Wednesday, November 02, 2005

The Dilemma of Disordered Eaters in an Introductory Nutrition Course

by Julie Walton, Ph.D.

I teach Nutrition in a large Christian liberal arts college.  Each day in class, I look out over 60 young faces, and pray that the day’s focus on eating and food will not batter and badger the 4-8 students who are in the midst of, or freshly recovering from an eating disorder.  How do we teach with sensitivity to these students?  How do we continue, day in and day out our intentional and intense attention on food and nutrition and health in ways that do no harm?

The course begins with an assignment to record and analyze a 3-day diet diary.  It is not uncommon for these diaries to come back with average daily caloric intakes of 1100 calories, dangerously low folic acid and calcium levels, fat intakes that students wrongly think virtuous and high intakes of water, ice, Crystal Light, diet sodas, and other non-caloric items.  Sadly, I am no longer astounded by such eating patterns.  What does stun me is the palpable fear of food in these otherwise wonderful Christian students. 

And so I continue to think about the gift of food and why God created us to 1) need food at all, and 2) need food on a continual basis.  In the garden, and before the Fall God instructed man to eat from the seed bearing plants and the trees with seeded fruits- a vegetarian fare filled with color, variety, fiber and taste.  After the Flood, God added animal-derived foods into the human dietary mix.  I have to believe that in all the different foods God created, each was meant for us as a delicious and fulfilling gift, and that he designed us to need food as one means of bringing us into closer dependence on and communion with Him on a daily basis. 

Really, the way we take in food, chew on it, tear it apart through digestion, absorb it into the very marrow of our bones, and use it to fuel our daily activities, it is no wonder that God’s Word itself is so often referred to as food for our souls.  God’s Word is milk, it is manna, it is bread and staff, and the very core of our sustenance and existence.

But, what happens in this fallen world to bring my students (mostly women) to this attitude that food is bad, that fat is abomination, and that the cultural imposition of impossible thinness is a god worthy of pursuit?  These students are staggering under the burden of their food behaviors.  They don’t eat, get ravenously hungry as a result, binge on the foods closest at hand, then expel the food right back out in a fit of guilt-ridden horror at their own behavior.  Or, they just don’t eat and call this self-starving control a virtue.  In some ways, these students are the most frightening, because they truly cannot see that anything is wrong or out of the ordinary.  In either case, the idolatry of their worship of thinness is disheartening to watch.

I do not have the answers, and when a student comes to my office to talk about disordered eating, I am open and frank, offering to pray about it in one breath while insisting they seek professional help with the next breath.  My biggest heartbreak occurs when their eyes well up with tears and they confess that years of counseling have not helped.  They are afraid of food yet think constantly of nothing but food.  They are enrolled in an intensive food-based course.  They feel trapped in an addictive and vise-like behavior, without any peace from the reconciling love of Christ where this behavior is concerned.  They give head-assent to the need for moderation, for adequate nutrition, and that the cultural expectation to be Barbie is perverse.  But their hearts are captive and tortured. 

Christ said that He came to set the captives free, to be our daily Bread, and to love us with a love too deep to comprehend.  Some students are so fiercely bent on NOT loving themselves that I can only keep praying for Christ to intervene. 

Do any of you teach Nutrition?  I would very much appreciate your views, your stories and testimonies, and how you reach out to students with disordered eating histories. 

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