Elena's Story

My journey started in third grade. I was eight years old sitting cross-legged in mandatory P.E., listening to a lesson that was supposed to teach us about “health.” My coach explained calories, how exercise burns them, how an apple has a number attached to it. At eight years old, I went home and told my parents I should only be eating a certain number of calories every day. I didn’t say it dramatically. I said it matter-of-factly, like I had just learned something important.

That’s when my parents realized something terrifying. An older family member had taken that same class two years earlier and their life-threatening eating disorder began shortly after. Third grade. Eight years old. That’s how early the seed can be planted.

No one meant harm. That’s what makes it harder. No one in that classroom intended to hurt us, but children do not hear information the way adults do. An eight-year-old doesn't hear, "This is how the body works." They hear, "This is how I control my body."

And at that age, when puberty is beginning, when identity is forming, when belonging suddenly matters, everything counts. Every comment. Every comparison. Every “fun fact” about calories.

Thankfully, my parents caught this vital moment and were able to help my family member and also change my understanding of "health" before it negatively impacted me. But even then, I was growing up inside diet culture and didn’t even know it.

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The lesson from third grade wasn't happening in isolation, either. I was a ballerina from the age of two.

Discipline, grace, perfection and also: “Suck your lunch in, it’s sticking out.”

I didn’t question it. It was normal. It was everywhere.

Body dysmorphia felt like motivation and restriction felt like strength. Looking back, so many of the messages I absorbed about food, exercise, and appearance were presented as discipline, health, or self-improvement. No one called it diet culture. No one questioned it.

People my age from middle school through college all had different ideas about nutrition and what they considered "healthy," but many of us had never received any real nutrition education to help us make sense of it all.

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Freshman year of college, without the structure of sports and ballet, my body naturally changed. I gained weight, and when I saw the number, I didn’t know how to respond because everything I had ever learned told me that change meant failure.

At the time, I was studying education at NYU and happened to be taking one elective: Nutrition & Health. That class broke everything open. It had never been offered at any of the schools I attended growing up, and I found that shocking.

For the first time, I understood metabolism. Hormones. Puberty. Development. The psychological damage of calorie obsession.

And for the first time, I realized how deeply misinformed our culture can be when it comes to food, health, and body image.

I changed my major to Nutrition & Food Studies because I knew this wasn’t just about me.

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And then sophomore year of college, my own health forced me even deeper into that realization.

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, amenorrhea, and IBS, and my weight was fluctuating in ways that felt completely out of my control. What made it especially hard was feeling like my health struggles were affecting the people around me too, even though I was doing everything I could and still did not have clear answers.

My body was changing. My hormones were off. I was eating what doctors told me to eat, but people around me were worried I wasn't eating enough because of what my body looked like. I felt trapped in something I could not fully explain, control, or fix.

What made it worse was how broken the healthcare system felt when I was actually the one living through it. If my dad were not a doctor, I genuinely do not know if I would have gotten the help I needed. That is not okay. That is not how healthcare should work.

I kept asking doctors the same questions. What should I be eating for my thyroid? What can I do to help get my period back? How do I support my body through this?

And over and over again, the answers were vague.

Eat healthy.

Make sure you're eating enough vegetables.

Try cutting out dairy, gluten, sugar, and anything else that might be hurting your stomach.

But I was a nutrition student. I did not need vague wellness clichés or to be told to cut out every food group from my diet, which I knew was absolutely not the way for a growing girl to solve these issues.

I needed real answers. I needed nuance.

And the more I learned, the more I realized why those answers were so hard to find.

I needed someone to understand that food is not just a casual side note to health.

All I could think was that if I had not been hyper-aware of nutrition through my studies, I could absolutely see this experience leaving someone else malnourished, confused, and developing disordered eating habits along the way.

As I continued learning, I started to understand why finding those answers had been so difficult in the first place.

The truth is, most physicians receive very little nutrition education during their training. They are trained in medicine, anatomy, disease, and their area of expertise. That matters, of course. But it also means that so many patients, especially girls and women, are left trying to piece together nutrition guidance on their own while dealing with very real physical symptoms.

And this had started long before college.

I struggled with IBS my entire life. In high school, I was told by a gastroenterologist to cut out dairy, gluten, many fruits and vegetables, seeds, and practically every other type of food in existence.

In high school.

It did not help me.

It gave me three weeks of misery and taught me, once again, how easily “health advice” can become restrictive, confusing, and completely disconnected from quality of life.

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Junior year of college, I finally got my period back. I found solutions that made my gut issues more manageable. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I understood my body instead of fighting against it.

I became much more educated on the wellness and nutrition world, not just through school, but through being forced to advocate for myself when the system was not giving me enough.

That experience changed me.

It made me even more certain that girls need better guidance earlier, and that mothers need better tools to support them.

 

Look around. How many girls do you know who are struggling?

The quiet obsession with food. The body checking. The guilt after eating. The TikTok trends. The “what I eat in a day” comparisons.

I joined a sorority that partnered with ANAD (National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders) to spread awareness about eating disorders. One of my close friends changed her major to nutrition after starting college and began bravely sharing her recovery story. And I started hearing from more and more girls and mothers that they didn't fully understand nutrition, or know who to trust when it came to health information.

It became undeniable.

This isn’t rare or dramatic. This is nearly every girl at some point in her life.

And today, girls are entering puberty younger. They are on social media earlier and exposed to misinformation before they even understand their own biology.

By the time a mother realizes something is wrong, the seed has often already grown roots.

 

Here is the truth no one says out loud:

Mothers were often never taught nutrition either.

They grew up reading magazines filled with celebrity diets and being told to eat less to stay thin. So when girls feel affected by the messages they receive about food, body image, and nutrition from the people around them, especially their mothers, they often don't realize that their moms are a lot more like them than they might think.

Young girls are forming relationships with food every day.

Whether their mother is guiding it, or TikTok is.

Whether their mother is leading the conversation, or silence is.

And this is not about blame. It's about protection.

It is about equipping mothers and young women with nutrition knowledge before they feel too lost, overwhelmed, or confused to even know where to begin.

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Eventually, all of these experiences led me to one question:

What if we stopped waiting until girls were struggling and started giving them the tools earlier?

Why Fuel Her Exists:

Fuel Her exists so that no eight-year-old goes home believing she needs to shrink.

Fuel Her exists so that mothers have language. Have science. Have clarity. Have courage.

We teach girls how to fuel their bodies, not fight them. We dismantle diet culture before it embeds itself. We translate nutrition into something empowering, not obsessive.

We are not here to shame. We are not here to control. We are here to guide.

Because prevention is quieter than recovery, but infinitely more powerful.

 

To the mother or young woman reading this:

You cannot control the world you or your daughter grow up in.

But you can control the conversations inside your home.

You can become the safe place. The informed voice. The steady anchor.

Fuel Her is your support system. Your education hub. Your community.

Workshops. Guided conversations. Tools for puberty. Science without fear. A place where you are never alone.

This is not just about food.

It is about identity. Confidence. Mental health. And the woman you will become.

If something in your chest tightened while reading this, trust that feeling.

You are not imagining the problem.

You've seen the subtle signs. The comparisons. The comments about girls' bodies. The silence around food.

You've wondered:

"Am I saying the right things?"

"Am I missing something?"

"Is she okay?"

You do not need to wait for a crisis to act.

The most powerful women are not the ones who react. They are the ones who prepare.

Fuel Her is your preparation.

Because girls are always watching.

Watching what we say.

Watching what we do.

Watching how we talk about ourselves.

And they deserve to feel strong in their bodies, clear in their minds, and confident in who they are becoming.

If you're still reading this, it's because something in you recognizes the stakes.

Join us.

Learn with us.

Grow with us.

Because every girl deserves the chance to build a healthy relationship with food, her body, and herself before the world tells her otherwise.

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Much Love,

Elena