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Key points
- Many individuals in recovery from restrictive eating disorders dislike many foods—or believe they do.
- There are systematic reasons why these apparent dislikes emerge and survive.
- Recovering requires learning—and daring—to like, want, and enjoy a far wider range of foods.
On the long list of things people get wrong about anorexia, this one is near the top: People with anorexia don’t like food. It’s almost never true; whether or not it was before, starvation generally forces an organism to be at least fixated on food, probably to love it in some way. Most people I know who eat too little value food too highly—or just the right amount, given it’s the single thing they need most.
And yet—many people I know and have worked with who have restrictive eating disorders also do a lot of disliking when it comes to food. Of course, that’s nothing unusual anymore. It’s increasingly common to hear people who don’t have an eating disorder talking in snooty, critical ways about food, so the anorexic stance blends in more easily these days—as it does in other ways, like counting one’s steps or one’s calories.
Those broader ways of disliking food aren’t harmless—they’re part of wasting and under-appreciating natural resources at a planet-wrecking scale—but the anorexic versions do particular kinds of harm when they pop up in the recovery process. In unchallenged illness, one probably doesn’t deviate much or at all from foods that have been declared—in whatever brand of disordered cost/benefit tradeoff—acceptable. But in recovery, at some point, dietary range has to expand, and that brings teething problems.
Here’s a rundown of the main origins of vehement food dislikes in recovery from anorexia, with some suggestions for how to defang them.
Fear. Cloaking fear in dislike is nothing new, and anorexia is defined by no emotion more than by fear. Frightened people lash out, and in recovery, they do so in the strangely supercilious ways of our age, damning things as gross, greasy, sickly, or tasteless.
It’s good to get into the habit of translating the criticisms back into the honest language of fear, because then you can ask, “What of?” and do proper demolition work on the answers.
Unfamiliarity. Things you’ve not eaten for ages or ever can taste weird. Sometimes instantly wonderful, often not. Some people seek out ultra-strong flavors during semi-starvation; others don’t. If you didn’t, and especially if your fat intake was very low, the intensity with which things can taste can be—well, again, scary, but also just kind of overwhelming. The anorexic watchword: too much.
Here, it helps to know what to expect: to understand, for example, that higher-fat foods taste more, that there is a learning curve to embark on, and that it might be steep.
Liking too much. Sometimes, dislike is the easiest disguise for its direct opposite. Recovering is about learning to take your desires seriously—including about food. When you’re seriously out of practice, having desires that you don’t instantly squash and call invalid is alien and can lead to a kneejerk fear of “What if I never stop wanting?” Turning every passing and persistent hunger into a presage of unending gluttony is standard. And one way to kill that frightening predictive spiral is to clamp down and say (pretend, then find yourself believing), “don’t like.”
A better way is to label this catastrophizing and try out some inoculating good sense of the “come on; this is just temporary” variety. *Of course* recovering from a lot of undereating is going to involve a lot of hunger and a lot of eating.
Liking decoupled from wanting. This is a more precise way to understand what’s often going on in the previous point. It’s remarkable how divorced from each other this well-evolved pair can be in anorexia. Often, the liking is demonstrably there, but its natural translation into wanting is blocked—again, by good old fear.
Understanding that the aim is to get the two back into alignment with each other can help.
Liking versus enjoying. Later in recovery, where there’s more of a habit of eating despite all the discomforts, liking gets translated more reliably into having. So now it’s the liking/enjoying pair that come adrift from each other: Awareness of a half-theoretical liking (of food-inherent things like flavor) gets swamped by the contextual difficulties of enjoying (the mental turmoil of “this isn’t OK,” “this is out of control”; paradoxically also the efforts to maximize enjoyment through arcane rules).
A recent client who tracked her liking versus enjoying scores and comments for a while observed—and worked hard to bring about—a remarkable shift. In the beginning, she was often giving very high scores to liking simultaneously with very low for enjoying (e.g., 7s or 8s versus 1s to 3s). Thanks to lots of eating anyway and lots of deconstruction of the enjoyment killers, she found that liking and enjoying were able to come back into equilibrium (and enjoyment grow much greater), with nice stable 5s to 7s all round.
A lot of this is about the simple fact of practice: Doing things that make the expectations reasonable, that make the eating experiences feel reliable, and, of course, that bring the hunger down from its pinnacles.
High costs. If anything you eat has to earn its place in your diet by giving you unalloyed ecstasy, your dietary range is going to be small. “It’s not worth the calories” is a great way to keep most foods off-limits.
Again, reminding yourself that the point of eating isn’t to make yourself euphoric can help. So can reminding yourself of the other things you want eating well to do for you, e.g., fueling a good life.
Taking reasons not to eat more seriously than reasons to eat. Maybe this is the foundation: where it all goes wrong and where it can all start to go right again.
What’s needed is to give the benefit of the doubt to liking, and to wanting, and to being hungry. Just like hunger and satiety signaling, liking and wanting have been disrupted by long abuse. The way to normalize hunger and satiety signaling is to give hunger the benefit of every doubt, and satiety no such thing. Likewise, liking and disliking need a hard reset.
The bigger picture
In all of this, maybe a bit of context helps, too. It’s historically only extremely recently that disliking specific foods has had much relevance to anything: For most of our history, sating hunger and staying alive was the point.
There is no need to love everything we eat, but to me, it seems that the universal default should be liking or at least not caring. Imagine being a fussy breather! I think having had anorexia and recovered from it will always make it strange and distasteful to me how much dislike other people feel and express about food. For myself in recovery, every single thing I ate was a miracle that conferred deliciousness. I experimented with the oddest things, like porridge with lamb’s liver, and I marveled at all of it.
My partner told me the story of how he came to like olives. As a kid, he’d always hated them; he went to Greece with a mate in his early 20s, and he decided he wanted to like them. He made himself eat one before every beer; by the middle of the trip, he associated them with beer and loved them.
All of this is up for grabs. Illness makes it harder, but all of this is malleable.
And the more foods you like, the better recovery will tend to be going—with the cause-effect links going both ways, of course.
It strikes me that there are two types of recovering people: the one who likes food and throws herself into her re-emerging life with gusto and the one who doesn’t and doesn’t. The capacity to be the former is in all of us, and letting it blossom probably shapes recovery more than anything else.
