It was the beginning of the fall 2020 semester. I was logged into the sort of meetings I suspect most university faculty were attending at that point in history. One centered on the precarity and dispensability of our own jobs. The next discussed ways we could support students struggling with their mental health.
A presenter from the counseling center walked us through information about various services: "we can help students who are struggling with anxiety or depression. We can teach them time management skills. We can help them make a plan to lose the weight they've gained in lockdown." She laughed. "You know, their COVID-19."
I leaned forward and turned my computer's video camera off. I could not hide my look of disapproval. Rather than shaming students for gaining a few pounds during a global health crisis, you could look out for all the students who are developing eating disorders to cope, I muttered under my breath.
I started going to therapy for my own struggle with disordered eating shortly before the pandemic began. That year, I'd given birth to my second child. I wasn't coping well. Postpartum had been filled with family health crises. My firstborn was jealous of my newborn. I struggled to balance work and life, sending sleep-deprived emails as I breastfed my son, accidentally dropping the phone on his head more times than I care to admit.
But I was getting my body back! That was the one thing in my life that seemed to be going smoothly: weight loss. People complimented me on this. That felt good. Sometimes it was the only thing that felt good.
So I turned my energy toward what was working, more movement and nutrient dense food. Nothing wrong with that. I'd always exercised most days a week-but soon it became every day. Then twice a day. Sometimes more.
I ate more vegetables. I began substituting zucchini for pasta, cauliflower for rice. My baby cried at night. I decided it must be the yogurt I ate for breakfast, the cream I added to my coffee. So I cut dairy out, too.
I began to feel worse and worse. In the mornings when I woke, everything ached. I felt incredibly depressed. I found myself screaming at my family when anything interfered with my ability to work out. I came home and threw objects at the wall whenever I was put in situations where I was forced to eat food I hadn't planned on consuming. My behavior might have been concerning, but because of my appearance, I was getting more praise than ever.
I recognized what was happening: I'd struggled with disordered eating in adolescence. I believed it was a problem I'd outgrown. As it turns out, though, life transitions can make a person more susceptible to disordered eating. Like having a baby. Or going to college. Or surviving a pandemic.
Eventually, I reached out for help. I wasn't functioning. I certainly wasn't the type of parent I hoped to be. Admitting my problems to my therapist was embarrassing. Depression, anxiety - those were words I felt comfortable using. But talking about an eating disorder felt impolite-immature, gauche.
In our appearance-focused world, many of us, no matter how smart or seemingly mature, may try to blame our own bodies when things get rough. When the pandemic hit, I scrolled through social media to satisfy my desire for human connection. I gazed at images of how others were coping in this newly contracted world. Netflix binges. Homemade sourdough bread. At-home workouts to combat the effects of lockdown and comfort food. It was eerie how fixated so many became on fighting flesh as we were threatened with a virus that could reduce us to nothing.
Early on, I found myself considering: how many people will learn to cope with this impossible world by developing an eating disorder?
It turns out, quite a few. Adolescent visits to emergency rooms for eating disorders doubled during the pandemic. Many reasons for this increase have been cited, including a lack of daily structure, food insecurity, and fearmongering over lockdown weight gain. Instagram's parent company is currently being sued for knowingly "worsening body-image and other mental-health issues."
Incoming first-year college students experienced most of high school disembodied, even after the initial lockdowns, variants pushed schools back on Zoom, or else left classrooms with scattershot attendance. For many days they stared and compared images in little boxes on screens. Their social lives were filtered and photoshopped. Isolated in their homes, they listened to the world bemoan weight gain-and even doctors encourage weight loss as a way to protect against severe COVID outcomes-as they went through their own developmentally appropriate pubescent growth spurts.
This is why it's so important to drop the harmful rhetoric associated with the "freshman 15" when speaking to university students about their first-year experience: they're already struggling enough.
After all, the freshman 15 isn't even real-it's a myth. On average, freshman gain about three pounds. This number is consistent even for individuals in the same age bracket who did not attend college.
Some may argue that making students aware of their susceptibility to weight gain will result in them choosing healthier behaviors.
Or it could result in what I've observed as a teacher and former college student: students skipping lunch and dinner to "save up" calories for alcohol. Guys missing class in order to spend more hours in the gym. Girls in the cafeteria scared to eat anything other than salad with a side of salsa (because plain lettuce is tasteless, but full-fat dressing is too much indulgence).
Teenagers maturing during this global health crisis were for great stretches of time not allowed to go out - it makes sense that they would turn their focus inward, to the shape of their own bodies. They were given many rules about how they could move and who they could touch - it is logical that they would attempt to establish autonomy by making their own rules, rules where they could be good and still rebel, rules connected to what they put into their own mouths.
In Sam Anderson's recent essay for the New York Times Magazine, he writes that "diet culture is a fear of death disguised as transformation." With over a million lives in the US lost to COVID-19, this year's incoming class of freshman is more than acquainted than ever with the fragility of life and health. What I hope for this year's incoming class is that they can enjoy expansiveness and envision an abundant future open with possibility-one in which they understand that gaining a little weight will not make it all fall apart.