Excerpt
Reclaiming the Black Body
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How Our Eating Became Imbalanced“
Eating disorders are a natural response to intergenerational wounds, gender violence, and racial trauma.”—Gloria Lucas, founder of Nalgona Positivity Pride
When I think about how eating became imbalanced in my own family, I know that food scarcity—or our lack of access to food—deeply wounded us. Whenever my parents went grocery shopping to fill our pantry and refrigerator, my siblings and I were often scolded for how quickly we ate the food they bought because, as our parents told us, “Groceries are not cheap.” I also grew up in a “clean your plate” household, meaning that during dinnertime we sat down, said our prayers of gratitude to God, and ate
all of our food without complaining. If one of us did complain, or refused to eat what was being served, we were either punished or made to feel guilty with statements like “Children in X country are starving—you better eat that food.” In this way, my siblings and I learned to ignore our bodies’ desires, to dismiss our hunger and fullness cues. We learned that listening to our bodies could cause feelings of guilt or shame. As a child I did not know what to do with those emotions, I just knew they felt bad. Dinnertime with our family evoked feelings of anxiety and distress because the message was always “We don’t have food to waste.”
Looking back, I don’t blame my parents for doing the best they could with the resources they had to support our family. They were only repeating the behaviors that were passed down to them from their parents, who in turn received them from their parents. Instead, I hold accountable the class disparities in this country, and how our capitalist system has made food and our ability to nourish ourselves a privilege rather than a human right. I grew up hearing stigmatizing and false messages about Black people receiving “handouts” from the government for food stamps. Even though at times we were qualified to receive them, my parents refused to accept them—choosing instead to work multiple jobs and put in extra hours to ensure that our family had only just enough.
I later learned that we were always riding the line between being too privileged for government assistance and too poor to actually afford the things my parents needed to support a family of five. We were struggling, but that struggle was preferable to the shame they felt for needing help in a system that had left us disadvantaged.
I carried the lessons of this upbringing with me into adulthood. In my early twenties, I would intentionally eat less because, even during periods when I was making enough money to afford a variety of foods to support my body’s needs, I had learned to internalize the scarcity wound my family had experienced. I held the vestiges of my childhood within my body—I made a habit of rationing my meals because I believed that there might not be enough for me to eat, that I could not afford to eat more, even when I was in the financial position to do so.
Years later, as I began to delve deeper into my work with eating imbalances, I decided to take a closer look at my personal history with the hope of gaining a greater understanding of how
my eating became imbalanced. Reflecting on the past, I began to realize that my Westernized Christian upbringing had a huge lasting influence on my thoughts around my body and food. As a young girl, I was raised to believe the creation story of Adam and Eve. Eve decides to eat an apple from the tree of forbidden fruit and, as the Bible story tells us, her lack of willpower and her human capacity to be deceived causes her to become disconnected from God. After consuming the forbidden fruit, Eve becomes ashamed of her body and is labeled as disobedient to God. I now realize that this famous story—one that many of us grew up hearing—is also a prime example of an imbalanced relationship with food and nourishment.
The story of Adam and Eve was a cornerstone of my conditioning around resisting “temptation,” which included anything that could be deemed desirable: cravings, “guilty” pleasures, foods considered to be indulgences. Both the literal and figurative rigidity around the creation story began to fuel my eating patterns. I internalized the idea that the worst sin I could commit would be to fall into temptation around food I’d come to view as “forbidden.” It was important to me that I force my body into obedience by controlling the way I ate. I followed what mainstream society told me was “healthy” and “unhealthy” to eat, and what diet culture said was the right or wrong amount of calories to ingest each day, or the specific kinds of foods I should be focusing on—eating only fruits, or vegetables, or proteins. By the standards of white-dominated culture, my Black body, with all its curves, was a disruption to the status quo. And so to conform, I followed the food rules that had been fed to me.
Although the story of Adam and Eve played a part in my childhood understanding of food regulation, as an adult who studied eating imbalances in graduate school and worked in the field with Black clients, I began to feel in my gut that the real origins of our community’s eating challenges went much deeper. When I began my training as a therapist, I slowly came to realize that the mental health care system we’re operating under—Westernized, white-centric, woefully bereft of diverse representation—was teaching me to pigeonhole eating disorders into rigid categories: anorexia nervosa, orthorexia, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, and more.
I found that this way of learning did not represent the experiences of diverse bodies, because the people I was working with did not fit neatly into those boxes. So I began to question my formal learning. My lived experiences, my evolution over the previous two years from the limiting title of “therapist” to the more expansive role of holistic embodied healer, and many ancestral rites of passage that I underwent all helped me understand that there are many levels to this biopsychosocial-spiritual illness—infinitely more than what we’re taught in the classrooms of academia. I felt compelled to understand more about how our society’s obsession with thin ideals, fatphobia, dieting, and the moralization of health have influenced the way Black communities think about eating imbalances.
As I began the journey of tracing back the roots of eating imbalances in our communities, I wanted to get to the core of how the condition was birthed into the human experience. I reached out to my ancestral healer and friend Ash Johns to seek guidance around how to go deeper. Ash encouraged me to engage in the process of discovery through ceremony and ritual, to spend some alone time meditating deeply on my family history and ancestral lineages’ relationship with food. I soon realized that the pathway to understanding required me to address and come into relationship with feelings I had become used to avoiding and rejecting.
In Internal Family Systems therapy and Jungian therapy, there is a belief that to become whole as a human being, we must create a safe space to integrate the rejected, exiled, and shadow parts of ourselves—aka the parts of ourselves around which we experience shame. The eating patterns I had developed early in my youth had not only become my “personal shadow” (the unconscious aspects of our personality that drive behaviors we deem as negative or shameful), but was also part of a larger shadow that had been cast—and is still cast—on our ancestral and collective culture. In short, the shame that we feel has been passed down; those negative messages we’ve internalized over the generations impacts us globally, and on an ancestral level as well.
After years of deep diving, I now see more fully the way in which the legacy of ancestral trauma affected how Black women, including those in my family, felt about their bodies. Controlling the way we ate helped us to survive and adapt to a society committed to our annihilation. It forced us to accept the lack of freedom foisted upon us and the not-enoughness we were taught to believe about ourselves. The white supremacist patriarchal capitalist system had taught us that being in control was the only way to feel powerful. We never understood what it means to have a loving relationship with our bodies. We didn’t know how to listen to our intuition, nor did we learn how to receive and use the ancestral medicines, gifts, and blessings that are our birthright. Instead, many of us found an outlet for our lack of freedom in patterns of imbalanced eating and in disconnection from our bodies.
