With a Little Help from My Friends

Nancy was the one who reminded me of our college reunion dates. “Are you going? It would be so great to see you!” she messaged me on Facebook a few months ago. That’s all it took for me to make the arrangements. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years. We were overdue.

As I walked across Bryn Mawr’s beautiful campus last week, I felt like I had stepped back in time. Had it really been forty years since I graduated from this small women’s college a few miles outside of Philadelphia? Who was I then, and how much had I changed?

Most of my high school classmates stayed close to our small-town Ohio home for college, and they had plenty of excellent options nearby. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I wanted to reach beyond my own backyard. To escape? To prove something? Maybe. I am still processing.

So, my father arranged a trip to visit several prestigious East Coast schools: Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. Since we were already in Philadelphia, he suggested we also stop at Bryn Mawr, one of the Seven Sisters associated with the Ivy League. All the schools impressed me, and many even had ivy climbing their stately old buildings, but Bryn Mawr stood out. Her Gothic stonework, turrets, crenellations, and intricate arches magnified her academic atmosphere, but it was her small class size that drew me in. I could easily imagine walking from the dorms across the sprawling green lawns and up the well-worn stone steps of Taylor or Thomas Great Hall for classes. I applied, matriculated, and moved into Rockefeller, aka Rock, in September 1982.

Barely seventeen, unsure of who I was, and so far away from everything I knew, my self-esteem was on shaky ground. I floundered. Seeking a sense of identity, I threw myself into my studies. I had to bury myself in books to keep up with all the other top-of-their-class girls who seemed much more intelligent, interesting, and attractive than I.

Nancy and I first met on the Blue Bus, the bus that drove students back and forth from Bryn Mawr to Haverford, another liberal arts college a mile down the road with whom Bryn Mawr had strong cooperation. You could live, take classes, declare your major, and of course party on either campus. On this occasion, Nancy and I were headed back from a Haverford mixer. We started talking and discovered we were both living in Rock on the same floor. We became fast friends and were inseparable that first year.

Though we did not share any classes, Nancy being a history major, and I pre-med, we studied together, coaxed each other to attend various mixers, laughed, cried, cheered each other through hell week and finals, took many a needed break, and studied some more.

We also ate together in the various cafeterias about campus. Rhoads, Haffner, and Erdman Halls each had excellent cuisine prepared on campus. And with so much deliciousness, you could pick and choose whatever suited your fancy whenever you wanted. Bryn Mawr took every occasion to have feasts readily available for her students. Donuts in Thomas Great Hall from 9-10 every weekday morning. Strawberries and cream on May Day. And, weather permitting, hamburger BBQs on Taylor Green at least once every other week, complete with mounds of chipwiches, a dessert new to me. Who could resist softened vanilla ice cream sandwiched between chocolate chip cookies and rolled in mini chocolate chips. Sometimes I ate two. Nancy worked at the after-hours student center where you could buy inexpensive brownies or blondies, or both, which I did.

Yes, we endured the crucible of freshman year together, and we gained the proverbial freshman fifteen (or twenty in my case) together.

Nancy and I often commiserated about our growing waistlines, not fitting into our clothes comfortably any longer and not having the financial ability to buy new ones. Every Sunday night after dinner, we would make a list of what we were NOT going to eat that week. And every week I would start off strong, but fatigue and stress would topple my willpower by the week’s end.

Nancy took up running and returned to a healthy weight. I continued to struggle and though a psychologist would not have diagnosed me with an eating disorder, I certainly had disordered eating. Restriction led to over-eating which led to restriction, and so on. A two-way street existed between mild depression and disordered eating, and the sabotage and self-doubt were real. Food was a comfort and a curse.

I had an unhealthy relationship with food without even realizing it. That pattern followed me through medical school, residency, four pregnancies, and years of practicing family medicine while raising a family. Not until 2014, when I reinvented myself as a lifestyle and obesity medicine specialist and immersed myself in nutrition, did I begin to understand what real food really is, how it affects the body, and how the body affects it. It has been a journey, and I am still learning.

What I eat, how I move, sleep, etc is remaking every cell, shaping every biochemical reaction in my body. I find this fascinating if not miraculous. I am not the same person I was a year ago let alone forty years ago. I cannot be.

Foundational to practicing a healthy lifestyle has been cultivating a safe space to challenge my old ways of thinking. This new objectivity and awareness has allowed my deeply rooted beliefs about value and worth to shift. I don’t have to strive for or study more or stew about my worth. I am because of “I am.” Therefore, I have worth. My worth is conditional on nothing other than being created. Period. Not because of my intelligence or anything I have accomplished, and certainly not because I went to Bryn Mawr. Simply by the fact of being.

I am because He is. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” sings the psalmist.

To be human is to have needs. Chiefly among them are nutrition, movement, sleep, emotional regulation, and connection. Caring for those needs is an act of respect for the Creator. Self-care is stewardship, not selfishness, because it enables me to serve others well. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself. ” If I am to pour into my neighbor, I must first be filled. I cannot give what I do not have. Self-neglect is no longer virtuous. It has taken years to give myself permission to care for myself.

I had a wonderful time at the reunion, and it was especially good to see Nancy, my dear friend, without whom I may not have made it through that first year. “I get by with a little help from my friends,” we sang unabashedly at Step Sing Friday night. We walked our legs off on both campuses, reminiscing and laughing about our old antics and our old food rules. We were young and naive then. Now here we are—older, wiser, accomplished, healthy, and ever so grateful for that time we shared together.