So… You Need to Eat.

Energy, Not Mass

By: Nina Naval

I know I’m small, so I won’t say, “You need to eat.” What I will tell you is this: I started eating twice a day in July of 2025.

For six years, I lived on one meal a day. I thought I was fine because I didn’t feel hungry. What I didn’t realize was that exhaustion had become my baseline.

I failed to take into account that a lifestyle of restricted eating—whether it’s caused by choice or circumstance—changes the shape of your organs. The body adapts. When you don’t eat, your stomach shrinks. It stops asking for food. Eventually, it can’t even handle more than one meal a day.

When you’re an adult and you’re in charge of your own food, nobody can really flag it until they see it. But my body didn’t lose any weight from eating so little because it adapted and I was used to it. I didn’t have a calorie deficiency because I had so little fuel I could barely move. I got tired quicker than you could say “let’s go for a walk.”

But I’ve got a chronic illness, so the fatigue wasn’t unusual for anyone either.

Who it was unusual to was the person I’d spend my nights with and bake my cookies for.

You get a cookie, and you get a cookie.

But not me.

I couldn’t eat a cookie and dinner. Again: my body couldn’t fit it in. My stomach had atrophied so much that despite how much I’d bake, I could never partake in what I made.

Then, there he goes.

“Have dinner,” he’d say.

And I’d eat half because I had a small bag of chips. He’d put it away for all of an hour before—

“Eat your dinner,” he’d say, pulling it out of the microwave. And I’d give him a look, and he’d glare right back.

It was wildly uncomfortable. Not insecurity, but literally: I had to push past my discomfort of being full and stretch my stomach. Over and over again, every time he made dinner.

He forced me to break a routine I didn’t even think I had.

I ate, because I was a pathological people pleaser and if someone made me dinner, I had to finish it. I’m Filipino, after all. I was raised in a household of “Don’t waste your food!”

The routine continued, and eventually, it didn’t hurt so much to have a big meal. Then, it didn’t hurt so much to have a big meal and a snack.

And what if I split it into two mini-meals? Inevitably, with a fair amount of trying, I started getting hungry again.

I almost forgot what it felt like when it didn’t just feel like signals my body gave up on signaling me. Learning to eat wasn’t just discovering I hadn’t been. It was teaching my body to speak again, and learning how to listen.

Calories is a unit of energy, not mass.

When I started to eat again, I started taking longer walks because I could and I missed the way the sun felt on your skin with a summer breeze. I had energy and I never really went dancing in college. I had energy and I wanted to play fetch with my dog until she got tired first.

I started going to the gym.

I started building muscle, and it feels a lot like learning to eat again. We start with five pounds, and we go up to ten. I learned that I can leg press a hundred pounds but my arms can’t do more than five reps on the damn cable machine’s lowest setting. 

I went to the zoo with Alexa on Labor Day, and my legs didn’t kill me the whole time. What used to be a Wheelchair Exclusive was now something I could do on my own two feet.

I did it with a backpack I couldn’t wear without messing up my shoulders four years ago.

And I didn’t pay for it the day after as badly as if I did the same thing one year ago.

The Weight of It All

Don’t get me wrong: I worry about my size. I’ve been small my whole life, and it’s one of the first things my family comments on when they see me. What if I get bigger?

In a culture where your appearance matters so much, where women are expected to be impossibly thin and curvy at the same time, it’s natural to feel fear. It’s natural to want to be smaller. It’s natural to want to be a specific shape.

I love the way my body looks now, even though I scowl at it every few days or so. I love my body because it lets me go to the zoo. I love my body because it holds my joints in place. I love my body because I can go dancing now.

I love my body, so I need to eat. I need to fuel it, so I need to feed it.

If I get bigger, and I probably will, it will be because I’m choosing my health, my ability to live my life, and my future.

And, well, I wanted bigger boobs anyway. So fingers crossed.

Anyway, I made beef teriyaki, and I’m hungry. So I need to eat.