But if food characterizes my nurture, the values my parents had instilled in me, then starvation sits at the core of my nature. It’s the little voice in the back of my head, and I’m only now starting to learn to tune it out.

Unfortunately, I’m hard-wired for disordered eating; the roots of anxiety and depression run deep in my family. My mom lived subject to extreme calorie counts for at least a year in college, and was haunted by dreams of being chained to a pole in a pastry shop — just out of reach of the sugar-dusted confections. Simultaneous urges to feast and fast rage in both of us.

I fatefully followed in her footsteps, enrolling at the same university, and falling into the same restrictive habits. As much as I wanted to join the Peace Corps when I graduated, it was also a desperate attempt to flee my eating disorder and the destructive ripples it sent through every part of my life. While I felt called to learn to create apple butter and vodka pickles near the border of Poland, I was also told that I, a stocky American among the bird-boned Ukrainian nymphs, was in desperate need of a diet. After my 27 months of service were over, it felt like that little voice in my head, the one that told me that food was the enemy, had found a megaphone.

Coming back to the States and all the foods I had been missing felt like a vicious game of tug-of-war. On one hand, what is life without peanut butter? On the other, a spoonful would send me spiraling into mathematical equations about calorie counts and daily calorie budgets and my basal metabolic rate. Was that first spoonful — which never fails to make me pause and savor the way it melts on my tongue, as if the whole world has stopped for a split second — worth all the mental anguish?

I found myself alarmingly pulled in one direction after the other, losing all sight of the middle ground. One week, I would say yes to delicately tart lemon-ricotta pancakes. I would buy myself a box of macarons, reveling in the little crack that happens when you bite through their perfectly taut shells. I wouldn’t feel any qualms about pouring myself a whiskey, neat, after a long day. I would pull a piece from the s’mores monkey bread I had created for a food video at work with gusto, not caring if the whole office saw me pile on even more chocolate than the recipe called for. The next week would be a joyless march through meal after meal of “safe” foods, foods that didn’t require any mental gymnastics or calorie budgeting but also left my mind, body, and taste buds utterly unimpressed.