Written by a Hungry Woman

On desire, deprivation, and why the world wants women hungry.

I remember the exact moment I began to hate my body. I was 10 or 11, visiting my dad after my parents’ recent divorce, slogging on a damp swimsuit in my empty childhood bedroom, dust bunnies where toys once lived. It was like I’d rubbed my eyes a little too long, and when the spots cleared, I was different. My own version of the creation story: a girl banished from the Eden of body indifference.

While my sister played in the hot tub, I was in the bathroom, staring at my pudgy child body in a too-tight two-piece, trying to understand what had changed. Something shifted in me that day— a small, quiet awakening to a world where the wild animal that was my body had suddenly been domesticated. A broke horse. A thing to be appraised.

I think about this moment often— how I wish I could go back in time and tell little Elise that it isn’t her body that’s wrong, but the world’s lens through which she was subconsciously taught to view it.

In seventh grade, my baby fat hadn’t yet pocketed itself into more desirable areas, and a boy I liked suggested I starve myself to get skinny. Not eating is relatively easy when you’re depressed, so I did it well. I lost enough weight to garner the attention of boys after being mostly invisible, while somehow narrowly avoiding concern from parents or teachers. For the first time ever, I felt relevant. Loved. Admired.

I thought I’d cracked the code. Really, I cracked something within myself that would take years to repair. A part of me knew even then that I was betraying something sacred by starving myself, by placing so much weight into my appearance, but when it seems like a choice between acceptance and rejection, I didn’t know how to choose anything else.

And so, like many women do, I chose hunger.

In college, I became obsessed with exercise. I diligently counted my calories—1,200 a day, the caloric needs of a toddler—inputting measured meals into MyFitnessPal, deleting the entry when I purged it up instead. Of course, I know now that when you tell yourself you can’t have something, the brain naturally amplifies the desire for it.

Food became my forbidden fruit, blurring the line between hunger and rebellion. Every day was a battle not to binge a pint of ice cream or a jar of peanut butter. I was constantly torn between shame and longing, deprivation and desperation.

For so many years, I lived my life hungry. I was conditioned to accept hunger as part of being a woman—hunger for food, for acceptance, for validation, all carefully portioned, rationed, and contained. This hunger, both physical and emotional, binds us like animals for slaughter. We learn to deny ourselves for fear of taking up too much space or demanding too much. The goal is a small body, the reality is a small life.

For women, hunger is double-edged, wedged between our ribs. We’re expected to be sated just enough to function, but empty enough to never take up too much space, never ask for too much. The world seems most comfortable when it knows we’re just a little uncomfortable, that a part of us is always struggling to breathe beneath the corset.

The irony is, the more I shrank myself, the more space it demanded in my life. Every inch I lost felt like a small victory, but each “win” only tightened the grip food and body image had on my mind. Obsessing over my appearance took up every spare thought, sitting at the forefront of everything. Social events became calculated risks, meals meticulously planned or avoided. Exercise routines dictated my schedule, and eating became a maze of rules and restrictions that swallowed up any sense of spontaneity.

In trying to control my body, I lost control of nearly everything else. Each part of my life was either built around or sacrificed to keep the cycle going. What I’d intended as a path toward perfection became a prison of my own making, leaving less and less room for joy, for connection, for life outside my desire to be skinny.

Looking back, it’s clear my own hunger was never just about food. Society taught me early on that wanting less of myself—less food, less space, less desire—was somehow virtuous. And yet, as I learned, this emptiness only multiplies, creating a hollow space that takes up our thoughts, our energy, our lives. We’re left feeling ravenous for life because the ideals we chase are designed to be unreachable, ensuring we never feel fulfilled, always striving, always believing that who we are isn’t quite enough.

Even today, having done years of deep work in this area of my life, that desire to be skinny over everything else still tries to tell me to skip a meal when I have dessert, not to have sugar in my Americano, to only wear clothes that prove my thinness.

When it comes down to it, all I wanted was to feel like I belonged. Imagine how different things would have looked if I knew from the start that I was enough in my chubby pre-teen body. If I could go back and tell that little girl in the swimsuit anything, I’d tell her that she didn’t need to change a thing. But maybe that’s something I’m still learning to believe myself.

If you could, what would you tell your 10 year old self? I’d love to read your response— I’ll put my own in the comments.

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