"I did fall in love with the act of assembling [food] into something I could share with another person during the most difficult and isolating time."
how cooking for her partner helped Anna Myers heal her relationship with food
hey, friends!
I am so thrilled to publish the below guest essay by writer and creative consultant Anna Myers. Anna tells the story of how moving in with her partner at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and learning to cook for him helped heal her relationship with food. Her piece gave me so much hope for my own future in recovery and comfort knowing you can always learn something new (even if it feels scary!) If you love Anna’s writing, definitely check out her newsletter ‘Where The Light Is.” Her full bio is also at the bottom of this newsletter!
"I did fall in love with the act of assembling [food] into something I could share with another person during the most difficult and isolating time."
guest essay by Anna Myers
In the spring of 2020, I wrote a piece for Teen Vogue on how the pandemic had brought elements of my ED back to the surface and made recovery harder. “Eating disorders are an exercise of control,” I wrote, and “the coronavirus crisis has taught us that the sense of control we thought we had was an illusion."
I didn’t know it then, but in time, I would come to realize that these last few years of my life saw two impossible truths coexist: I did struggle, more than I had in a long time, not to relapse. But I also, unexpectedly, managed to progress in my healing in ways I had not thought possible back in 2019. I think we’re all aware of how the former might have played out for folks with some form of disordered eating, so instead, I’d love to talk about the latter.
I’ve had a dysfunctional relationship with food since I was fourteen, exactly half my life. As a result, I never learned how to cook because, well, I’d always thought food was evil, so what was the point? Starving yourself all day and then eating four jam doughnuts in a row is a perfectly reasonable habit, the voice at the back of my head would tell me, there’s no need to learn how to make meals you’d actually enjoy. And that is not an exaggeration: when I first moved to London, aged 19, I didn’t know how to boil an egg or avoid burning milk in a saucepan. The only pasta sauce I knew how to make was one I could buy in a jar and transfer as-is to a plate -which, as an Italian, is particularly shameful.
But all of it was shameful. My fear of food, my need for control, the moodboards of impossibly thin actresses from the 90s and 00s. The secrecy in which I dealt with my ED for too many years to count. In comparison, the fact that the only meals I knew how to have were pre-packaged and to be consumed in the dark of my room, with no one to witness my spiraling, was… almost nothing.
Only in that infamous spring of 2020 did I realize that -family notwithstanding- I hadn’t shared more than a handful of consecutive meals with other humans since I was a teenager. Which is to say: I often went out for dinner with friends, but never spent enough prolonged time with any of them for someone to realize my secret. Sure, we’d gone on a few vacations, but by that time I’d found ways to “manage” my ED and was only suffering from sporadic episodes, not sustained spells. It wasn’t perfect, but I could manage a holiday or two without spiraling.
And as for romantic relationships, the only real one I had in my early twenties was with someone who proved equally partial to calorie counting and meal skipping as I was. So rarely did we eat together, I think he never even got the chance to figure out there was something wrong with me before we broke up.
It all came together in my mind as a jumbled patchwork of flawed and shackling beliefs, each factor reinforcing the validity of the others in order to convince me I would never get out. I could continue hiding my occasional cravings and failings as long as I wished, the voice would tell me, because, well –up to that point, nothing had ever made it impossible to.
That’s where the pandemic comes in.
Because when it came down to it, the reason behind my great epiphany turned out to be as plain as it was unimaginative. My lease ending simply coincided with the UK announcing a national lockdown (down to the exact week, baby!), and I had virtually nowhere else to go, so my saint of a partner suggested I move in with him until things calmed down.
I was relieved, of course, but also terrified. Namely: that the pandemic would only get worse, and a lockdown couldn’t save us from the weight of it; that our relationship wouldn’t make it through living together 24/7 with only one hour a day of government-allowed time outside; and most of all, that we’d have to eat every meal together. Not just for a while, but possibly for months on end.
This time, I knew there was no getting out of it. I had no way to avoid it, really, which meant I was finally free to confront my fear around it.
I’d done enough work to be able to identify what I was struggling with most of all: my false belief that I could come to see food as neutral, but never enjoyable; the narrative I’d subscribed to for so long, that food was mostly to be had in secret, in a state of detachment at best, and at worst, shame. Not, ever, pleasure. Nor love.
So when I moved in with my partner, I vowed to remember all the progress I’d made and to try and chip away at that narrative with every meal. I actively worked to accept the love he was giving me, and remain present when he offered to cook for me, or teach me how to cook a few favorite meals. When we ate breakfast in bed. When we bought ice-cream at the corner store and ate it directly from the box sitting in a sunny park.
Sure, there was the occasional hiccup. Sometimes, the state of the world would be too much to take, and I would skip lunch or eat one bagel after the other over the sink while he was asleep. But for the most part, I was so grateful for our makeshift Masterchef lessons, and would spend hours looking up different recipes to attempt or filling out meal planning spreadsheets to my heart’s desire.
Eventually, it gave me enough confidence to try out on my own. Rationalizing it in my head with twisted logic, I’d tell myself that while I didn’t love food, I did enjoy cooking for someone I loved.
And you know what? It worked.
It might have started out as fake ‘til you make it, but I did come to wholeheartedly take pleasure in making a mess of the kitchen and learn what pan or pot is used for what. I watched tutorial video after tutorial video. I burned a loaf of banana bread, failed to flip a frittata, and made an inedible soup. I made a really good stew, lots and lots of pasta, and a heart-shaped pizza. I helped make a lasagna, a gratin, and a true Bolognese ragù. And I loved it, I loved it, I loved it.
If I didn’t know where to start when it came to learning to celebrate food as nourishment, and life energy, I did fall in love with the act of assembling it into something I could share with another person during the most difficult and isolating time. And that made all the difference.
My partner and I have now lived together since March 2020. I haven’t completely erased the flawed narrative I’ve lived with, in one way or another, for the last fourteen years. But I have rewritten parts of it, and in time, I’ll continue to work on the rest. One step at a time, with love.
Anna Myers is a Milan-born, London-raised writer and creative consultant whose expertise sits at the intersection of lifestyle, communication, music and entertainment. She's written for publications like Elle, The Telegraph, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Glamour, Grazia, SELF, Apartment Therapy and many more. She publishes a weekly newsletter, 'Where The Light Is,' about the joys and struggles of building a life, with encouraging essays and culture recommendations: subscribe here! You can check out her work at www.annamyers.co.uk and send her dog pictures on Instagram @annamyers139.