Anna Rollins on faith, diet culture, and purity culture

In her new book, "Famished," Rollins shows that these threads are tightly interwoven, even when we can't always tell where the causal relationships are

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Anna Rollins, author of the book Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. Here’s a link to our live conversation.

When I got an advance copy of this book a few months ago, I knew immediately that she and I would have so much to talk about. Her memoir captures the ways diet culture and purity culture interact in the lives of young women, and the ways faith can further complicate and even supercharge these forces. I’m researching for my next book, with examines Christian diet and wellness culture and its impact on women, so this memoir felt like a treasure trove of insight. Famished looks unflinchingly at the ways obsession with body size, weight, and goodness plays out in our relationships and impacts our health long-term.

Anna graciously agreed to answer a few questions in writing here in this post. You can order Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl here!

KM: Your memoir powerfully connects your internalized beliefs about food, body size, sex, and faith without wrapping it all up in a neat, tidy narrative about who or what is to blame for the pain and confusion. And yet, faith is a common theme, and so much of your story plays out in the context of faith community. How do you see your beliefs about God—especially those you inherited as a child or adolescent—shaping and reinforcing your view of your body as you grew older?

Diet culture and purity culture have rhyming scripts, but they don’t lay over each other precisely. In the faith tradition I grew up in—which was Baptistic and almost fundamentalist—I was given many narratives about control. I was given extensive rules that bordered on legalism, and there was this idea that good people obeyed the rules. Part of the way you testified to the power of Christ was by showing that you had something the outside world did not. This might manifest in seeming more positive in the face of hardship, being a harder worker than others in a workplace setting, pulling your appearance together and not dressing sloppily, maintaining a cleaner home, or things like that.

So much of what I was taught about God had to do with perfectionism. I was taught very little about surrender or about the opportunity to experience grace when we inevitably sinned. I think I was almost taught that it would be better to simply avoid finding out—better not to “test God” by trying and failing to not sin—because we didn’t fully understand forgiveness.

KM: Sometimes women will talk about how motherhood “healed” their relationships with food and their bodies. Your story is so much more complicated and sheds light on the ways that these internalized beliefs about food and body size don’t just magically disappear for so many of us. How has motherhood changed the way you experience caring for your body?

I struggled with disordered eating in adolescence, and I experienced something close to recovery after I left my more rigid faith circles. I thought my struggles with food were something I had outgrown, but when I became a mom, those struggles started reappearing. I think there are lots of reasons for this. Some people experience freedom during pregnancy—they see that their body has this amazing function of growing and sustaining life, and they’re able to embrace their body not just as ornament but as a powerful force. This was not my experience.

From the moment I got pregnant, I felt like my body was public property. I felt like people were assessing not just my appearance but every part of my life to determine whether I was a fit woman or a fit mother. There were so many rules in pregnancy about what I could or could not consume and how I could move my body. In the faith circles I was in, I felt a lot of judgment related to my career ambitions or even my need for rest or pleasure. All that intensified scrutiny pushed me back toward the coping mechanism I had used in adolescence: disordered eating.

I became much more hypervigilant about food and exercise because there was so much I could not control. I felt under so much surveillance, but this was one thing I could control—and I certainly received praise for it. There’s actually research showing that the times a woman is most vulnerable to disordered eating are during puberty, pregnancy, and perimenopause. Part of this is due to the incredible body changes women go through during those periods and the way our culture moralizes bodies—particularly women’s bodies—and idolizes the thin, white, youthful body.

But some of it also has to do with hormone changes. Women respond to stress differently because of these hormonal shifts, and for many women this affects their mental health, sometimes including renewed struggles with disordered eating. So I think it’s really important not to think of eating disorders as only a young woman’s problem, but instead to consider the cultural forces that shape how women are able to inhabit their bodies throughout their entire lives.

KM: These scripts you examine in your memoir—the scripts of purity culture, diet culture, high-control religion—tell women what their bodies are good for, and what a good body is. As you put words to your experiences and reflected on your story, how did you see your beliefs about bodies change? Where do you find yourself looking now to recalibrate your view of the body?

A huge part of healing my relationship with my own body was writing about it—not just privately, but publicly. So much of what I learned about keeping up appearances, hiding my hungers, and not drawing too much attention to myself—especially in modesty culture—were rules I needed to break. Writing allowed me to break them.

Writing publicly about disordered eating, my doubts related to faith, and the difficulties I encountered after marriage because of damaging purity culture teachings meant going public, drawing attention to myself, and accepting that I could be scrutinized or judged—and that I would be okay. I learned that I could withstand that judgment and even become stronger.

Some of what I wrote, especially early on, I don’t always love. But that, too, was part of the process: realizing I could show too much, make mistakes, or share in ways I’m not entirely proud of, and still move forward with self-forgiveness and compassion.

Breaking rules that were central to my identity was part of my healing. Taking up space on the page allowed me to take up more space in my life—not immediately rejecting my appetites, but sometimes indulging them.

Thanks for reading! You can watch our live conversation here.

Anna Rollins is the author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. Her groundbreaking debut memoir examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Electric Literature, Salon, Joyland, and more, and she has also published scholarly work in composition and writing center studies. An award-winning instructor, she taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years and is a 2025 West Virginia Creative Network Literary Arts Fellow. A lifelong Appalachian, she lives in West Virginia with her husband and their three small children.