Carrots: My Anorexic Obsession
Carrots are an American produce staple. We dip them in ranch. We pair them with celery and hummus. We add them to soups and curl them all fancy like on top of salads. We feed our elderly mushy steamed carrots to compensate for their lack of teeth.
Carrots are not all that significant. One serving of baby carrots (about 8) contains 30 calories, 2.5 grams of fiber and more than double the daily recommended vision-boosting vitamin A. When I was deep in the dredges of my eating disorder, I routinely ate roughly five pounds of carrots each week — not normal in case you were wondering. I ate carrots for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everything in between. If I ate other “safe” foods, I would pair them with carrots to feel less hungry.
One of the worst parts of my eating disorder was constantly feeling hungry and never feeling satiated. Even when I ate, I was simply less hungry than I was prior to eating. And, I discovered something most people probably don’t know about eating, which is that if you don’t eat for long enough and go through all the stages of hunger, from nibbly to famished to starving, you begin to not feel hungry anymore. The feeling simply disappears (for a while, it always returns). Over the years, I fine-tuned the exact moment I needed to stop eating to not feel anything.
