Content Warning: Mentions Disordered Eating
It shocked my parents when their little girl, the kid who frowned at “Spongebob” boxed macaroni and cheese and lied about having a peanut allergy to avoid peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, tore apart a small filet of smoked fish, leaving behind only a plate of bones. Where did their picky eater go?
As a toddler and young child, I was picky in ways other children I knew were not. I flat-out refused ketchup, milk, blueberries, nuts and tomatoes. I’d eat watermelon when it was firm, raw carrots but never cooked, cucumbers with no skin and the heads of asparagus (which eventually joined the fray of untouchable foods). Pasta itself wasn’t an issue, but the heavy, acidic red sauce flooded over it made me feel sick. Cream cheese spread thinly on a bagel was the only form of cheese I’d accept.
My parents were a bit worried at first; many of my dislikes were favorites among other children, so why didn’t I go for them? My pediatrician assured them that picky eating is a common behavior in in children. There isn’t one accepted definition of picky eating, nor is there one specific cause. Nonetheless, he was confident that over time, I would adopt more foods into my diet.
My parents accommodated my preferences. They would make me one dinner while they and my sister ate another, or section me a portion void of all my dislikes. They did not force me to eat anything I didn’t want, besides vegetables, which I tolerated. For school lunches, my mom would pack me the only lunch I accepted: ham roll-ups, strawberries and “Scooby Doo” fruit snacks. Every. Single. Day.
But outside the comfort of my home, I grew to be insecure about my eating habits. With my picky tendencies, I felt like an inconvenience to others. At school functions and birthday parties, I would sit there nibbling on plain chips while the other children gorged on pizza and spaghetti. When I went over to other people’s houses, I’d often just eat the dry cereal my friends’ parents hesitantly placed in front of me. I squirmed under the scrutiny of others when they asked me what I wanted, what I didn’t want and why. It was even more humiliating when some questions were directed over my head to my parents. I did not want to be the subject of conversation; I just wanted to be left alone.
As I grew older, my pediatrician was proved right. While I began to get tested for lactose intolerance, cutting out even more basic dairy products from my plate, my diet grew in meat, seafood and vegetables. My first love was steak: tender, medium rare, prime rib-eye prepared by my dad on the grill. It was the food of birthdays, holidays and special Sunday nights. Salmon stole my heart soon after, rivaling steak as my favorite.
Even more foods joined the roster: Seafood — a world beyond the soft, mushy foods I avoided growing up. Not only did I enjoy mussels, shrimp and bacon-wrapped scallops, but I loved the unexpected versatility of the food group. I finally escaped the plainness of buttered noodles by tossing clams or even little squids in the mix. I eventually discovered a similar flexibility with vegetables, learning to love them in stir fry, fajitas and even burgers.
I distinctly remember the happiness and excitement I felt when I first tried each of these foods. Like unlocking a new level of power in a game, I had gained access to another world that was less dull than the one before it. Meals both at home and away were more interesting, and I felt emboldened to try more while still staying within the limits of my childhood preferences.
This is not to say that my learned habits were easy to break — as I transitioned into my teen years and into adulthood, my picky tendencies reared their heads in more dangerous ways.
As a child, I rooted myself in a complex that the way I ate was wrong and shameful. I grew up living in that thought. The scrutiny I faced made me distrustful of my own intuition, and I questioned whether I was able to make good decisions for myself.
Picky eating can correlate to disordered eating, which is defined as “a wide range of irregular eating behaviors that do not warrant a diagnosis of a specific eating disorder.” The distinction between the two can be difficult to pinpoint, but “most picky eating among children falls under mild to moderate disordered eating, and will resolve over time, at times with the support of an outpatient dietitian, therapist or pediatrician.” While I did work with pediatricians and gastroenterologists, the term disordered eating never came up in my presence. Perhaps that was because the language was too sophisticated for a tween, but nonetheless I don’t fully engage with that label for fear of watering down its actual severity. Instead, I stick with the descriptor “picky eating” or, at worst, “my unhealthy relationship with food.”
In my case, my unhealthy relationship with food was the climax of years of body insecurity, depression and shame towards my food choices. If someone made even an innocent comment about my choice of food, I would shut down immediately. Even healthy foods were “bad” because of how much I liked them; I’d sneak snacks into my room, darting past my parents with the contents in my pockets. Food the noun and eating the verb developed as two different areas of opinion: I wanted to love eating the way I loved food. Tracking seemed like the perfect solution — I could lose weight, limit the “bad” intake and, the biggest lie of all: have a healthier body.
Using a meal-tracking app, I carefully recorded each food and the times at which I ate. My supposed picky eating made it easy to justify my dangerous eating habits. Of course I’ll get a salad with practically nothing on it, I don’t like any of the other toppings. I won’t eat much here, the menu isn’t for me.
This was a lie. I missed food. I would go to bed and wake up hungry, ready to sleep again to avoid the torture of the day. I knew it was wrong when I refused to say the actual amount I was consuming. My weight loss goals were too extreme, and when I saw no results, the reality of my situation only hurt more.
This moment was the peak of my unhealthy relationship with food, but for others, their relationship with food can spiral into a more serious situation. Disordered eating can spiral into an eating disorder, which is a “serious mental illness characterized by disturbances to thought, behaviors and attitudes towards food and eating.” Similar to the transition from picky eating to disordered eating, disordered eating to an eating disorder is not a clear path that looks the same in everyone. There are signs people can look for, such as the progression of dieting and amount of physical activity, which should always be diagnosed by a professional.
My situation did not spiral into one that needed medical help, but this was not because I was stronger-willed than those who struggle more than me — I don’t want to purport the idea that seeking help is unnecessary or shameful. I think of myself as lucky more than anything; my therapy for anxiety and depression helped me ease out of my unhealthy mindset, even though that mindset wasn’t explicitly discussed.
As a way of understanding myself and healing my relationship with food, I’ve developed a new label that I believe more accurately reflects my eating habits: inverted picky eater. Picture picky eating like a triangle, with your basics like pizza and peanut butter at the bottom and mussels at the top. As it gets narrower, the less popular foods dwindle out at the top. Now invert that triangle — that’s how I define my diet, demonstrating how I like the less popular foods but not the more basic ones. This model is limited, not accounting for age and cultural differences in food. But for my sake, this simple image reflects the reality of my life that I once couldn’t explain.
The way you eat is not weird. It’s a mantra I constantly repeat to myself, and most of the time I know it to be fact. There are still moments of insecurity, where I’d rather hide with my meals instead of eating in public, but I’ve had enough practice explaining the inverted picky eater diagram to advocate for myself. Vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, picky eater, inverted picky eater; whatever the label or non-label may be, our diets are our business and ours alone.
On campus, in shared living spaces and in dining halls, you can’t hide the way you eat. To those who are insecure about the way they eat, I see you. It took me time to adjust to eating in a dining hall. It felt like being thrown into the deep end, but when no one made a comment about me, I felt like I could breathe. There’s already so much pressure in college — food should be a reprieve, not another stressor.
I’m relieved that I’m not a child anymore, hovering awkwardly over the dinner table at a party or a restaurant, struggling to find the words to explain that she just can’t eat it. But beyond relief, I wish I could go to that child and tell her that there’s nothing wrong with or inconvenient about her.
Statement Columnist Elizabeth Wolfe can be reached at eliwolfe@umich.edu.