CW: This post doesn’t mention any specific disordered eating behaviour but does explore *my* thoughts on anti-Blackness and anti-fatness connected to neurodivergence. There is mention of binge eating, anorexia and over-exercising.
I’ve had problems with disordered eating for as long as I can remember.
Growing up, as the only Black girl and a transracial adoptee in a small white town, the messages about what was considered beautiful were very clear. If you want to be accepted, be thin.
And white.
[ID: a white hand holds a spoonful of vegetable soup from a white bowl that’s been put on a white plate. I don’t really like soup like this, but I learned it was “good for me” if I wanted to “stay healthy.” Photo by Henrique Félix on Unsplash]
Looking back, I wonder if I believed that being thin enough would make up for the fact that I wasn’t white. But I did believe that being thin came with a promise of acceptance, so it was something that I strived for my whole life. Even during times of my life when I looked thin, I realise now that I never believed I was thin enough. I was never able to lose enough Blackness that way.
It wasn’t until I was 40 years old that I first learned about being neurodivergent. It was then that I started looking into neurodivergence and disordered eating. We hear a lot about neurodivergence and eating. If you have ADHD you hear about the stories of eating impulsively, forgetting to eat, not having an appetite because of your medication...
Issues of eating and neurodivergence tend to be brought up mostly when talking about ADHD, but don’t often include other neurodivergence (besides maybe autistics) while including chronic illness (which is important because many neurodivergent people have co-occurring conditions, for example, those who have MAST cell activation syndrome tend to need a very special diet to alleviate symptoms). But no matter how hard I looked, most of the information I read came from a lens that didn’t quite fit my experience. It’s rare to see these conversations around neurodivergence and food also address the impact of race and gender too. Now that I know more it’s not surprising, but at the time I started investigating I never understood why. I thought it was just me.
As I continue to unpack my own beliefs around anti-fatness and disordered eating, I realise that I’d grown up not being given any insight as to why I might have learned to see fatness as I did and how that might have impacted the way I learned to see myself. During times of my life when I might have been considered fat, I never connected the ways I despised and criticised myself and treated my body to be a sign of my own internalised anti-Blackness. I never realised that so much of my own struggles around disordered eating not only came from undiagnosed neurodivergent conditions, but also from the messages I received from society about what it meant to be Black and fat. I already struggled to be accepted while being Black, I wouldn’t stand a chance of finding any acceptance if I was fat too.
The whole narrative around fatness is often simplified to fatness being bad (unhealthy, unattractive, laziness) and the fault of the fat person, while thinness means being good (healthy, attractive, active) due to efforts made by the thin person. Healthy and fat are considered to be in opposition to each other. When you add race and gender to this picture, you learn that anti-fatness stems from anti-Blackness. Black women and femme are considered to be more unattractive, fatter, and unhealthier, which means that whiteness, thinness and Eurocentric ideals of beauty are seen as the right way to be. Black women couldn’t be healthy, especially while fat, let alone attractive and active too! Fat people definitely couldn’t have eating disorders either (actually they can and very much do).
The food that we’re told we should or shouldn’t eat doesn’t always connect with the kinds of food we’ve grown up eating either. We learn to see our culture’s food as wrong if it’s not what whiteness eats while being told what to eat regardless of whether that suits our body type, our culture, race and gender, whether we have some sort of neurodivergence (diagnosed or not), chronic illness or pain or not. We’re shown specific images of what beauty and “a healthy body” must look like and it’s blamed on us and our efforts if we can’t achieve it. But with so many overlapping, moving parts informing how we learn to see our bodies and our eating habits, how might this impact our sense of selves, how others perceive us and because of that, the kind of support we might need that we did or never received?
In discussing neurodivergence and mental health, disordered eating isn’t the exception, it’s so prevalent that you might mistake it for a rule. Consider how many people with ADHD are seen to have disordered eating patterns because of a combination of issues including co-occurring emotional conditions, impulsivity and executive function challenges. Autistics are more than 20-30% to have an eating disorder for many reasons including executive function issues, sensory processing, or inflexible thinking about food. Approximately 30% of people who deal with anorexia show autistic traits. This suggests that solutions to meet their needs should take into account their neurodivergence too. But we rarely hear about the impact of different neurodivergent conditions on disordered eating or eating disorders. Instead, we continue to simplify them as something that happens because of body image and could not be connected to what is happening in our brains.
With trans, non-binary and gender expansive people being three to six times more likely to also be autistic and since managing eating disorders is also highly prevalent (up top 15%) within the trans and gender-expansive community, how might knowing that suggest the kind of support we might need? Could clinicians be able to foresee support not only for our neurodivergence but also for exploring gender identity while managing eating disorders/disordered eating too?
I have to wonder, what is being missed or assumed because of the way that we’ve learned to simplify what never should be simplified in the first place? The more we simplify people's experiences into fixed expectations of society that ignore the overlapping oppressions and challenges that we face, other truths continue to be missed, ignored or overlooked that could have been addressed at the same time. What solutions are we potentially missing that could be most impactful for our most marginalised communities that in turn could prove to be helpful for everyone?
When we limit how we see complexity in ourselves, we limit our ability to see complexity in others. There are always multiple truths existing at the same time. I am a neurodivergent, queer Black femme who has struggled with eating disorders and disordered eating my whole life, but no one ever saw the dieting and binge eating, the periods of over-exercising or the repeatedly, significant amounts of weight lost and gained as signs of a problem. But if I’m assumed to be unhealthy unless extremely thin, would I ever have had just the right look to be seen as needing support for disordered eating/an eating disorder too? Would my behaviour around food and my weight losses and gains have been seen as a sign of needing support if I was white? I never thought of these questions growing up because all I ever saw of anyone that struggled with eating never looked like me. I came to believe that it wasn’t possible for me to be dealing with the same things. I must be the reason I couldn’t eat better, exercise enough or be thin enough. I must be the problem
White supremacy has us using either-or thinking as a way to hide multiple co-existing truths from us. It keeps us from recognising other problems that aren’t addressed in the world beyond what we’ve been taught to see. When we can’t see our stories reflected in the world around us, we come to think that we must be the problem and society could never be. Then nothing changes in the world and we’re left blaming ourselves for not fitting what’s expected. All while being left without seeing the ways society needs to change so we can be supported in ways that allow us all to thrive.