Food always powered Anahi Araiza through study sessions and cultural gatherings. But after putting on some weight in her college years, she decided to get serious about weight loss, often restricting her food consumption overall — and that’s when everything shifted.
“One day, I overate whatever calories or macros I established for myself,” says Araiza in a phone call. “Then it turned into a spiral where every single day I was unable to do anything but think about food.”
After a while, she developed binge eating disorder (BED), which is defined as repeated episodes of binge eating, or eating large amounts of food quickly.
BED is the most common eating disorder in the United States, yet it is chronically underdiagnosed among Latino communities.
Araiza describes the disorder as “unbearable.” The thought of food and eating was always lingering in her mind, impacting her quality of life when she studied abroad and at school. “It felt compulsive, like there was nothing I could do to stop myself from eating,” she says.
In a nationwide survey conducted by Equip — a virtual eating disorder treatment program — more than 70% of Latino respondents reported experiencing at least one disordered eating behavior in the past, with the most common behaviors being restrictive (52%) and binge eating (37%).
However, only 12% reported having been formally diagnosed with an eating disorder.
“I would say that it’s very under-recognized because in the United States providers are trained to look for eating disorders more through a white, Western lens,” says Ana Gardner, a therapist with Equip that specializes in eating disorders in Latin American culture and first-generation immigrants.
Data for this study was gathered from 980 Latinx-identifying respondents across the United States, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 39. Among many questions, the nationwide survey asked participants to describe their relationship with their body, and the role that food plays in their cultural and family life.
Though a majority of the participants identified food as being both positive and central to their life, 55% reported that they had experienced teasing or discrimination related to weight. Family was identified as having the top influence on body image, more than peers or social media.
“In Hispanic or Latino culture, there is a big emphasis on food as a way to show care, love, affection,” says Gardner. “There’s also a really big emphasis on body size, so those would be two main things that really can contribute sometimes to eating disorders as well as like acculturation stress.”
Multiple studies have also linked food insecurity with binge eating disorder, including a 2023 study that found that food insecurity in early adolescence is associated with 1.67 higher odds of developing BED.
For Aaron Roldan, who grew up in working-class poverty, food was always tied to fluctuating emotions and monetary circumstances. When her family was prospering financially, celebratory meals were in order; when there were moments of sadness, sweet treats were a go-to pick-me-up.
“[Eating food] came with any emotion, so even boredom was something that was intolerable for me. Then, absentmindedly, I would just go and get something to eat,” says Roldan. “Over time, it started feeling like I did not have control over eating.”
After a while, Roldan developed BED. Generally, there is a lack of self-control that often leads to feelings of guilt and shame. “It just became like a never-ending cycle,” says Roldan.
Roldan — who at that point weighed 400 pounds and was diagnosed as diabetic — reached out to medical professionals for help. But rather than treating her symptoms as disordered eating, she was instead pushed into getting bariatric surgery, a weight loss procedure that physically reduces one’s stomach size and food consumption.
“They really made it seem like that was my only option to lose weight. It was either this or I would never have a healthy relationship with food,” says Roldan, who says she struggled with the idea of surgery as it would limit her ability to participate in cultural holidays.
Living in a larger body is a radically different experience, says Roldan, because eating disorder concerns are often dismissed by health professionals.
One 2023 article in the AMA Journal of Ethics found that the utility of body mass index (BMI) is widely overestimated in medical diagnostics, meaning that its reliance can delay necessary medical interventions for those experiencing disordered eating.
The article also underscores how the narrative surrounding eating disorders often conjures up images of young, thin white women, which can create a bias surrounding who can experience an eating disorder.
“It made me sad to think that my doctors couldn’t see that my relationship with food was more than just a lack of self-control or things like that, instead of it being a mental health thing,” says Roldan, who now helps others as a therapist specializing in eating disorders.
Since early childhood, Patrilie Hernandez’s family members would always say that she had a “buen diente,” a term that defines someone with a hearty appetite in the most complimentary sense, unlike many picky youth.
But that positive attribute changed once Hernandez reached puberty.
“ All of a sudden I was restricted around what I could eat and I was constantly told that I was eating too much and I wasn’t allowed to get seconds,” says Hernandez. “ I think that’s when I started having like really disordered thoughts around food and my body.”
She was made to feel guilty by family members whenever she ate, an emotion that only worsened when she moved from an ethnically diverse neighborhood in New Jersey to St. Louis, Mo., where she attended a predominantly white high school.
“That’s when I really started restricting a lot and really became obsessed with dieting and keeping my body as small as possible,” she says. “[I’d get] very frustrated with myself because no matter what I did, my body wasn’t as small as my friends, some of my friends were just naturally very petite.”
Studies have shown that restrictive eating habits, including diet, can often lead to psychological distress, which can then lead to disordered eating behaviors such as binge eating, purging and more.
With hunger pangs causing natural discomfort by nighttime, Hernandez says she would lose control and overeat throughout the evening as a way of compensating from the deprivation — a habit that kicked into overdrive up until her early 30s.
“It was my body telling me that [I] needed to make up for the food that [I] didn’t eat during the day,” she says. Coincidentally it was around this time that she also worked in the public health sector, a facade that made it easier to hide her BED.
After receiving a formal BED diagnosis from doctors, Hernandez attended an intensive outpatient program, but she didn’t find it helpful for someone who identifies as being genderqueer and “diaspo-Rican” (someone in the Puerto Rican diaspora).
Instead, she created her own community on Instagram, Embody Lib, through which she gained a large following from airing out her grievances over the standardized treatment of eating disorders. At its height, the grassroots collective helped inform larger organizations (including Eating Disorder Coalition, Project HEAL, Equip) of the nuanced challenges people of color face when battling an eating disorder.
It also helped her find community in her recovery process. Now, she has a more peaceful approach to food than she did before her diagnosis and treatment; and she urges Latino families to heed her advice.
“Eating disorder prevention starts at home,” says Hernandez, who has a masters in nutrition education. “What can we do within our own homes, within our own circles to really change the way that we speak, and even not just about other people, but about ourselves too. I think [change] starts there.”