I refuse to be afraid of a ripe banana

How online health hacks exacerbated my disordered eating

The other day, during a mindless scroll of Instagram I watched a performative interaction between two popular health gurus, one of whom went to bite into a perfectly ripe banana. “No, no, no!” the other cried, with alarm in his voice. He explained she should eat only green bananas, since they contain more resistant starch and less sugar than edible ripe ones.

As an ex-dietaholic who’s now allergic to the trends I once followed religiously – from low calorie, to low fat, low carb, and paleo – I find messaging that encourages people to be fearful of certain foods more than a little problematic. According to the National Eating Disorders Collaboration, one of the main risk factors for Binge Eating Disorder is dieting and restriction, which is exactly what food-fear leads to.

While I was never officially diagnosed as having Binge Eating Disorder (I once tentatively broached the subject to a GP who chuckled at me, since I was a “healthy weight” – whatever the fuck that means), I can certainly attest to disordered eating patterns. It all began in my teens with dieting, but morphed into an orthorexic hellscape thanks to an over-focus on food rules, which then paved the way to decades of binge eating.

When I was thirteen years old, my best friend Stacy and I would smoke her grandmother’s Winfield Blue and hold each other accountable on our prune-and-Diet-Coke diets. While our reasons were never discussed, for me dieting was an attempt to have value in a world that, as far as I could tell, saw the curves of a woman’s body as disgusting.

During the years of strict dieting that followed I was prone to the occasional binge, mostly due to hunger. But it wasn’t until my mid-twenties, when I began researching food online for “health reasons” that my eating issues really spiralled out of control. Of course, it was all a ruse and I didn’t care about health. I mean, I drank alcohol most weekends, and my favourite pastime was sitting on the back step blowing smoke rings into the sky, watching them expand then disappear (ahh… the nostalgia).

Nope, healthy eating was simply another way to diet.

Every night after work, the beeps and screeches of my dial-up internet signalled “me time”, which meant time to discover more food rules, a pack of cigarettes and a pile of carrot sticks beside me. The fitfluencers stuck to their own websites back then, but I’d hunt them down with this new thing called Google. Falling down a rabbit hole of online articles, the list of foods I was willing to eat was continuously cut in half: Fruit contains too much sugar, so it was bad; potatoes have too many carbs, so they were bad; nuts contain phytic acid, an anti-nutrient; and broccoli has too many pesticides unless organic (and who can afford to eat organic?).

Inevitably, after weeks or months of “healthy eating” my will would snap. Relieved and yet disgusted with my lack of willpower, I’d ditch the egg white frittatas and buy the unhealthiest foods I could find: Cadbury Snack chocolate, sour gummies, a tub of ice cream and a loaf of bread for buttered toast. I needed to consume it all today, before I’d return to my life of deprivation tomorrow.

Over time, binge eating my favourite sugary foods became habitual. Not only when I’d starved myself and needed the calories, but also when I felt stress, overwhelm, boredom, uncertainty, or even guilt (incidentally, this was often from eating a small amount of “bad” food – like a banana). Sometimes I felt nothing at all, and needed sugar to get away from the nothingness.

It wasn’t until my late thirties when I stopped trying to adhere to dozens of food rules, and stopped caring what the rest of the world thought of my body, that things slowly began to shift. But while letting go of the diet-mentality was vital, it wasn’t a panacea – my binge eating somewhat improved once I allowed myself to eat without fearing anti-nutrients and calories, but I was far from healed.

Perhaps because I’d freed up some mental space after quitting dieting, I went on an inward journey that started with meditation. After a year of absolutely sucking at it, I eventually became aware of a peaceful inner world that became my home-base. I am sorry to be so wanky. Later, I began paying attention to my thoughts and gently correcting them when they were self-deprecating, which I soon realised was most of the time.

Neither of these practices had anything to do with food or food rules. And yet over time I began to get to know myself, and value my energy levels and inner peace more than I valued escaping life with food. While I’m still far from perfect when it comes to my eating habits (I mean, sugar is fucking delicious), the story “I can’t do moderation” – which was absolutely true for decades – began to disintegrate once I focused more on my inner world, and less on the diet-obsessed, macro-counting outer world.

I have no doubt that most of the influencers who offer “health hacks” have good intentions, and maybe they work for some, but for me rule-based eating was the most harmful way to do things. Disordered eating ruins many lives, but a piece of fruit has killed no-one. So when the social media influencer cried “no, no, no!” over a ripe banana, you can bet no-one’s ever hit the block button quite so quickly.

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