You know what’s really fucked up, think about how many poor people with eating disorders or problems with food
How many poor mothers skip meals to feed their children
How many poor children only eat one mea a day (like free lunch at school)
How many poor teens and young adults just don’t make enough to eat and start internalizing that they’re unworthy of food
How many poor people do you know who can’t afford healthier food
How many poor people don’t have enough time/money/gas/ability to cook fresh meal
How many poor people do you see starving on their breaks their lunches just to save food
Capitalism creates these problems and i have never seen a post on here talking about how we struggle with eating disorders and food insecurity under capitalism.
Yeah p much.
The two biggest factors contributing to my eating disorder were an incredibly low self esteem and the fact that I was broke as hell. Not eating for days on end became a habit, and then, when I could afford to eat, I’d binge my sorry heart out.
It calmed down for a bit when I had a few months of financial stability, I still binged but it wasn’t nearly as bad. But when I became broke again? Lo and behold, the disordered eating returns in full force. It’s getting a bit better now that I’m not homeless anymore but yeah, the money guilt is still pretty strong whenever I eat and it’ll probably be that way for a good long while.
My eating disorder was also very closely connected to my bad financial situation. Constantly feeling out of control about my financial situation meant that I tried to re-establish my sense of control by spending less and less on food. Counting cents in the exact same way that I was counting calories.
“So I ate 700 calories and spend 2.15 today? I bet I can push that to 500 calories and 1.80 tomorrow.”
And the re-enforcement from society was also double. I was being praised for being skinny AND praised for being so disciplined about money. I thought I was doing good because I was starving myself.
I wish I’d realized that my desire to have
perfect control over my weight and my desire to have perfect control
over my money were the same thing.
That society pushing me to be skinny and making me attach my selfworth to my weight was the same thing as society pushing me to be the most financially responsible person ever because if I was in debt I was a bad person, right? That I was counting calories and
counting cents to the point of self destruction and those two impulses
were the same thing. And I deserved help for both.
None of the high school videos about eating disorders warned me about this.
I did recover from my eating disorder without recovering from my compulsive non-spending-money, and ended up eating mostly bad food but enough calories.So it’s not like it was a 2 headed monster that I had to slay
together. But recovering from both would have helped. Every time I was
short on money, relapsing by cutting spending on food was tempting.
By now I know that a lot of other people have these same experiences or very similar ones, like compulsively spending too much money on high-calorie food to suppress financial anxiety and weight anxiety and then feeling shitty about themselves and comulsively spending again. Or cycles of binge-starve-binge-starve combining with ‘buy fancy stuff’-’don’t call the plumber it costs money’-’buy fancy stuff’-’don’t pay my health care bills’-’buy fancy stuff’.
capitalism fucks us up.
QueerAnarchism 