East of Eating: The Intersection of Steinbeck and Anorexia

 A personal essay by Sophie Plantamura

One girl's war with food, one novel's unexpected significance. 

One of the many products of
my morning smoothie cravings. 

8 am. I wake up with the fortuitous desire to really try and eat more today, paired with the craving for a smoothie. Ready to take advantage of both of these daybreak intentions, I set out to the kitchen, my cold feet cushioned by slippers, my bony shoulders wrapped in my blanket. My blanket drags on the floor as I sleepily turn on the blender. 

First step: almond milk. “Easy,” says the voice in my head, “almond milk only has 30 calories a cup—go crazy!” The same rationale persists as I shove handful after handful of spinach into the blender. But then come the seeds: hemp, chia, flax, all of which my dietitian told me to increase in my breakfast, all of which trigger a tsunami of anxiety in my sick brain. 

My logic and surviving morning motivation guide my hand to withdraw a tablespoon instead of my usual teaspoon from the drawer: the first challenge vanquished! I hastily scoop a full tablespoon of hemp seeds into the blender before I lose my nerve. The rational, healing part of my brain praises me—“Hemp seeds are a nutritional powerhouse, full of protein! omega 3’s! fatty acids!”—while the sick part of my brain interrupts: “60 whole calories wasted on a spoonful of seeds that you can’t even taste.” That disordered delusion makes camp in my mind as I measure chia seeds: I scoop a tablespoon, dump some back in the jar, feel guilty, add more, no that’s too much, dump again, and finally fling a 65% full tablespoon of chia seeds into my blender. 

Then comes the fourth step, which seems on par with a Herculean labor: peanut butter. “Okay,” says my rational mind, “Peanut butter is delicious. It adds calories, which is the goal. Plus healthy fats. Oh yeah, and it’s delicious,” to which my malicious mind retorts, “That spoonful was at least 200 calories worth of peanut butter. Disgusting.” 

Did I think it would get easier when it came to adding a banana? Because it most definitely did not. A whole banana being, naturally, out of the question, I toy with two-thirds and three-quarters and three-quarters and two-thirds, scale it back to just a half, scale it up to five-sixths, and finally end up somewhere in between. 

A Christmas morning run with
my dad, before I was told I
had to stop running.

Exhausted and frustrated, with my once resolute morning intentions packed up in a neat and tidy box labeled “Eating Disorder” in the back of my maligned mind, I blend the smoothie and spend the rest of the morning anxious about how many calories I just consumed. 

The constant company of an eating disorder seems all-encompassing, never-ending, world-consuming
when meal after meal resembles my breakfast battle with the blender. Anorexia is a thief: It not only took away my ability to make a smoothie, but also plundered my capacity to hike with friends, to stand up without getting dizzy. Eliminated my normal monthly period. Stole the strength to exercise the way I wanted, robbed the freedom to exercise when I wanted. Left with freezing hands, fragile hair, and an ever-racing heart, I felt as though I could never recover. 

Steinbeck's Significance 

My well-worn copy of East of Eden. 

11 am. It’s four years earlier, in third period AP Language and Composition, and we’re discussing the final chapters of East of Eden. My hand cramps as I furiously scribble notes as quickly as the waning ink in my ballpoint pen will allow. At lunch, my friends question my bizarre enthusiasm for this seventy-year-old novel that most of them didn’t read, anyway. But how could they not see the genius? Good and bad, right and wrong, agency and redemption—the themes in East of Eden seemed applicable to the entire human experience, from Cain and Abel to Californian settlers to a seventeen-year-old girl at Dana Hills High School. Little did I know, though, that in just a few years, I would be applying these same themes to my own experiences with an eating disorder. 

I feel fairly confident that John Steinbeck was not thinking about eating disorders as he was writing East of Eden in rugged, mid-twentieth-century California. Yet, the connections between the two were undeniable: as my mom pleadingly appealed to my logic, asserting that I was too smart to keep letting myself lose weight, I was reminded of the words of the Hamilton children as they discussed their father’s fate: “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.” 

As my good-intentioned friends questioned why recovery was so difficult—I just had to eat!—I was drawn to a previously overlooked snippet of Steinbeck’s wisdom: “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.” 

And as my own psyche obsessed over control and perfectionism, Lee’s wise counsel to Abra became my own personal mantra: “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” As I reread East of Eden, I devoured these little nuggets of relatable truths, applying them to my own experiences in ways that my eleventh-grade self never would have expected. 

"Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids." 

I consider myself to be a very logical person. I worship pros and cons lists; I despise emotional appeals. I want to be a lawyer, for heaven’s sake—what’s more logical than that? Yet, logic could not infiltrate my disordered mind as I obsessively measured and remeasured chia seeds. There was absolutely no rationality present as I had a mini mental breakdown about peanut butter, of all things. My inherent cleverness would have, should have forbidden me from repeatedly making these irrational decisions that would eventually turn life-threatening. But my eating disorder let myself be—as Steinbeck would put it—stupid. 

"It's hard to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it." 

I hated my eating disorder. I hated constantly thinking about food. I hated the rising nausea and panic I would feel if I thought I ate too much. I hated my morning smoothie battles, the anxiety that surrounded eating out with friends, my too-skinny body. Yet, at this point, counting calories and skipping snacks and doubting dietitians had become all too routine, impossible to just choose to stop doing. I did not want to remain in this life-threatening cycle, or to keep losing weight, or to inflict irreparable damage upon what I know is a sacred body. But here I was, stuck in a hated and hateful routine. 

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."  

Every single doctor I spoke to about my eating disorder emphasized that I would not be fully recovered until I addressed the underlying psychological patterns that caused it in the first place. I met each of these admonitions with a laugh; my mental health was fine! Just because I became the teeniest-tiniest bit obsessed with food and weight and exercise did not mean I had mental health problems, and I would rather do anything than go to a therapist. 

Eventually, though, the doctors broke through my mental barriers, and I was able to recognize my not-so-healthy perfectionism. My obsession with being perfect not only extended to my relationship with food and body image, but also to school, relationships, exercise, work, grades, sleep. Just good was never good enough for me: if I did not have the absolute highest grade in a class, my success didn’t count. If I skipped a day of running, all of my progress would disappear, and I’d automatically be back to ten-minute miles. But wasn’t this a good thing? Wasn’t my perfectionism what led me to excel academically, to improve physically, to succeed professionally? 

The answer was no. 

As Lee reveals to Abra in East of Eden, sometimes the quest for perfection is exactly what keeps you from being good. Like Abra, I was caught up in a vicious cycle of comparison and unworthiness and so-called self improvement, all in pursuit of the impossible condition of perfection.  In my endeavor to make myself perfect, I exterminated nearly all the inherent good in my body. 

Yet, as I embraced the experiences of Steinbeck’s characters, my mind and body slowly began to heal. Abra was happy when she let go of her ideal of being perfect—couldn’t I do the same? Bit by bit, I hesitantly lowered my expectations of perfection for my workout schedule, meal times, even homework, feeling like a snake shedding stifling skins, revealing a flawed and imperfect and good interior. 

The Future is Bright

This story does not end with a happy resolution, not yet anyway. I cannot say that I have a healthy relationship with food, I weigh less than I want to, and my mind still reels as though I’m doing rocket science as I cook a meal. 

Ordered a burrito instead of a salad,
counted it as a victory.

But yesterday, I got my first period in 10 months. 40 weeks, 300 days, 7,200 hours spent either ignoring or worrying about my health problems, my current decisions’ impact on my future body, all culminating in this unexpectedly wonderful and healthy and good natural occurrence that will never be taken for granted again. Yesterday, I called a therapist—my appointment is next week. Because healing comes from the inside out, and I am finally committed to getting better.

Today, I will not listen to the voice in my head. I will eat when I am hungry, and I will eat when I am not, because food is more than fuel: it is friendship and fitness, pleasure and wellness, community and celebration. I will ignore the glaring electronic eyes of the scale and the elusive electronic pressures of social media, and I will focus on the good over the perfect.

Tomorrow, next week, next month, even next year, I will become weight restored. I will genuinely love my body: not my skinny wrists or shrinking stomach, but my legs that allow me to walk and jump and climb, my arms that allow me to wave and hug and write. I will be able to run—faster, longer, stronger—and I will be able to not run—just because I’m not in the mood. I will not have a second thought as I unceremoniously dump ingredients into the blender when I wake up craving a smoothie. My daily breakfast battles may have been lost quite a few times, but I will emerge victorious from my war with food. 

Image credits: 

"Green Smoothie" by Sophie Plantamura; personal photo

"Sunrise Run" by Sophie Plantamura; personal photo 

"East of Eden" by Sophie Plantamura; personal photo

"Burrito Happiness" by Sophie Plantamura; personal photo