We asked our members to keep their ears pricked around campus and write down eating-disordered "verbatims" whenever they heard them. The yield was astonishing. Within a few days of being given the assignment, our roving reporters returned with literally dozens of overheard quotes.
The most disturbing ones (for example, "I wish I had the self control to be anorexic, because then at least I'd be skinny") were put on posters, along with short responses that the ECAs wished they had been able to give. These answers were approved by health educators and by McCosh's entire multi-disciplinary eating disorders treatment team, which consists of nutritionists, psychologists, physicians and psychiatrists.
The negative response to the campaign has been difficult for some ECAs to digest (no pun intended). A large number of the posters were not simply ripped down, as posters exposed to inebriated students on Prospect Avenue tend to be, but pointedly and defiantly ripped up into tiny pieces.
This didn't surprise me much. But what really disturbed me was that many of the posters were defaced, either with offensive pictures or with comments about the campaign and its message. Some comments were just cheeky, but others leveled rather serious accusations at the ECAs. One in particular accused us of publicizing "blatant lies."
It included a quote from a student who had been overheard trying to resist a slice of cheesecake because it was, in her words, "bad." Our position is that no food is "bad," and that we should give our bodies the foods they crave, rather than demonizing foods we know to be fattening.
The person who defaced the poster called our insistence that no food is "bad" a "blatant lie" and accused us of "trying to make people feel better" by printing a poster that encourages people to eat whatever they feel like eating. The latter is certainly true; we are trying to make people feel better. We're trying to make them feel better about doing something that is completely natural, which is listening to their bodies and acknowledging cravings. There isn't anything inherently "bad" about cheesecake, or any other food for that matter, if you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. I'm not talking about binge eating, and I'm certainly not talking about ignoring the advice of nutritionists and physicians: I'm talking about ending the practice of labeling certain foods "bad" and believing that eating them not only makes you unhealthy, but somehow a "bad" person.
So we should eat cheesecake at every meal, until we're all on the local news being lifted out of our beds by a crane? Of course not. Your body is really smart. It knows what it wants, and it knows when to stop. It doesn't need you to "control" it by denying it what it's asking for.
People who critique this view, called "intuitive eating," claim that this philosophy doesn't apply to the overweight or obese, who they say don't get full as quickly as "regular" people. This philosophy, they say, could lead to serious health problems in people who are already overweight or obese. But studies have found that intuitive eaters tend to have lower body mass indexes than dieters. Besides, take a look around this campus and compare it to the rest of the country. Obesity is not a problem at Princeton, but restrictive and disordered eating certainly are.
Of course, to a lot of people, the idea that you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want it, will sound like heresy. We're told every day of our lives that certain foods are "bad," and that eating them will surely result in any number of awful consequences, like diabetes, obesity, heart diseaseand worst of all, fatness. And for some people, avoiding certain foods might literally be what the doctor ordered
For the rest of us, and certainly for most of us at Princeton, avoiding certain foods is simply an attempt to do the unnatural, to override and control our bodies. And your body is smart - if you don't give it what it wants, you're only going to overcompensate later by bingeing, or by eating more than is necessary.
Eating well, as my dad would say, isn't "rocket surgery." Eat a few colors of the rainbow, spend some spend time getting to know your totally unique body and your own individual cues of hunger and fullness and pay attention to what feels good. Is it broccoli? Yum! Is it cheesecake? Go for it.
Chloe Angyal is a sociology major from Sydney, Australia. She is the president of the Eating Concerns Advisers and can be reached at cangyal@princeton.edu.
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