Is Iran Responsible for My Eating Disorder?

For most of my childhood, my family reminded me that I was overweight — over and over again.

They found surprising ways to remind me. One time my aunt sat me down, showed me a health magazine showing the reproductive organs of a woman, and said, “Listen, you’re young now, but when you grow up and want to have kids, you’ll struggle if you’re overweight.”

I teared up. I was just 11 years old.

This conversation happened around 2013 when I was in elementary school and honestly, it ruined my little world. Looking back, I remember how helpless I felt because it was a serious topic and at that age, I wasn’t ready to talk — or think —about it. Thinking about such an adult future made me feel intense stress.

Eating disorders can be complicated and many people have their own path there. But there is no doubt that they are common. The National Alliance for Eating Disorders of the World Health Organization (WHO) found that in 2019 there were 14 million people worldwide with eating disorders, including nearly 3 million children and adolescents. In the United States, the rates are higher than the global average with 9% of Americans struggling with an eating disorder in their lifetime.

That 9% included me.

During the peak of my eating disorder, I developed anxiety and my heart would beat faster than usual and I started showing behaviors of obsessive-compulsive disorder because of how badly I saw food.

I remember obsessively arranging my food, putting 4 tablespoons of rice — never 5! — on my plate, and leaning on the sink of my bathroom while brushing my teeth because I felt light-headed because I wasn’t eating enough.

At 22 years old, I’m still dealing with the obsessive thoughts about my body, weight, and food that I had when I was 18. During the peak of my eating disorder, I would weigh myself 10 times throughout the day, and if the number went up slightly I would panic, and even now I get the urge to weigh myself throughout the day.

Although these habits and thoughts are still with me I am working through them, but I also want to understand the role of my culture in my eating disorder.

Cultural Impact

I was born and raised in the Iranian capital of Tehran until elementary school. When I was 12 years old, I moved to the U.S. Majority of my memories from childhood are of feeling irritated and upset by my family’s comments about my weight. I wasn’t obese, but my weight in comparison to my height and age was high so I was under the category of the chubby kid with a “cute face” throughout childhood.

Growing up in a society where women are required to cover up for religious reasons that have been made into law, many family members, the only people who really saw me, were undermining my perception of my pre-teen body.

Research among Muslim women illustrates that wearing a hijab (a traditional head Muslim head covering) stands as a barrier against influences by society and culture on disordered eating, but these studies were done in countries where Muslims are a minority and wearing a hijab is voluntary. For example, it can protect them because it acts as a resistance to Western influences since it can have the effect of maintaining a Muslim identity in American society. The purpose of the study is to validate a Farsi version of societal and cultural attitudes towards the appearance of Iranian college students ages 18-30.

Also, Western media is influential in the Middle East, and social media is a powerful influencer of self-perceptions in the region, including Iran. Studies on body dissatisfaction and disordered eating among Iranian girls and women college students are 30%-75% that are comparable to global rates.

“With the internet and globalization, and probably before the internet….different cultures were sort of impacting each other…wherever those standards were coming from, that impacted us” explained Dr. Moghadam on the impact of the West on these created ideals.

Food growing up felt like an important part of my Iranian culture because as an Armenian Christian family we still celebrated Persian New Year Norooz, Yalda Night, and separating eating from those events takes away the precious memories I made with my family and friends. For example, during Armenian Christmas (on January 6), New Years Eve, and Easter my family would fill the dinner table with zereshk polo, which is rice with saffron and barberries an herb that grows on shrubs, ghormeh sabzi a stew with meat, kidney beans, and greens, gheimeh another stew with meat, greens, and mutton. All these foods were irresistible because of their aroma, and appearance — and the pressure from family to try every dish on the table. “I’ll be really upset with you if you don’t eat more,” my grandma would say. The food was more than a connection to the culture of our homeland, it was a way for her to show love. And if I didn’t eat seconds, it was as though I was committing an offense.

Her generation, lived through a brutal war with neighboring Iraq in the 1980s, that, among other things, altered their traditional relationship to food. During eight years of fighting, that war brought financial hardship and food insecurity. My dad told me about the wartime system that saw him and millions of others use ration coupons to get food at the grocery store. Even if you stood in line, he said, it wasn’t guaranteed that you would get the food you went for. People learned to eat whatever they got. He, his four siblings and their parents struggled to afford or obtain enough food, he says.

“We didn’t have color on our faces because we weren’t eating properly,” he recalls. Even getting drinkable water could mean 2 kilometers of walking to a well.

I didn’t live in war while I was in Iran. I was born two decades later and spent all of my teen years in a country where supermarkets are flush with all manner of food. But I can’t help wondering whether my culture and our family’s history are somehow connected to my eating disorder.

My dad Haygaz told me that my aunt brought up my weight to show that she loves me.“The messaging of, well, ‘They just love you,’ and ‘This is how they show love,’ it … diminishes your experience” said Dr. Moghadam when I shared that memory with her.

Dr. Pegah Moghadam a clinical psychologist based in Atlanta, Georgia, suggested that it might well be Iranian culture promoting eating disorders that often grow out of looking for approval from others, she said, “People-pleasing style comes in very quickly in our culture,” she explained, adding that there is a preconceived notion of how a good role model child should be like and when the child thinks their physical appearance should also be part of that “model” it ends up affecting their self-esteem for the long term.

Dr. Moghadam’s insight resonated with me because growing up I was people’s pleaser, and that negatively impacted my self-esteem and my relationship with my body where I was thinking by not eating or restricting myself I was honoring my body, but I was doing the complete opposite.“When you tell your body you shouldn’t consume food because you should be thinner, you’re at that point. Not loving and honoring your body, it’s super counterintuitive,” she explains.

I wish I knew that sooner.

My weight was and, in some ways, is still part of my identity because pieces of the past remain,like nicknames I was given by family members that stay with me. My vibrant personality and character were somehow connected to my chubby face and my cousin used to call me “glorag “ and its direct translation from Armenian is “round” and “hasd” which means “thick” or in this case “chubby” like the Spanish equivalent of “gorda.”

Another part of my identity when I was in elementary school was my long hair. I recently started cutting it because, for the longest time, I used it to help cover my body and mask the insecurity about my weight I always carried with me. I remember when I was in the van with school friends going on a field trip in Iran, and my friend Liah said, “Yeah, I like my long hair because it covers my body, and that comforts me.” I had an epiphany because I had been doing the same exact thing without realizing it.

An analysis done among Iranian male and female college students suggests that eating disorders historically were thought to be “culture-bound syndromes” happening to only or mainly among young, white women in Western nations. However, in the past two decades, changes such as economic growth and urbanization in non-Western populations have contributed to the surge of eating disorders in those regions.

Eventually moving to the U.S. didn’t make things any easier, because of the quality of food, refined sugars, and hard-to-resist fast food restaurants available 24/7. And naturally enough I gained more weight and got sucked into unhealthy eating habits. But thankfully enough, I grew up and lost weight because of puberty and I want to thank my growing height (I’m only 5 feet 6 inches tall), and my consistent exercise routine and self-compassion have gotten me a long way.

I’m not sure if full recovery is possible — at least for me, but one thing I know is that recovery is a long journey where you have to be patient with yourself and not get discouraged by the setbacks, because if you do then you’ll get further away from the day you’ll be at peace with your body.