deciding what to eat and how much to eat. Things change and sometimes, for the worse. When we think of eating disorders, our mind automatically jumps to anorexia or bulimia. In your head, you imagine a girl standing in front of her mirror with her bones protruding out. Sometimes, you may even imagine someone automatically purging after they’ve eaten a meal. We’ve been conditioned to think of eating disorders as restricted to only girls – skinny girls in particular – and we can only think of two possibilities. That doesn’t apply to the world anymore. Fear of food is the most common, yet the most overlooked, form of disordered eating. The world is a big place to examine disorders so I’m narrowing my focus to college in particular.
‘Freshman 15’ is a term I was made familiar with when I came back home for the first time after joining college . My friends and I were finally reunited and naturally, everyone looked different. If you don’t eat, party or do things that make you happy in college, how else do you unwind? Everyone was concerned about how much weight they had put on. They put a term on it – ‘freshman 15.’ Apparently, it was a term to describe how freshmen put on at least 15 pounds (approximately 6 kgs) in their first year of college. They were bickering on about methods to try to shed this weight. From fasting, to skipping meals and juice cleanses. It was safe to say, every weight loss strategy under the sun was covered. Why was there even such a thing as freshman 15 in the first place? It puts unnecessary pressure on college students to try to prevent the weight gain or lose it. College students, especially freshmen, are already disorganised because of their new work spaces. Research shows that they experience loneliness and an extreme loss of support. Pressure about their weight just adds a heavy toll to an already burdened shoulder. The whole idea of freshman 15 really did not sit well with me. I started over analyzing food – I knew the nutrition and caloric labels on food items better than I knew my whole academic syllabus.
My Subway order would focus more on numbers than it did on actual food items. 200 for the bread, 80 for the chicken, no sauce because I can’t pass a certain limit of calories. It was exhausting to even think about food. If this wasn’t bad enough, a virtual platform was coming which was going to push disorders into their climax.
Before I joined college, I would watch tons of videos on YouTube to prepare myself on how to set up my room, pick my outfits and manage work in college. A new genre of videos has popped up on the internet. The famous, ‘What I Eat In a Day as a College Student.’ If you aren’t familiar with these types of videos, it typically revolves around an influencer or a celebrity showing you what they eat in a day. It’s just a video, so why is it harmful? An article from the Guardian tells us that there is a high chance we are bound to do something if we’ve seen it on the Internet. So, these very ‘harmless’ videos we see with people eating very little food is bound to have an effect on the way we eat. From college students on the Internet skipping breakfast to eating ‘little’ because they wanted to be ‘skinny.’
Back when I was a first year at college, I was exposed to this toxic genre of videos. Now, we see it making a comeback in apps like Tik Tok (before it was banned). Tik Tokers show their wide range of vulnerable audiences how little they eat in a day.They are often proud of their low calorie diets and don’t fail to mention it to their audiences. The New York Post did an article on how showcasing extreme dieting on social media was leading to the creation of serious eating disorders.
If she consumed 600 calories, it does not mean you have to as well. All bodies are made different and everyone’s range of activity differs. College can mean different things to different people. For some, it may be a cheerful experience where life is one big party, but for others it may be the trigger which leads to a lifetime of eating disorders. So put down the calorie tracker and eat the damn Subway sandwich.