As an only child who moved around a lot, Emma Specter learned to take comfort, as many children do, in foods that were familiar, whether it was the Dunkin Donuts she sought out in Rome or the candy bars she bought in stores in Manhattan. By the time she entered high school, she had begun to use food not just as a source of comfort but as a kind of anesthetic agent she secretly administered to herself. She found that mindlessly eating cookie dough to the point of physical discomfort could help dull the pain of life’s most unpleasant moments — that is, until shame took over, followed by the urge to count calories.
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Specter eventually came to identify this behavior as binge eating, an eating disorder she describes viscerally in her memoir, “More Pease: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for 'Enough.'”Harper Collins). Binge eating can have different effects for different people, but for Specter, it involves “sneaking food into my mouth as quickly and passively as possible,” she writes. Her debut book, which combines deeply personal (and often humorous) narrative with academic research and journalistic inquiry, explores the origins of her eating disorder while searching for a motive: “Why am I doing this?” Specter said in an interview.
Vogue’s Los Angeles-based culture editor is still trying to answer that question. In addition to a lot of therapy and introspective writing, her process so far has involved interviewing writers, academics, and fat activists about diet culture and its social underpinnings.
The Times spoke to Specter about how she realized she had an eating disorder, why she decided to stop dieting and what happened when she began to reframe her thinking about her body.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In your book, you describe how any event in your life, no matter how big or small, could trigger a binge. How did this pattern manifest itself in you, and how did you recognize that it was part of a disorder?
I was and still am definitely more prone to overeating on a bad day than a good one, but sometimes something very small would go wrong and I would react by bingeing. When I'm in a bad mood or bored or feeling lonely or tired, I find it difficult to self-regulate without food. I think a lot of us use food to comfort ourselves and that doesn't have to look like disordered attachment. But for me, it was very much about shutting myself out from the world with food.
I think that's the tricky thing too, that obviously everyone eats to survive, to feel comfortable, for all those things. Was there a moment when you realized that what I'm doing is maybe a little destructive, if that's how you see it?
Absolutely, that's how I see it. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I started to realize that something wasn't right. A lot of things I had desperately wanted came true. I got jobs in the media, I had a great group of friends, I came out and realized that I wasn't a normal person. [as queer]Dating was better and more exciting, or at least existing. But I felt like there was a real disconnect, so I started binge eating almost more when I had more going on in my life. I felt more fulfilled and happy, but I would still binge eat and then realize, “What function does this serve for me? Is it an escape when I'm feeling overwhelmed or scared or stressed about what's at stake in my new life?”
Correct. How do you work on not relying so much on food as a way to escape your feelings?
I've found a lot of beauty in preparing communal meals and eating together with my partner, his roommates, and my friends, and simply reminding myself that food can be a great source of comfort when I'm feeling overwhelmed, and it doesn't have to be accompanied by loneliness and hiding.
When I was in the dieting and bingeing cycle that I was in for so long, I was very worried about “How am I going to be able to have a group dinner with friends and still meet my Weight Watchers points?” I’m happy to say that I haven’t dieted in a long time, but that reptilian brain mentality is still with me sometimes telling me what I should and shouldn’t eat or enjoy. The more I can gather with other people around food, the less I feel like I have to be this kind of solitary respite that I just haphazardly indulge in.
So the journey you describe in the book is two-fold: you recognize that you're bingeing and figure out what's behind it and how to control it, but you also learn to let go of diet culture. Do you feel like those two things go hand in hand?
Absolutely. I think that stopping dieting was really crucial to getting to a point where I can accept myself as a fat person. It was really one of the most ingrained habits of my life to the point where, I think like a lot of people, and especially women, I still know the caloric value of foods and I'm trying to get that out of my head. It doesn't hurt to know what's in your food, but I'm trying to push away the feeling of, “Oh my gosh, this banana has so many calories, I can't eat it.” I think that saying goodbye to dieting has been really crucial to just accepting the body that I have now and not the body that I could have if I cut out carbs and worked out for two hours every day.
I was a little disappointed that stopping dieting didn't fix my binge eating, something that perhaps should have been obvious to me because binge eating is a very ingrained habit I've engaged in throughout my life. But part of me thought that if I didn't diet anymore, I'd never have the urge to overeat. It can be demoralizing to feel like I'm doing all this work. [toward having a positive relationship with food] And I still binge, but I think that's just part of the balance, especially at the point I'm at in my recovery, which is very much focused on harm reduction. I've made a tenuous peace with the idea that binge eating is going to be a part of my life.
You talk about your binges as a form of self-harm, how they caused shame, embarrassment, nausea and indigestion. Could you tell us about other ways in which they affected and continue to affect your life?
Something I want to highlight is the amount of money I spent on food excesses. Obviously it wasn’t a lot of money (an individual excess might be an ice cream cone, which costs $7, but that adds up) and it’s not my favorite use of money. It’s not my favorite use of how to relate to the world and the economy, especially through the use of food delivery apps. Relying on someone else’s precarious job to bring you food that you don’t even want is not nice and it’s not how I want to relate to my community.
I also think that for a long time I felt like my consequences, for lack of a better word, were fatness. I remember at one point looking in the mirror after I had gained weight and thinking, “Look what you’ve done to yourself.” You know, really nasty thoughts about myself that I try really hard not to harbor anymore, but they creep in because we live in a fatphobic society. But I think it’s been a really beautiful redefinition to be able to say that my body is not a negative outcome or consequence of anything. It’s just my body and it can do so many amazing things.
CONCLUSIONS
from “More, please”
Reading your book, it's clear that you didn't come to body acceptance overnight and that it's still a work in progress. Can you talk about what has helped you be kinder to yourself along the way?
I can't think of anything that has had a bigger impact on me than having fat friends. Just being surrounded by fat people who love and are loved by each other (which sounds so cheesy), but I think it gives me a daily script for my own self-acceptance. I can't overstate the importance of having a community of fat people in my life, and I really hope that's the case for all fat people.
I know being fat can be tricky because it can often feel like it's your rest stop on the road to thinness, but I've felt so deeply that if I want to live in my body happily as it is, I need to surround myself with other people who do that and who accept themselves and who still have tough times and who still have journeys that I may not even know about because every single person is going through their own world and journey in their own meat suit.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start reevaluating their relationship with food or their body?
Try not to be alone with it. “It” is your fear and anxiety about what you eat or don’t eat or how your body looks or doesn’t look. Sometimes that means talking to the people in your life, but I think people dealing with eating disorders and binge eating in particular can often feel so much shame that it’s really hard to start that conversation. Your Notes app or your Google Docs are just as good a place as any to start a conversation, even with yourself as you figure out what another level of help might look like for you.
I just hope that, as cheesy as it sounds, you are as kind to yourself as you can be and that you can find your own version of therapy, or write about your problems, or talk to your loved ones about what's going on with you. None of that is possible without this little glimmer of self-compassion, and self-compassion has to come first.
(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers, and writers about their latest books, all with the goal of learning how to live a more fulfilling life. Want to send us a pitch? Send us an email [email protected].
