Please take care reading!
A friendly warning that this newsletter dives right in to eating disorders, body image issues, and unhealthy behaviors and thoughts around food and weight.
If these topics do not feel safe for you, please skip this one.
When I talk about my eating disorder, I always use the past tense.
“I had an eating disorder,” I say, or maybe, “I used to have an eating disorder.” Which is not a lie; from my sophomore year of college until my mid-twenties, I had a pretty classically-presenting eating disorder, with periods of calorie restriction, binging and purging, over-exercising, and generally obsessive behavior and thoughts around food and my body and weight. I don’t know exactly when it started and I can’t remember exactly when it “ended,” but since the mid-2000s I have considered myself to be in recovery. Or recovered. Or in remission. I’m not quite sure.
What I mean by that is that I eat food, with no restrictions. I won’t mention any specific foods that I eat, because as a person in recovery from an eating disorder I find that reading about someone else’s diet can be problematic, even when the person is trying to prove how un-fucked their brain is. “I’m so okay now, I even eat [blank]!” still sends the message that [blank] is bad, so bad that the idea of eating it is brave or even rebellious, and so I won’t subject you to that. But the only foods I don’t eat are foods I don’t like. For example, olives. I hope no one is triggered by olives (I still love the oil, don’t worry.)
So, yeah, I eat food, at pretty regular intervals throughout the day, and I don’t consciously restrict what I eat (what tricky wording!) or binge or purge. That feels like recovery for me. I don’t diet, I don’t count calories, and I don’t use a scale. I find my specific danger zone is numbers. In order to feel like I’m in recovery I have to reject all numbers as they relate to food: calorie counts, fat grams, weight in pounds. If I want to eat something I will never, ever read the nutritional information. Picture me, Mommie Dearest, clutching a calculator instead of a hanger, losing her shit: “No specific numbers, EVER!!!!!” In related news, I am now very bad at math. And I’m making jokes because I want to draw focus from the fact that I’m not sure if I really have recovered, after all.
I always use the past tense when I talk about my eating disorder. But it’s not that simple. I haven’t relapsed, technically—we control-freaks love a technicality!—but after four years of wild global upheaval and loss of control (oh my god oh boy hot damn do I hate not feeling in control) I sense it closing in on me lately. I feel it when I look in the pantry, and then the fridge, and then the pantry again, and wonder why I don’t ever seem to buy anything that I actually want to eat, or to even seem to know at any given time what my body needs or craves. I feel it when I “accidentally” skip breakfast because I’m wrangling the kids to school or picking up Legos or working on a deadline and then—oops!—realize at 1 pm that I haven’t eaten any solid food since yesterday. I feel it when I have to skip the gym because I’m too busy or too sick or simply too tired, and am incapable of allowing myself the grace of a good excuse. I suffer from anxiety, for which I am medicated, and yet I operate most of the time under the assumption that if I stop being vigilant in any area of my life, even for a second, everything will come crashing down. I know, rationally, that this is not true: letting the dishes or laundry pile up for a few days will not fast-track me into some horrific Hoarders territory in which dead animals wind up buried under piles of trash. Letting communication lapse with a friend doesn’t mean I have torpedoed our connection forever. And, in keeping with that logic, eating “badly” for a few days or skipping a week of workouts will not alter my body permanently—or maybe even at all. Like I said, I don’t weigh myself, so I never know if I have gained or lost weight. But there is an ever-present fear that somehow I will lose control of my body and careen into… what? I don’t even know! What am I so afraid of? The answer is vast and nebulous and doesn’t hold up to even mild scrutiny.
Here’s the thing: I am thin, and I have always been thin. I have always inhabited a small body, and although I would never meet, say, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s standards for voluptuousness, I do conform to most of the punishing physical criteria our culture lays out for women. I am small-boned and slender, petite enough that I can wear my adolescent son’s clothing. I have never been overweight, not even at nine months pregnant (I diligently weighed myself weekly during both of my pregnancies, to make sure I was gaining just the right amount—something I told myself at the time was healthy, but which in retrospect seems like a big red flag as to the progress of my recovery). So, here I am, a small, thin woman who has never not been small and thin, worrying that somehow she will lose control of her physical body and become, suddenly, amorphous and expanding, deforming spacetime like a human black hole. Clearly it isn’t about weight or size, really (and it’s definitely not about physics, which I don’t understand!) But it’s too scary to unearth what it is about, really. And so I’ll just sit here in Starbucks at 12:49 pm, drinking my organic juice—I have not yet eaten solid food today—and feeling incredibly cold, as always. I’ll just sit on my bloodless hands and try to think about something else.
Interlude: 1986(?)
I am in the first grade and for some reason my class is being weighed at school. There is not much context to this memory, but I do know we are not in gym class. There is a scale at the front of our classroom near the blackboard that each student is being invited—non-optionally—to step on, one by one. Each weight is then written on the board for the entire class to see. Is this part of some ill-advised Reagan-era health initiative, or a fucked up math lesson? I don’t know. But I am a rule-follower and I do not ask questions, so when my name is called I walk forward in my dress and sandals and step up onto the scale. Am I nervous? Excited? Confused? Feelings have been deleted from this memory, so I could not tell you. I only know my weight: 44 pounds. The teacher seems pleased.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, a “dry drunk” is someone who’s technically sober but isn’t really recovered. They’re white-knuckling it through, bull in a china shop style, not relapsing but also not dealing with the underlying issues that drove them to addiction in the first place. That’s how I feel about my eating disorder these days: I’m a non-puking bulimic. A reasonably well-fed anorexic. I have spent many years in therapy trying to address the perfectionism, anxiety, fear, and control issues that nurtured my eating disorder, and have made good progress, but the underlying triggers are still there even when they’ve been sat with, endlessly analyzed, and forced into submission. I joke with friends that obsessive cleaning has become my new, “healthier” disorder. Instead of controlling the size of my body, I try to control the state of my home. But if you have children or pets, you already know I’m dead in the water; any mess or clutter that gets cleaned will reappear within hours, if not minutes. So I’m still left with the desperate need to exercise control over something (ideally, everything) in order to feel safe. This expresses itself in many different areas of my life. I budget diligently, only to then spend money impulsively and overdraft my checking account. I overthink everything. I share too much online. I have minor breakdowns over even more minor stresses. I may have redirected my anxiety and fear towards other things but I sure haven’t tamed the beast. You know that scene at the end of season one of Stranger Things, when Will gets saved from The Upside-Down and everyone is psyched and he seems okay, but then he’s in the bathroom and he spits up some unholy larva into the sink? That’s how my eating disorder feels: still inside me, insidious and ugly, mostly dormant but always lurking, a little self-destruct button I keep tucked in my pocket just in case, like that football with the nuclear codes. And its ever-presence is oddly comforting.
The truth is that I do restrict what I eat, just not in the textbook way. I don’t diet or refuse high-calorie foods, but I am often picky and indecisive about what I want to eat, which often means there’s nothing I want to eat, which then means I might skip a meal, or order takeout when my house is full of good food, just because something about what’s in the fridge just doesn’t feel exactly right. I do have rules about food, but I couldn’t begin to define them, because only I know them, and also they are subject to change every day depending on how I feel inside my body. I don’t throw up after I eat, but I do lie in bed at night, often high from an edible, and try very hard not to cave into the munchies, engaging in tense negotiations with myself about whether I deserve to eat more. Being high makes me more kind to myself than I might otherwise be—I almost always allow myself a late night snack—but the fact that I even have to consider whether I deserve to eat is so fucked. Sometimes I’ll even get out of bed and go into the bathroom and look at my body as some kind of evidence in the trial I am conducting in my mind, in which I am the prosecution, the defense, the judge, the jury, and—of course—the accused. Am I thin enough to justify more food? I wonder, examining my stomach, thighs, and arms through heavy-lidded eyes. “I used to have an eating disorder,” I tell people. I am so full of shit.
Interlude: 1992
My mother doesn’t like to keep junk food in the house. Even before it’s mainstream, she buys things like carob, root vegetables, whole wheat pasta, and something she calls “good-tasting nutritional yeast,” which we load on top of popcorn, lending it a pleasant umami flavor that we love but that our school friends think is weird. For breakfast we eat plain Cheerios, and if we want something like Corn Pops or Frosted Flakes we have to eat it after dinner, as a dessert. It isn’t rigid or punitive—we have plenty of treats—but I become a junk food junkie, like Claudia Kishi from my favorite book series, The Babysitters Club. On nights when my mom works, my father often takes us to McDonalds, and later, on the couch watching Must-See TV he and I will split a pint of coffee Haagen Dazs ice cream, right out of the container with a shared spoon. In 6th grade, I am allowed to walk home from school by myself. It’s only five city blocks, and right in the middle of my route there’s a corner deli where you can get twenty mini Tootsie Rolls for a dollar. On more than one occasion I take advantage of this deal, frantically unwrapping and chewing all twenty candies in the two and a half blocks between the deli and my house.
The thing about eating is you have to do it every day if you want to live. Food isn’t something you can cut out for recovery, like alcohol or drugs or even sex. For this reason I think eating disordered people are some of the strongest among us, mentally speaking; we have to face down our demons every day (physically, we bruise easily and are probably vitamin-deficient, not exactly fight club material). No sooner have you conquered dinner than you have to contend with breakfast, again. And then lunch, again. And on and on, ad infinitum—or, maybe, more accurately, ad nauseam: to sickness. And the thing about being “recovered” is that the energy I expend thinking about, debating, preparing, procuring, and consuming food isn’t even mostly a conscious process. It feels more like having every app on my phone open at once, passively draining my power.
As I write this my husband and kids are away for two nights and, though I constantly ask for alone time—overnights being the ultimate escape, the most coveted gift—I am adrift. Having only myself to care for, I feel like someone who has crawled out of a bunker into an unfamiliar and impossibly vast new world. What should I do? What should I read, what should I watch? And, of course, the big question: what should I eat? With no one else’s meals to prepare, with the luxury of wandering a grocery store alone or cooking whatever I want, “weird” ingredients or child-unfriendly smells and tastes be damned, I often forget what I like. Or, rather, I am overwhelmed by the control I wield. I can plan breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks?!? I want it to be flawless; I want to prepare myself the most satisfying meals I have ever tasted, like I have invited myself to dinner on a date and I really want to impress myself. This sounds healthy, but it isn’t always. I’m a perfectionist, and so if I can’t do it perfectly, I reason, I might as well not do it at all.
Interlude: 2000
I am a sophomore in college and I have my own room with no roommate. It looks like a jail cell outfitted with floral sheets and a Swingers poster, but it is all mine. When I am not using my alone time to study or illegally download songs on Napster, I am doing aerobics in the roughly two-foot square space between my bed and the door. I rent ‘80s fitness VHS tapes from the local library and right now my favorite is Kathy Smith’s Ultimate Video Workout, in which the incredibly toned Smith—with her feathered hair, leg warmers and perpetual leotard camel toe—leads a group of extremely enthusiastic people who look like they just came from auditioning for A Chorus Line in a series of synchronized leg kicks and the gentle yet tireless pumping of light hand weights. When I emerge from my room and swan around campus in my loose-fitting jeans and spaghetti strap tank tops, sometimes people will tell me I look too thin. I try to hide my delight.
I would like to say that I told my friends about my eating disorder my senior year of college because I knew I needed help, but actually they staged an intervention after seeing evidence in the bathroom of our shared off-campus house. I would like to say that I told my parents about my eating disorder because I knew I needed help, but actually it was because my sister found puke under my bed. I would like to say a lot of things, and rewrite history, but at least I can say that I have not intentionally vomited in a very long time. Once it was something I did every day. Into toilets was always ideal, but in a pinch I would line my garbage can with plastic bags and then dispose of it later, when no one was looking. Bulimia is not a tidy disorder; it is violent and messy. My first therapist surmised that I was throwing up in an attempt to purge my feelings—anger, sadness, and anything else that didn’t feel like it could be expressed through traditional methods. This analogy is a little on the nose but also felt and still feels accurate: getting something inside, something too frightening and enormous to reckon with, out. And it worked. There’s a reason people like saunas and juice cleanses and punishing workouts. Afterwards, you feel drained and buzzy and… light. And while none of those things are fundamentally unhealthy (“cleanses,” side-eye, notwithstanding), they are similar to eating disorders in their pursuit of a certain level of emptiness. If we can just get rid of toxins, release water weight, burn calories, we think, we can achieve a more purified state. In theory.
It’s no secret that the entire world, and specifically the United States, has a deeply fucked relationship to food and bodies. Despite striving for more inclusivity and a wider acceptance of the very plain facts that all bodies are different for a gazillion different reasons and that people can be healthy at any size, there’s been very little change in the last century in terms of what the culture deems ideal. For women, the criteria are especially impossible: we must be thin but fuckable, with perky breasts and shapely hips but flat stomachs and toned thighs (thicc is good; thick is not—you do the math). We must not diet—cottage cheese and celery are so passé—but rather prefer to eat plates full of greens and grains and lean proteins, while also being able to joyfully scarf down burgers and wings and fries and pizzas because it’s sexy for women to eat whatever we want (just as long as our bodies don’t change, lol). Having an enormous belly while pregnant is to be nurtured and celebrated, but as soon as the epidural wears off it had better get back in line. Those of us who live in colder climes might get a brief respite from scrutiny under the thick sweaters and puffy coats of winter, but we had better unzip them to reveal “beach-ready” bodies come spring. Are these self-flagellating ideals completely batshit and actively harmful, both physically and mentally? Yes. And yet they are nearly impossible to escape. For a long time it felt like my eating disorder was sheltering me. When you’re adrift in a sea of pain and fear, it can be easy to mistake a prison for a haven.
Interlude: 2005
I am 25 years old and living alone for the first and only time in my life. I rent a small garden-level apartment in Brooklyn, across the street from a 24-hour bodega. The apartment has both a backyard and a washer-dryer, which is practically unheard of in New York. I have a job I'm under-qualified for that pays me more than I deserve, and yet my spending is out of control—a purging of a different kind. At least a few times a week, I shuffle over to the all-night deli in sweatpants (and a pair of the mesh Chinese slippers that I own in three colors and which are absolutely destroying my feet) to buy my favorite junk foods. If there is anyone waiting to pay in front of me, the wait is interminable. I make the sixty-second commute home with my heart racing, the plastic handles of the bags wrapping tight around my fingers, cutting off circulation. I eat as much as I can, as fast as I can, while watching VHS tapes on my tiny television, and then I walk calmly to the bathroom. The toilet is black, an unusual design choice that helps to hide the evidence of my purging. It feels like throwing up into an abyss. This strikes me as a good metaphor even at the time.
This thing is so fucking long because I honestly don’t know how to end it. I always want to tie things up neatly: this happened to me, and here’s what I learned from it, and she lived happily (if self-deprecatingly) ever after. I can’t do that here. I wish I could. I’m okay, and also I’m not okay, not all the way. Jesus, is anyone? I’m not a danger to myself, but I’m also not a reliable caretaker. I want to live a long and healthy life, but I also want to remain in a body that I and other people have been conditioned to find attractive. I want to get a good grade in Conforming to Unrealistic Beauty Standards 101. I want the teachers—probably some unholy jury composed of Bill O’Reilly, Joe Francis, and Jillian from The Biggest Loser—to give me a sticker. Better yet, I want to erase everything I’ve absorbed, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind-style, and live in a state of unselfconscious bliss. I want to grow up learning that weight is just a unit of measurement and not a defining characteristic that in any way determines your worth as a human being. I want to go back in time and tell my nineteen year-old self that no one has much (if any) control over anything, and that looking that terrifying fact in the face instead of abusing her body for the better part of a decade will save her a lot of time. I want my feelings about my external body to be as neutral as my feelings about my internal organs. My heart beats, and it’s doing its job. My lungs take in oxygen, and they’re doing their job. My body moves and walks and rests and dances and lives, and it’s doing its job. I want to eat to fuel my hungry body and not to soothe—or outwit—my anxious mind.
2024
I write a long-winded essay about my eating disorder. I keep adding to it so I can avoid publishing it. I wonder why I’m even publishing it; maybe I should just keep it to myself. I’m afraid that admitting I still grapple with body image and food so long after my “recovery,” that people will worry about me when I’m fine. I’m afraid that no one will worry about me, because I am so adamant that I’m fine, when clearly I’m not. I’m afraid that my parents will be uncomfortable reading it. I’m afraid to examine why I’m more comfortable with strangers reading it than my own family and friends. I’m afraid that I’m more focused on making it fun to read than brutally honest. I’m afraid for it not to be funny. I’m afraid for it to be a fucking bummer. I’m afraid for it to be, period. But, well, look: here it is.
It’s a cliché to say that this is so brave but this is so brave. I read most of it relatively objectively, with only my love for you skewing my objectivity. But as someone who hasn’t had an eating disorder it was certainly outside of myself, right? Then I got to the last paragraph and started bawling. I’m not sure why. But I think maybe it’s because that is how we all feel all of the time no matter how it’s manifesting. Appreciative as always of your wit and wisdom being in the world. ❤️
I feel like 2024 is the year of sharing that we are not okay. I read all of them, even the pieces by people who are not okay in ways that I myself am okay. It doesn't matter in what way they aren't okay, just that I need to read about someone else pulling off the plastic wrap. Will we look back and see this as a natural reaction to the insanity of social media? Are we coming down off of that now? The vulnerability is so necessary and I wanted to thank you for yours.