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The podcast discusses the connection between anxiety and eating disorders. Anxiety can lead to a desire for control, which can manifest in controlling food intake and appearance. Social media plays a role in promoting unrealistic body standards. COVID-19 has exacerbated anxiety and led to increased focus on controlling food. Seeking professional help and addressing past trauma are important for recovery. The speaker shares her personal experience of struggling with anxiety and an eating disorder during the pandemic. She emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and enjoying food despite anxiety. I'm Sarah Fisher and this is my podcast. I'm a student at the University of Tennessee and biomedical engineer major and this is about the dynamic between anxiety and eating disorders and how they relate to each other. So majority of the US suffers from anxiety and what we can see from this is that eating disorders can stem from this. It can start with anxiety and then it can lead to an eating disorder as people are trying to find something to control because recently, think about COVID, something crazy happened. COVID. COVID-19. We had to shut down, we all ended up in our houses and just felt like everything was out of control. Felt like oh my gosh end of the world and in your mind you're trying to find something you can control because there's nothing to control. Everything is going out of whack. Your usual routine is all messed up, your school's all messed up, your class is all messed up, you're going from in-person classes to online, you're having to spend all your days by yourself, don't really have social interaction, only through screens. So you're going through that and you're like okay what in my mind, what can I really control in this moment? Because if you're anxious in that moment, if you're anxious if you start with an anxiety disorder you're going to want to find control and this can stem from a crazy moment such as COVID-19. It can start from that and then you could have anxiety, it could stem from that and then you would want to control because that is what anxiety does. It makes you want to control stuff, it makes you want everything to be like a little bit perfect. I mean there's a certain kind of anxiety instead of just fear, you're trying to control that fear and so you end up controlling what you eat and you end up controlling how you look or wanting to control how you look and this usually comes from social media which, well social media really helps out with it obviously. When you look at social media you see all these different people, all these beautiful girls, all these models who you really want to look at, look like, you want to be them, you want to be small, petite, skinny, big boobs, big butt, all the fun stuff and so you try to attain this but it's unattainable because you are your own self and you can't change who you are in just a few minutes and usually when you have an eating disorder you want it to happen quickly and that's what causes you to alter eating so much. You end up on weight apps trying to track your calories, you try to spend more time doing other things to try not eating, it's a little rabbit hole that you get stuck in and it's hard to climb out but there is light in that tunnel, there's a way to get out, there is safety in it. When talking to professionals about it they will talk about anxiety and how it's affected you, they'll even dive into past trauma that has happened and how that has led to your thought process now. It's usually we develop things over time, yes there's genetics with everything, you genetically end up with anxiety which is not fun but it all stems from like trauma, usually it comes from trauma or something big that's happened and for all of us it's probably COVID-19, crazy time, a lot of altered states, a lot of altered things happen, a lot of change and from people I've been around you can see how they've been affected and my friends they also kind of dealt with it the same way I did in trying to control things and trying to control at least one one part of their lives. So my personal story with it is that I've always dealt with anxiety, I was not diagnosed with it but I'm not diagnosed with it yet but I always suffered with anxiety attacks and all that fun stuff and couldn't do big crowds, couldn't do speeches, all the fun crazy stuff about talking in public because social things were not my thing or still not my thing but I've gotten better about it and with COVID it kind of went a little crazy and I ended up by myself for a long time. I was in my room and what was I on? TikTok and I saw all these pretty girls with perfect body these gym girls with like they're super strong, super skinny and then Chloe Ting which I mean if you are a girl and you went through COVID-19 you're probably gonna be like yeah I know Chloe Ting, her workouts because that's what everyone was doing during that time in 2020. It was a big thing and yeah I was one of those people. I started off with that and I ended up trying to control what I was eating, what food I was putting in my mouth and if it was healthy, how many calories were in it, how many carbs were in it, how much protein and I ended up going to the gym a lot and running and I ended up losing a lot of weight which I thought was good. I thought this was a great thing, getting rid of some pudge, some extra layers and so I went I would weigh myself every day and that's just not a good idea because weighing yourself every day puts this like idea in your head that you're gonna weigh the same way every single time or your body doesn't fluctuate which it does. Your body does fluctuate, it does change, it alters through the days with water. When you drink water it can stick with you for a bit and you can have water weight and also with food. Whenever you eat, after you eat, you can weigh a little bit more because you haven't digested that food. So in my head anytime I went above a certain amount I had to, I was distraught. I was so upset and wouldn't eat and then would start the cycle of trying to eat and then binge eating because I needed all this food. Because after you're in eating disorder your body's just like in need of food. You've taken so much from yourself and you've tried to keep yourself away from so many things that when you have like a little taste of something you just go at it. I remember one of my like favorite things was getting a date and putting peanut butter on it. It was so good but so I after I realized that that's an eating an eating disorder is what I was going through I have been told by the doctors I was told to go to therapy and then was medicated and I mean there's still struggle. There's still moments where things get kind of crazy when things happen and I want to control that one thing. Sometimes I turn to it but it over time I've realized that I don't need to do that. I'm going to be who I am and I'm going to eat what I want because food is fun and food is fuel and if my anxiety wants to take that from me I'm not letting it because I love ice cream. I love chocolate and I love all that. So that is the connection between anxiety and eating disorders. Thank you for listening. Bye.