UW Does Not Support a Safe Environment For Those Who Struggle With an Eating Disorder
(Anonymous Opinion)
CW: Eating Disorders
There’s something to be said for eating your favorite vegetables, participating in joyful movement, and other practices meant to sustain a happy life. However, what does it mean to promote counting calories, weighing oneself constantly, and watching the numbers plummet? The University of Washington has some practices that do not help sustain such a happy life. If you are struggling with an eating disorder or not, it can be very difficult to see how the University displays nutritional information everywhere, decorates the walls of the gym with signs about bettering your diet, and promotes the ridding of foods with added sugar. Unfortunately, there is also a scale that UW promotes the usage of, with signs around it promoting body positivity. The body positivity posters are not enough as long as the scale is there. These practices promote eating habits that students may want to change in order to have a happy life (aka not being hyper focused on what one eats).
West Campus Fitness Center
Now, it is unfair to say that this is all the University cares about. Yet, it is critical to put an end to such practices that UW promotes. What exactly about displaying nutritional information is unhelpful? To put it plainly, as many an eating disorder dietician has told me, counting calories is often a way to turn off the body’s natural signals as to what it wants you to eat. For example, emotional eating is often a way to deal with, well, emotions. And that’s okay. Yet, in order to promote a more sustainable eating style, it is not advisable to count calories (as the University suggests), but rather to connect with one’s body, respecting it by giving it the foods your body wants (which can be ice cream and also can be iceberg lettuce). Life is about sustaining balance in order to maintain a life you want to live, not skipping breakfast. Living the life of your dreams means self-control — controlling how much you buy into the toxic diet culture that society throws upon you each day.
So, what can you do? First of all, please be kind to yourself. You deserve happiness, respect and, depending on what you want, neutrality or love towards your body. This is your body, and I wish you all the best in taking ownership over how you want to treat it (not how the world wants you to). Secondly, talk to your representatives about holding UW to the body positivity standards that are necessary for a happy world. The Residential Community Student Association (an HFS organization run by students that gets things done for students on campus) is a wonderful resource to go to and bring up concerns that HFS and the UW are not addressing to date. One action that the RCSA could take is to promote the idea that UW can have a separate list of nutritional information online for those who need it, and to remove the detrimental information from dining halls. This way, students can eat in peace. Finally, if you need support or would like to learn more about eating disorders, please check out resources such as the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), or Project HEAL (Instagram account @projectheal), an organization that promotes equal opportunities for recovery and treatment.
Together, we can end diet culture and live in a society where all bodies are respected. It all starts at the ground level with you.
Published May 22nd 2022
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