I didn't have an eating disorder. I still had a lot to unlearn.

What working in residential eating disorder treatment taught me about the way I — and almost everyone around me — talked about food.

Ziv Vosberg

6/29/20263 min read

I never had an eating disorder.

I want to say that clearly at the start — not to distance myself from the people I work with, but because what I'm about to share is about something different. It's about how someone without an eating disorder can still carry deeply disordered ideas about food. And how working in a residential eating disorder program forced me to confront that in myself.

What I brought into the room without knowing it

When I started working in a residential eating disorder program, I thought of myself as someone with a pretty normal relationship with food. I ate. I exercised. I thought about what I put in my body. Nothing dramatic.

What I didn't realize was the language I was using — casually, automatically, without a second thought — was exactly the kind of language that fuels disordered thinking about food.

I called food good and bad. I said things like I was so bad today, I ate terribly. I need to work out, I ate too much this weekend. I talked about earning food, deserving treats, being healthy or being unhealthy based on what I'd eaten that day. I used the language of morality around something as fundamental as eating.

And I did it constantly. Without noticing. Because everyone around me did too.

What the work taught me

Working in eating disorder treatment means learning — very quickly — that the language we use around food matters enormously. Not just for people with clinical eating disorders, but for everyone. Because disordered thinking about food doesn't begin with a diagnosis. It begins with the ideas we absorb about what food means, what our bodies mean, and what it says about us when we eat certain things.

In treatment, we talk about food neutrality — the practice of describing food without moral weight. A piece of cake is not bad. A salad is not virtuous. Food is fuel, pleasure, culture, comfort, connection. It is not a measure of your character.

Learning to speak about food this way professionally meant I had to learn to think about it this way personally first. And that process was more uncomfortable than I expected.

I had to catch myself constantly. To notice the automatic judgment that arose when I thought about what I'd eaten. To replace the language of good and bad with something more neutral. To stop framing exercise as punishment or penance for eating. It was slow, effortful work — and I didn't have an eating disorder. I can only imagine how much harder that work is for someone who does.

Then I started noticing it everywhere

Once my own thinking started to shift, I couldn't unhear it. The language of disordered eating is everywhere — so normalized that most people don't notice it at all.

I heard it in conversations with friends who were dieting. I heard it from family members at the dinner table — comments about what people were eating, how much, whether they'd been good this week. I saw it on television, in commercials, in the casual language of wellness culture that frames restriction as health and indulgence as failure.

I realized that the ideas I'd been carrying weren't personal failings. They were the water I'd been swimming in my whole life. A culture that assigns moral value to food, that treats the body as something to be controlled and optimized, that frames eating as something to be managed rather than enjoyed.

And I understood, more deeply than I had before, why eating disorders develop and why they're so hard to recover from. Not just because of the neurobiology, not just because of the trauma

and attachment wounds underneath — but because the recovery requires swimming against a cultural current that is running very strongly in the opposite direction.

What I want you to take from this

You don't have to have an eating disorder to have a complicated relationship with food. Most people do — to some degree — because most people have been marinating in food-moral language their entire lives.

If you find yourself calling food good or bad, if you feel guilt after eating certain things, if exercise feels more like obligation than joy, if you find yourself thinking in terms of earning or deserving food — none of that makes you broken. It makes you a person who absorbed the messages your culture was sending.

Those messages can be unlearned. I know because I unlearned them — slowly, imperfectly, over years of doing this work. And the unlearning changed not just how I talk about food, but how I experience it. How I experience my body. How I show up in my own life.

That kind of change is possible. For everyone — not just for people sitting in a therapist's office.

But for those who are struggling with something deeper — where the relationship with food has become something that controls your life rather than nourishes it — please know that support exists, and that you deserve it.

If you're struggling with your relationship with food and would like support, I'd love to connect. Book a free 15-minute consultation at ziv-vosberg.clientsecure.me — no commitment, just a conversation.