Excerpt: The Texture Problem
A few weeks ago, my mother asked me if I’d ever considered writing a book about my struggles with food and eating, and all the ways that it has impacted my life. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be comfortable with letting people in on such a personal and stressful part of my life, and I’m still not.
However, I think there’s a sort of therapeutic merit in getting it down, and if someone else out there sees it and relates, maybe I can help someone like me feel less alone in their own struggle.
So, I drafted up an excerpt to share with you all today. I’d be very interested to hear your feedback. I’ll probably be continuing to write this for my own purposes, but I’d like to know if it’s something you all want to see more of or not.
I’m still figuring out how I want to handle this. There’s a lot of material to cover. For now, I’ve decided to draft up three pieces of it — a prelude, an introductory sort of chapter, and an excerpt/story. The final product, if there ever is one, may look very different to this, but it felt worth it to get written out anyway.
Let’s get into it.
Prelude: The Disclaimer Portion
This is not going to be an easy book for me to write.
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s going to be an easy book for most of my family to read either.
Let’s get introductions out of the way, first of all. My name is Madeline Dunsmore. I’m a self-published author from California. At the time of writing this, at 23 years old, I am roughly 5’2”, and my weight since I was ~18 has hovered in the range of 85-98 pounds, putting my BMI solidly in the underweight category. If you know me, you’ll know that stick-figure body proportions are nothing new, as I’ve been very small my whole life.
I have had issues with food and eating for a very long time, and if you’ve come here to read about my miraculous journey to overcoming that issue… you may be looking for a different book. This book has little to offer in the way of advice, and it’s not about my recovery because I honestly haven’t recovered.
This book is not meant to glorify that struggle. It is not meant to garner sympathy for my plight or try to make people feel like my struggles are any worse than anyone else’s. It is not meant to drum up a chorus of people congratulating me on working so hard or going through so much.
This book is, effectively, a dialogue. It’s a conversation that I never really had in its entirety with anyone, and I will admit to some small hope that in writing it down and sharing it with the world, my words might make it to someone who is going through the same thing, and they can see that they aren’t alone. Maybe it’ll make it to someone who knows someone like me, and they might be able to understand better.
I don’t know.
This is not a book where I get better by the end. Unlike my favored territories in fiction and fantasy, life doesn’t often tie things up in neat little bows. It’s a book about frustration and self-doubt, about health scares and the various ways that my issues with eating have affected every other aspect of my life throughout the years. It’s not pretty. But I hope it’s something someone out there might find important.
Introduction — Both Hands on the Burner
AKA: The “Alright, you’ve hooked me. So, what’s wrong with you?” Chapter
Picture this.
You are standing in front of a stove, with the burner clearly on. It’s turned up pretty high – the flames are tall, and you can feel the heat on your face, even as you’re just standing there. Several people are surrounding you – friends, family, strangers – who all are telling you to put your hand on the stove. You must put your hand on the stove several times daily if you want to be healthy. You know this.
“Anywhere on the stove?” You ask. There are other burners that are turned off right now. Those would be safe to touch, you think to yourself.
“The one right in front of you is best,” they insist. “That’s the one everyone touches.”
Your stomach sinks and you immediately balk, because no person in their right mind would put their hand on the burner. You can see the flames RIGHT THERE, and you can feel the heat. You know without a shadow of a doubt that if you put your hand on that burner, it will live up to its name.
But still everyone insists that it’s fine. There is no fire, and you just need to put your hand on the burner to see for yourself that it’s fine.
They put their own hands on the burner. It doesn’t burn them. You don’t understand why.
But no matter how many times you see them do it, it doesn’t make it any easier for you to follow in their footsteps – the burner is still on, the heat is still searing, and you know that if you put your hand on that stove, it will burn you.
Everyone else can touch the burner. Why can’t you?
A lot of the time, you simply can’t bring yourself to do it. You panic. You cry. Sometimes this is enough to make the people leave you alone. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes your hand is forced into the fire. Sometimes it burns you. Other times it doesn’t.
If it doesn’t burn you, the people are upset with you. Think how much time and energy you’ve wasted – yours and theirs – all just to find out that the fire won’t burn you. They told you the stove wouldn’t burn way back at the beginning! Did you not believe them?
If it does burn you, the people are upset with you. Why are you making such a big deal out of this? They don’t see any fire. It can’t burn that bad. You’re just being dramatic. It didn’t hurt you at all, they accuse you. You just needed to justify all that effort wasted. You just needed to be right. Everyone else can hold their hand on the stove without any problems. Something must be wrong with you.
It doesn’t happen every day. Most days you touch the stove on the safe, non-fiery parts and get away with it. The crowd isn’t always there, and sometimes even when they are, it’s easier to let you touch the safe parts. Less energy spent on everyone’s behalf, and a problem they can address later.
If all else fails, you can avoid the stove altogether. This is not healthy. You know this.
Inevitably, though, it will come up again. They will ask you to put your hand in the fire.
You will never know for certain if the fire will burn you or not. After every time that it doesn’t burn you, they ask you to do it again, and the process starts over. They don’t understand why you’re not getting more comfortable leaving your hand in the flame.
“You saw that it didn’t burn you last time,” they say sometimes, their hand flat on the burner as they stare at you. Flames lick around their palms and fingers. They don’t feel it. “Why is this such a big deal to you?”
Because I don’t want my hand to be on fire, you think to yourself.
Other times they are aware of the fire. “Sometimes you have to do this,” they say, the flesh of their fingers melting and sloughing off into the inner workings of the stove. They shake with the pain, but their conviction keeps them smiling. “It’s good for you, even if it doesn’t feel like it. You just have to push through it.”
Do I? You ask yourself.
“If you want to be healthy,” the crowd agrees in unison, as though hearing your thoughts, “sometimes you must put your hand on the burner. Don’t you want to be healthy?”
You can’t find your words to reply. Your eyes stare at the other three, flameless burners. Don’t I? You ask yourself.
What’s wrong with me?
I don’t know.
I’ve spent a lot of time online looking at various answers to that question, trying to understand what was wrong with me and how to fix it. I grew up a very analytical and particular person. I suppose I must have viewed it like a word problem and thought that if I could just find the answer, I could work backwards to fix myself.
I found a few answers.
Most people thought I was anorexic, and I don’t blame them. I was thin as a rail my whole life, after all. I worried that I might be too, but it didn’t quite fit. I had issues with my body image, sure, but not the sort that came with anorexia. I wasn’t scared of gaining weight. If anything, my lack of weight was more a contributor to my image issues — something we’ll explore more later.
Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) was one that I found in high school, and I thought it fit well enough. It covers a lot of the things that I’ll talk about in a second with texture/taste issues, and the fact that I wasn’t eating enough of the right foods to grow at a healthy rate.
An internet rabbit hole told me that ARFID co-occurred a lot with autism, ADHD, and anxiety, but could also be just a result of never growing out of severe picky eating from childhood. Thus began a cycle of self-assessment. What was wrong with me?
Online tests, in their infinite wisdom, told me many things over the years. They told me I had severe anxiety, that I was neurotic, that I had OCPD, that I had ADHD — a lot of things that I didn’t know or understand anything about, but seemed to imply that something was horribly wrong with me in more ways than one.
I was smart enough to not believe a test on the internet at its word, and yet I still found myself tied up in knots over it. Was it even a question of if something was wrong with me? Or just how much of me was wrong?
My friends had known for a while that I was weird-about-food. Some were accommodating and understood, or at least understood enough to leave me alone about it. Others less so. In high school, after discovering ARFID, I told my friends I thought I had an eating disorder. Some of them didn’t take it seriously, convinced that I was joking, or it was some kind of ploy for attention. When I told them a bit about how much difficulty I had with eating, some of them lamented, wishing they had that problem, and my body. I didn’t.
We were high schoolers, though. I don’t blame them for not taking me seriously, and it wasn’t the first time I’d come to them thinking something was wrong with me.
If you’re looking for the part where I went to a doctor and got an official diagnosis, I’m afraid I have to disappoint. I’ve never gotten one.
The way I tend to describe it to people is that I have a “texture problem”. This covers a variety of different issues that I’ve had historically, so it felt like an apt enough descriptor, and less scary for most people than hearing the words “eating disorder”. What this means is:
A) Some textures are Bad Textures. Anything that’s mushy, slimy, or squishy, ESPECIALLY if I’m not expecting it to be, is often grounds for immediate refusal. This impulse is strong enough that if something looks like it will be mushy, slimy, or squishy, I cannot force myself to eat it. If I press my fork into it and it makes a squelch noise, I cannot force myself to eat it. For whatever reason, this also applies to most sauces.
B) I have trouble eating anything that has a combination of textures and will often resort to eating each texture one at a time or specifically asking for/preparing my food with minimal textures. This covers a sort of no-pulp policy as well.
C) Some textures are Good Textures. Crunchy is a very good texture for me, assuming the food is meant to be crunchy. I have little to no issues with things like crackers, granola bars, cereal, chips, peanuts and cashews, etc. Unfortunately, this means a lot of junk foods are fine with me.
However, “texture problem” doesn’t cover everything. I also have high aversion to foods that just look gross, or don’t smell right, and must keep all my food on my plate as separate as possible so that the tastes don’t mix. I have to be meticulous about a lot of food-related things because I need to be able to regulate how much of which taste is present and in what order.
I'm well aware that the problem is largely in my head, and a lot of these reactions I'm having are irrational ones. I avoided vanilla yogurt for literal YEARS despite knowing that I had eaten and highly enjoyed vanilla froyo several times. Frozen yogurt and yogurt were just not the same thing to my brain.
When faced with new, unfamiliar foods, or foods that I have encountered before and my body has deemed to be Bad, it is incredibly difficult to force myself to eat them. Other people being around exacerbates the problem, but it’s also a phenomenon I experience when by myself.
Not “hmm, I don’t want to do this” difficult. Not “this sucks, but I guess I gotta do it” difficult. Being asked to put my hand on a burning stove difficult. Full body panic and shutdown difficult. And no, I don’t want it to be happening any more than anyone else involved.
I want it to be easy. I want to be able to eat healthy, gain weight, and put on muscle. I don’t want the social and physical limitations that this has put into my life. I want to be able to touch the burner.
More accurately, I don’t want the burner to be on fire anymore.
Excerpt: The Cereal Debacle and College Therapy
AKA the “Yes I seriously eat my cereal and milk separate” Chapter
I’ve had a major soft spot for cereals my whole life — they’re quick and easy to make, and also characteristically crunchy, which is a perfect storm of good traits for food to have.
Cereal also involves milk, which is by far my favorite beverage. I drink a ton of the stuff just by itself, can and do drink it with basically every meal, and I even used to get teased for ordering milk at restaurants.
(Which, by the way, I still do.)
There was just one problem.
You see, growing up, my favorite cereal was an off-brand version of Lucky Charms called Magic Stars, with little oat pieces and little marshmallow pieces in various shapes. I would pour myself up a massive bowl with cereal and milk, then spend around the next hour eating my cereal. Some of you are probably wondering why on EARTH it would take me an HOUR to eat a bowl of cereal, but I imagine a few of you may have caught on to what happened.
Magic Stars suffered from a Taste Issue with me — the oats were oats and tasted bland, and the marshmallows were marshmallows and tasted sweet. The taste of them together was fundamentally wrong for me, so I instead opted to meticulously eat all of the oat pieces first, then group the marshmallows by shape and eat them after.
This, however, returned us to the Texture Problem. If you take an HOUR to eat cereal, surprise surprise, the oats and marshmallows both get soggy. I was not willing to compromise on eating the oats and marshmallows separate, but mushy oats and mushy marshmallows were absolutely disgusting. I couldn’t drink the cereal milk either, which felt like a waste.
Finally, I opted for something that made more sense to my brain without losing any of the components of the meal itself — instead of having a bowl of cereal and milk, I’d have a glass of milk and fill a separate bowl or cup with cereal.
It was a little strange, admittedly, but I liked this system a lot more. Having the milk and cereal separate allowed me to drink all the milk and eat all the cereal without wasting portions of either. I no longer had cereal turning mushy on me because it took so long to eat, and I could still eat all the oats first and then the marshmallows.
Imagine my surprise when Get Out (2017) famously depicted an antagonist eating their cereal and milk separate as a strange, dehumanizing behavior. “What kind of a psychopath eats their cereal like that?” you’re meant to ask. Since then, that scene has been the first thing people bring up when I mention my cereal/milk separation, and it has shifted the outward perception of this behavior of mine from “kinda odd” to “downright unnerving”.
At this point I’ve learned to laugh along with it. I do it with every cereal now, I’m not going to stop doing it unless I magically shed my texture problem, and if people want to think it’s unnerving, there’s nothing I can really do to stop them.
I’d be lying if I haven’t noticed an uptick in people asking me that familiar question though.
“Seriously, what is wrong with you?”
Or, in the words of the therapist I went to briefly as part of my time in college, “This seems like a lot of hoops to jump through.”
It is. It’s a process I thankfully don’t have to go through with all foods, and it’s a process whose importance to me varies depending on how strong the texture/taste/etc. problem is with that food. If I really needed to, I could eat the marshmallows and oats together. It would be very uncomfortable and Wrong, but wouldn’t kill me to do that, and I wouldn’t have a hand-on-stove and/or vomit reaction to it like I would if I had to eat mushy cereal.
However, when eating food in general is such a hassle, finding ways to enjoy eating is important. Scratch that — finding ways to make sure I eat at all is important.
One of the best pieces of advice that that therapist gave me was during a session where we were talking about my daily food schedule.
I explained as best I could. Bacon was the only thing I got from the dining hall in the mornings — three strips, and sometimes a drink to go with it. The eggs and hashbrowns were bad textures. Sometimes I would get a piece of fruit like a banana, or a little cereal box, but mostly it was three pieces of bacon to go, and I would eat them on my way to class or back in my dorm.
In the evenings I got pizza, one to two slices, with a soda, for either lunch or dinner. Sometimes I had lunch and dinner, but it was usually one or the other, not both. Most of my freshman year was spend surviving off of sandwiches, pizza, lunchables, ramen, candy, and chips. It took over a year to try the dining hall’s tenders and fries, which were okay sometimes, and their custom-made burgers, which were actually good but quite a lot of burger for someone my size.
There were many options for food on campus, catering to all kinds of palates and food requirements. Vegan and vegetarian, organic foods, there was even a farmers’ market of sorts every so often. I made very little use of the healthy options.
I was able to supplement my diet from the various fast-food places they had on campus, some of which had foods I recognized and liked. However, these restaurants took real money, not my campus dollars. I had lots of campus dollars (because they were meant to be spent on food, which I wasn’t buying), and felt bad about using extra money to pay for non-campus dollar foods. I tried to be sparing about these fast-food places.
Many days, I wouldn’t go to the dining hall or any of those fast-food places, even if I was starving. I would start heading there, but veer away at the last moment. For some reason, the places filled me with such dread that going there and getting food was extremely difficult. Sometimes I would only work up the courage to go after it was too late and they’d closed.
Sometimes I slept just so I wouldn’t be hungry anymore and could try again in the morning.
One time in freshman year, I was struck with the sudden realization that if I didn’t eat something within the next hour, I was going to pass out. It was about midnight, and the markets closed at 1am. I ran to the market across campus, bought a sandwich, and ran back to my dorm on legs so weak I almost collapsed several times. I got back to the room, opened the sandwich, removed the cheese from it, and… ate only about half of the sandwich. If that. The turkey and bread still had remnant cheese taste in them, and it was making me sicker than my malnutrition. So, I went to bed instead.
I was barely eating, and when I did eat, a lot of it was junk food, fast food, soda, and the like. It wasn’t rare that I got soda with my breakfast or bought a whole carton of chips or cookies to eat instead of real food. My stomach being small and my metabolism being fast meant that I could eat until I was stuffed and still start getting hungry again about an hour later, so I preferred to snack throughout the day instead of having dedicated meals, which was a lot easier to do with copious amounts of junk food.
I was completely ashamed. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to have energy and be able to focus in class. I had already dropped ten pounds in my freshman year and by this point in my sophomore year I weighed about 80 pounds and couldn’t put on any weight. I was scared of developing any number of health complications from not taking care of myself, and yet that fear was not driving me to eat. It was driving me to starve.
We determined that food had become such a point of stress and guilt in my life that I was avoiding it entirely, which was making me even more stressed even more guilty, and severely limiting my ability to participate in my courses or do anything other than go to class, do work, and sleep.
She looked at me very seriously and said, “Eating anything is better than eating nothing. Eating nothing at all will do more damage to your body than eating fast food ever will.”
I could be healthy one day, she said. However, right now the most important thing was to get me to eat. Fast food, junk food, cereal in a cup despite the looks I got — anything, so long as I wasn’t starving myself. I had to deal with my negative feelings surrounding eating itself before I tried to regulate what I was eating, or else I would never break the cycle of shame and food avoidance.
It would probably take a lot of behavioral therapy, and she recommended a place off campus that specialized in helping people with eating disorders.
I wish I could say that this advice took hold immediately, but it didn’t. I wish I could say I went to the clinic, but I didn’t.
It was in the next city over, requiring a bus ride by myself there and back, as I didn’t have a car and couldn’t bring myself to ask any of my exceedingly tiny group of friends to take me. Counseling with the school was also paid for, whereas this place wouldn’t be. Plus, at the time, my parents had only a vague understanding of how bad the eating problem had gotten. They knew how bad it had been growing up, but I had tried not to make a point of how out of hand it had gotten while I was away at college. I didn’t know how to tell them I’d been recommended to an eating disorder clinic, much less ask them to pay for it. I didn’t want them to see me as weak or broken. I didn’t want them to ask what was wrong with me.
In the end I think I did call my mom and mention it offhandedly, but nothing ever came of it.
About a month later, I got an email from that counselor, checking up on me. I hadn’t scheduled another appointment with her yet, and she wanted to know if I was okay. I didn’t know how to explain that I wasn’t going to the eating disorder clinic, and my shame over it was so strong that I didn’t immediately respond. One day turned into two, then a week, then a month, then several months, until I had completely ghosted her.
I never returned to therapy, on-campus or not.
COVID would happen soon after, shutting down the school and sending everyone home for online courses. It wasn’t until after I was back home that my parents would see how much of a toll college was taking on me, and furthermore, it wasn’t until they convinced me to take a break from college altogether that I started to get better.
It didn’t magically cure my food issue, but it did remove a massive source of stress from my life, which made it easier to concentrate on actually living a good life and letting the advice I’d gotten kick in.
So yes, I eat my cereal and milk separate. I also break Poptarts into several pieces so I can eat the crusts, bottoms, middles, and tops separately. I don’t let my corn touch my steak, and I prefer my spaghetti without sauce and having only been in the water for about fifteen seconds so it’s still crunchy. I order my hamburgers plain so I can decide how much ketchup goes on them and I keep my fries separate so they don’t get any ketchup on them. I order my nachos and cheese separate, so I can decide how much cheese goes on each chip and keep them from getting cold and soggy.
And sometimes that’s weird to people, and that’s fine. Sometimes those are a lot of hoops to jump through, and for now, that’s fine too. The point is that whenever possible I am encouraging myself to eat anything I can, even if I need to be particular about it.
I'm still not good about this. One downside of being home is that I don't have near-instant access to foods if there's nothing in the cupboards. At college, my dorm was literally above one of the several markets on campus. Even if I was only buying ramen or chips and a vitamin water, I still had easy access to grab those things and go.
There are still times at home where I go hungry for much longer than I should. I get enraptured in a project or a game or a conversation, and eating falls by the wayside.
I'll finally manage to get up hours after I should have eaten, and check the cupboards.
If there's nothing quick or easy to make, I might abstain from eating altogether.
If I look over and realize its an hour away from dinnertime, I might not eat so I don't fill up on nothing before actually sustaining food is being made.
Hell sometimes I will open the cupboards, see several options of food that is easy and quick to prepare, and get so sick at the thought of eating that I return to my room empty handed. Even if I WANT to eat!
Food still carries a lot of lingering anxiety. I'm slowly getting better at preparing my own food, which allows me to both regulate what I eat as well as gives me the freedom to explore new tastes at my own, very very slow pace.
Keyword here being slow. Very slow, in fact. But progress is kinda like eating. And messy, minimal progress is still better than doing nothing at all.
This is a project that's admittedly close to heart, and in a very different way than I'm used to. When I say I can fill a book with all my stories, struggles, and self analysis over food, I'm really not kidding.
These excerpts don't even touch on the many ramifications food have had on my social life and health, and even for what was included there's a lot more I could talk about with my time in college and food too. Really, I could break down my relationship with food into childhood/adolesence/young adulthood and have new things to talk about in every section.
If you've found these excerpts interesting and want more, or would like to share your own experiences with food, feel free to comment below.
Also let me know what you all think. Would you be interested in reading more of “The Texture Problem”? Do you have any particular areas or questions you'd want it to focus on? Or is this not really your cup of tea?
Until next time, thank you all for reading, and have a lovely Monday.