*NOTE: CW for writing about body image/disordered eating*
KØBENHAVN, DK — If you say you’re going to Copenhagen, chances are high that someone will mention The Bear and/or the food scene. Though I haven’t watched the show, so much of my own joy of being in Copenhagen has been the food. Beyond its culinary reputation for world-renowned, Michelin-starred restaurants like Noma and Geranium, Copenhagen is home to incredible, casual (yet still expensive) dining options and world-class pastries. The friends I made here and I have bonded over our shared love for carrot cake (which will take center stage in a future blog post), and I have been to far more bakeries and coffeeshops around the city than I would like to count or admit.
While I have dropped far too much cash on meals out and specialty coffee, Copenhagen’s status as one of the most expensive cities in the world has also meant that my time here marks the first time I am cooking for myself almost full-time, without the luxury of an unlimited Claremont College meal plan and a dining hall just beyond my door. I’ve experimented with how long I can stretch out Danish produce before it goes bad (spoiler: things rot much faster here), pored over New York Times Cooking website for recipes, and spent far too much time deciphering Danish labels at the grocery.
Across the board, study abroad has been a wonderful amalgamation of growth, upheaval, and choices. Growth in that it has forced me to be more independent than I have ever been—navigating a new city without the “life training wheels” my liberal arts college provides; upheaval in the way that Copenhagen has been this liminal space, separate from my reality and entirely independent of my grounding forces of people and places at home and college; and choices in the sense that my life here feels like mine to make. In a city where food is everything, my choices around eating are abundant.
In my last blog post, I wrote about what it meant for me to make the choice to take a step back from soccer during study abroad. Since I was seven, my workout schedule, like most of my life, has been predetermined by my sport. I never had to think about whether I was getting “enough” exercise, because I had an hour and a half of practice or a game most days. I chose to relinquish that routine during study abroad. I bought a gym membership at SATS with the DIS student discount ($175 for four months!), and I learned how many layers I need to stay warm while running outside in sub forty temperatures.
With no obligation to anyone but myself, the influx of choices at my fingertips brought opportunity and, unexpectedly, immense guilt.
As I reflect on this past semester, I’ve realized that eating and exercise are much easier to control when I’m in a routine. Study abroad upended the monotony of home: no more practices, no more dining hall options. Not to mention that the constant traveling that many abroad students engage in (including myself) leaves little room during those travel-heavy periods to establish consistency.
Even before I arrived in Copenhagen, eating and exercise were intrinsically intertwined to my body image. In the back of my mind, how much I eat only matters when I don’t exercise, because the two cancel out in how they impact my body. Choosing to step away from campus, from soccer, meant I was working out less (because student-athletedom requires an absurd number of hours dedicated to sport), and my body still required the same fuel, plus a few more Danish pastries for happiness sake.
I believe that disordered eating is an unspoken language for those of us raised as women. Especially in this day and age, the hypervisual nature of social media bombards us with expectations of what your body should look like and what ‘healthy’ entails. When I arrived in Copenhagen, it was as though, all of a sudden, those standards of beauty were embodied and constantly walking right next to me. I’ve never been around so many tall, thin blonde women in my life, all complete with their perfect skin and perfect clothes. This is most definitely an exaggeration, and I know that this characterization reinforces a specific, and restrictive, depiction of Danishness, and not everyone in Denmark is the hot, tall, blonde-haired-blue-eyed person I describe. However, the ones that fit the former description were those I was most conscious of; I found myself hyperaware of my Asianness, and, by extension, my body itself and how it looked relative to the Danes around me.
The lyrics of this week’s song have little to do with my reasoning for selecting it. Mostly, the song title and status as a gym playlist staple factored into the decision. The name “The Cure” feels mildly ironic and a little taunting; I know that there is no real “cure,” at least not the immediate, magical one I want, to disordered eating. Moving away from that kind of thought for food is an exercise in itself: repeated flexing of a muscle that you’re conditioned to use in a completely different way. Songs in my gym playlist must be a motivating force for me to do hard things (lift heavy weights, continue running on a treadmill when I desperately want to stop), and “The Cure” fits that bill. Choosing the Lady Gaga song was less of an intentional, specific decision, and more of a general commitment to myself that my gym playlist of the future will be motivation to move and do hard physical things independent from worries about food and body image.
This blogpost is admittedly a little self-indulgent; writing it was essential processing for something I’ve been thinking about all through the semester. However, writing honestly about my experience has been a critical part of my blog, and even if only one person finds resonance in this post, it still feels worth sharing.
Songs of Copenhagen 
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