(Don’t) Let Them Eat Cake

If you’ve engaged with diet and food content on the internet, chances are you’ve heard of the Whole30 program. It’s a thirty-day elimination diet established in 2009 by Melissa Urban, as well as the brand behind Urban’s 2016 bestseller, Food Freedom Forever: Letting Go of Bad Habits, Guilt, and Anxiety Around Food. At the heart of the Whole30 program and noted on its sleek website is the concept of food freedom—a term that encompasses everything from building an all-inclusive relationship with food to removing rules that govern grazing habits and mealtimes. The universal principles appear promising: Kick the guilt, anxiety, and self-criticism surrounding food. Remove moral descriptors like “bad” and “unhealthy” from a given plate. Regain the prepubescent ease of fisting carbs into your mouth and not thinking twice. Food freedom, Urban claims, is “the final stop on [the] Whole30 Journey”: the capacity to live one’s life “free from food-related stress, guilt, or anxiety” (Whole30, “Food Freedom” n.d.). In essence, it means defeating obsessive thoughts around what one consumes. Yet in order to get there, the program instructs followers to complete weeks of food elimination, ditching added sugar, alcohol, grains, ultra-processed foods, dairy, and even legumes (Whole 30, “The Original Whole30 Program Rules” n.d.). As someone who endured multiple rounds of elimination diets as a kid to figure out what I was allergic to (spoiler: a lot), I can tell you that all these diets did was make me think about food even more.As a multiple-food-allergy sufferer living in Southern California—diet culture’s epicenter—the food freedom promised by Whole30 both tempts and concerns me. This is the land of vegan food banks, juice cleanses, and celebrities who, in the early 2010s, popularized my necessary gluten-free diet for appearance-centric benefits like clear skin, weight loss, and reduced bloating. Amidst a landscape of voluntary restrictions that often border on disordered eating, I can’t stop thinking about food. And while I’m tempted by Urban’s offer to create less noise in my head about what I do or do not eat, my anxiety-riddled fork won’t gain confidence by any number of affirmations or eliminations. Food will always be my preoccupation—whether that constitutes rational anxiety or a disorder has yet to be determined, but my experience makes one thing clear: Urban’s food freedom is impossible to achieve when food allergies limit what you can freely consume.I have cried in restaurants. I once cried because I ate mac & cheese. On a summer trip to Montreal, I locked myself in the bathroom over a beet salad and risotto, which was made particularly embarrassing by the concern of the Quebecois staff and the fact that my French just doesn’t go that far. I can ruin a night out with a single corn chip fried in gluten-contaminated oil, praying that my stomach’s revolt waits for the privacy of my apartment’s bathroom. My fear around food exists in a Schrödinger’s space, where dishes made by someone else could be either harmlessly delicious or intent on hurting me. The “simple question” the Whole30 program claims to answer is one I’m panicked over constantly: Is the food worth it? Is enjoying a meal, chewing and swallowing and not thinking about it, even possible?Food allergy anxiety—which sounds like a PTA mom’s excuse to bake cookies out of grass—is an actual, documented phenomenon. Though not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), it is categorized by the nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) as a level of precaution to avoid food allergens that is excessively stringent, based in fear rather than documented reaction severity, or otherwise interferes with the enjoyment of food experiences in one’s life (Freeman 2021). It’s a twisted, fiendish offshoot of anxiety that can’t be dismissed as irrationality. Real experiences warrant real fears, and it doesn’t help that the symptoms of a generalized anxiety attack largely overlap with anaphylaxis (Rosenberg 2020).This is no new experience for me. For the first half of my childhood, it seemed I acquired a new allergy to mark each year of my life. First were walnuts, ground maliciously with zucchini into a chocolate chip cookie. Then an M&M that bumped elbows with a pecan. I quickly checked off peanuts and other tree nuts, and for three years, drank almond, rice, then soy milk during elimination diets as each subsequent allergy test negated my previous options. I was eventually diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that means my intestines can’t digest gluten—wiping out about 95 percent of the best food group, along with most of the fun to be had at birthday parties.Food is a joy and a struggle in my life. When one of your earliest memories is the emergency room, it’s impossible not to be wary of that happening again. I check the ingredients on everything I buy, and it takes me triple the expected time to get through Trader Joe’s. I’m sure that on many occasions, some pitying woman has recognized herself in my scrupulous study of a tamari bottle—and while she’d be amiss to offer me her harrowing story of why such obsession is just not worth it, suspicion about my attention to nutrition and calories wouldn’t be entirely wrong. When you spend half your brain power debating whether any sort of dietary consumption is worth the stomach trouble, it’s easy to drift into unhealthy territory.Whole30 is grounded in restriction. According to the program, dietary curtailment is a temporary and justified requirement for food freedom—a path towards health rather than a barrier. Nevertheless, a question hidden at the bottom of the website’s FAQ page should raise some concerns: Can the restriction in Whole30’s elimination phase lead to disordered eating habits? Yes, the program admits, it can. Take this statement from the website:The Whole30’s elimination phase is a form of restriction (of food groups, rather than calories), and can lead to intense cravings, binging, and the reactivation of dormant disordered eating habits. (It can even promote such behaviors in those without a history of disordered eating. Current research suggests that some people are simply more susceptible for the development of eating disorders during certain dietary protocols.) (Whole30, “Frequently Asked Questions” n.d.)I am, research suggests, one of those people.Eating disorders and food allergies are not mutually exclusive. In an explainer piece for Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams puts it plainly: “Monitoring what you eat, being mindful that your food could actually hurt you, is stressful” (Williams 2023). According to Williams’ review, my celiac disease and food allergies put me at higher risk for disordered eating—a correlation complicated by the fact that my necessary food behaviors, perfectly justified in my mind, may appear disordered to others. Doctors, raising eyebrows at my weight, have questioned whether I’ve been restricting my food. The answer is always sticky. Yes, I want to say, because you and a handful of other medical professionals told me to. Hesitancy to eat altogether is frequently warranted: As a kid, I started protesting dinners cooked by a family friend who admitted that she didn’t believe in allergies. Skipping meals out of fear for what they will do to one’s body produces rightful concern in others, but the subject is misplaced. When cashiers question my vegetable-and-protein-only cart at the grocery store with a pitying look (I am buying two bags of gluten-free junk food at my next stop), I know they’re wrong. I am constantly conscious of what I put in my body, only because I have to be.Still, a condition that recently came to my knowledge has me questioning my personal boundary between diet, disease, and disorder. According to Forbes, a UK-based charity found a recent and significant jump in diagnosable cases of ARFID, a lesser-known cousin of the eating disorder trinity. The “extremely worrying” condition is “characterized by the avoidance of food” (Hignett 2024), separate from concerns about one’s body image or weight. An individual with the disorder may, for instance, exclusively eat beige food—typical behavior for a specific genre of toddler. But as I read through the symptoms, it was difficult not to connect them back to my own experience. Doesn’t eat particular types of food? Well, certainly. Fails to realize they need to eat more? I’m in a constant battle between too much rice and bread substitutes with titanic levels of fiber, so I’d say that tracks. Avoids eating because of previous traumatic events related to food like vomiting? (Hignett 2024). Does vomiting a single bite of mac and cheese for three hours count? How could I forget!I know I don’t have an eating disorder. But the more I scroll through symptoms, it seems an objective review of my food behaviors could get me diagnosed with any number of them. Compulsive checking of ingredients and nutrition labels is symptomatic of orthorexia, a hyperfixation on the health contents of the food one consumes. So is, per the National Eating Disorders Association’s description, an “unusual interest in the health of what others are eating” (Dennis n.d.)—forgive me if I want you to describe the fusion experience that is a cruffin. My “unusual eating behaviors” could be chalked up to anorexia (Johns Hopkins Medicine n.d.), and yes, freaking out in a crowded cafe because you ate the wrong thing and have to throw it up isn’t a great look if you want to justify your relationship with food. Food allergies, anxiety, and eating disorders are increasing in prevalence together, and it’s no wonder the promised liberation of food freedom is so enticing. The latter two conditions can often be whittled down to a desire for control—but what do you do when that irrational desire, the avoidance and categorization of foods, is necessary for your survival?These are questions that Urban and Whole30 admit they are unable to answer. Neither, I think, can many medical professionals answer them. The bombardment of dieting information and health schemes that lead to disordered eating frequently incorporate allergy-driven behaviors into solutions for the shame we feel about our bodies. Food freedom becomes doubly complicated. Reflecting on my adamantly not-an-eating-disorder, I’ve started to see this fusion in my younger self. Due to my food restrictions, adults and peers involved me in diet culture long before I showed any interest. Because I couldn’t get a deep-fried-whatever at the bowling alley, the moms of my eighth-grade friends marveled at my healthy choices. Then their daughters started doing it. Health became a cornerstone of my value system: I imposed more restrictions on myself to keep up the image, taking roasted broccoli and sunflower seeds to school, then scarfing down perfectly safe gluten-free pizza at home, sick to my full stomach after withholding calories. Safety and performative healthiness blurred. And then, after I finally started to transform my annoying restrictions into a fashionable if dangerous superiority complex, magazines started releasing articles all about why gluten-free isn’t guilt-free—alerting readers that replacement products contain an obscene increase in sugar, fat, and everything diabolical compared to their counterparts. If this was true, I was at an impasse. Even if I wanted to be the healthiest twelve-year-old with an eating disorder in all of California, I couldn’t, because I still had to eat.All things considered, I think it would be very difficult for me to develop a full-fledged, restrictive eating disorder. I’m simply not very good at it. Over the hump of why-does-my-body-look-this-way that apparently we all go through and having defeated the urge to convince my peers that I only ate lettuce, my prohibition from so many fun foods makes it ridiculous to second-guess eating a safe cupcake when I find one. That said, I can pinpoint a moment as a teenager where I was on the precipice of no longer being able to use the allergen excuse to govern what I was eating. Perhaps this was inevitable—my medical condition was marketed as a health fad. With the line so thin between fear of food and fear of eating, I think I narrowly avoided risking trauma at the hands of medical professionals who may have tried to help me.While food freedom’s benefit may be its loose definition, the opposite—say food imprisonment or paralysis—condones an urgent search for a definition so that it can be reversed. What happens, then, to people forced into in-patient treatment, prematurely diagnosed, and told that their very real, very serious food allergies are fabricated by their eating disorders?A Reddit post from four years ago under the community heading “mildlyinfuriating” features a photo of a hospital meal tray laden with sliced oranges and a carton of orange juice, alongside the corresponding meal receipt (slytherinqueen186 2021). The patient and poster, as shown at the bottom of the slip, is allergic to citrus. Reddit may not be the most reliable source for medical information, but the post’s many comments by users echoing their experiences of having allergens ignored—at a time when their autonomy was handed over to health professionals—isn’t exactly reassuring. While in the hospital for appendicitis, my own equally celiac father was served Special K cereal, as if the staff were testing methods to double the pain and price of the experience by exploding his stomach a second time. As isolated instances where patients had the wherewithal and rights to not eat the food presented, the infuriation here may in fact be mild. Yet the fact that food allergies might be treated so laxly during short-term medical stays is concerning on a larger level. How broadly are food allergies being disregarded in medical settings where patients have less autonomy, or where false diagnoses may result from this ignorance? Food allergies and food allergy anxiety may not always come with a provable diagnosis—but in many cases, anorexia, paranoia, or another it’s-all-in-your-head disorder do.The fact that I’m even aware of having celiac disease as the cause for my bodily woes can be accredited to my mother, who saw our small-town medical professionals stumped and took matters into her own hands. When doctors threw out other causes for my symptoms—which included worrying mental signs as well as abdominal pain and other typically physical traits of allergies—my mother went to the library. She researched, argued with doctors, and ultimately received a sheepish apology from my pediatrician when my test results came back, breaking serology charts with the highest numbers they had ever seen.My family knows firsthand that the medical establishment is not always accurate when evaluating patients. I had a team of angry, exhausted parents advocating for me, but that’s a privilege very few are afforded. To make matters worse, the disorder diagnosis that was initially floated for my symptoms—PANS, a lovely little acronym for pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome—is known to be triggered by celiac disease and other untreated food sensitivities (Chadwick 2020). 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