What I Learned From 15+ Years Of Eating Disorders
Food is both extremely simple and ridiculously complex, for some.
[This is part one of a two-part article.]
I’ve had a distorted body image and disordered eating habits since I can remember. I don’t know if I was born with these neuroses or if something happened prior to the beginning of my memories that made me that way. My earliest memory is of my parents screaming at each other and my mom slamming the front door so hard it shattered.
But there was an escalation, or a series of evolutions, like punctuated equilibrium:
the hypothesis that evolutionary development is marked by isolated episodes of rapid speciation between long periods of little or no change.
It was a little bit like that, except that I was a one-person species. The initial evolutionary jump occurred around the time I was 15, and I stopped eating for a few days. When I was 16, it escalated to where I would go a week or more without food, with several weeks of semi-normal eating in between these starvation periods.
Emotional turmoil around the time I turned 17 created the next big jump, leading to a period of about five weeks in which I ate, at most, a handful of solid food each week. I subsisted on coffee and energy drinks. From here until I went to college, just over a year later, I would go a few weeks with eating habits that were more or less normal, followed by lapsing for several weeks, repeating beyond ad nauseum.
At 18, on my own at university, I could experiment with all sorts of ways to manipulate my body to behave in unreasonable, bordering-on-intolerable ways. The in-between periods of semi-normal eating became cycles of bingeing and purging, mostly because it was now an option in a way it hadn’t previously been. Here, I could get a room to myself, work as much as I wanted to, whenever I wanted to, and do so while freely engaging with my eating disorder in whatever way I chose to do so.
I was free to be free, and I chose to use that freedom to torture myself.
Why?
For a long time, I viewed myself as being sub-human. It seemed to me, growing up, that the things that happened to me could be explained in one of two ways.
The first possibility was that people around me didn’t see that I was being bullied and abused, which seemed ridiculous to me. I discounted it almost immediately, mainly because what was going on seemed so obvious to me.
The second possibility was that people did know what was happening, and if that were true, then I had to wonder why no one did anything to stop it. And at some stage, following this line of reasoning, I concluded that no one was doing anything about it because it was okay. Either I was making a big deal out of nothing — which is an accusation frequently made of children, especially girls or those raised as girls — or it was something positive that I suffered in the ways that I did.
In any case, the result was that I learned to suffer. I learned to endure very difficult circumstances, even when it came to things I shouldn’t have. And I became very proud, in a certain way, of my ability to run myself ragged. I’m not proud of this, but I felt superior in some ways when I was able to outlast and show up when someone else couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Identity Crises Abound
I remember a specific time in graduate school, during my first semester. I’m from Florida originally, and I went to Wyoming for graduate school. In January. I had to get out of my hometown, and this seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But I’d never even seen snow before. I didn’t have any kind of footwear for it, either; my main shoes were a pair of beat-up high-top Converse.
For Christmas, my dad gave me a pair of very nice boots by Eddie Bauer. But he didn’t know my sizes. I told him I was an 8 1/2, which is my size — in men’s shoes, in the United States. He bought me ladies’ shoes in an 8 1/2, not realizing I’m more like a 10 in most ladies’ brands. The point is, I walked around in shoes at least a size too small for my feet for more than three months before I happened to glance at the inner tag one day. I also worked on my feet just under 40 hours a week at the on-campus cafeteria. That’s hard on anyone, but when you’re wearing a pair of shoes that isn’t right for your feet, it’s excruciating.
So, one day, I’m sitting there waiting for seminar to start. One of the professors mentions how so-and-so broke his leg and will be absent for the next few weeks. I fought back a smirk and thought to myself, “Pussy.”
Because here I was, just shy of 22 years old, with no fucks given about the pain I was in, physical or otherwise. It was pretty bad on multiple levels, most of the time. But my identity was consumed by two things then: academics and my eating disorder.
When, eventually, the latter caused me to lose the former, it was… devastating. But rather than actually dealing with any of it, emotionally speaking, I embraced my ED more tightly than ever.
I couldn’t deal with the loss I was facing, how eviscerating it was, and so the only thing I could care about was losing weight. Like the Lily Allen song says:
Now, I’m not a saint, but I’m not a sinner.
Now, everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner.
Simple. Not easy, but simple. I decided, after everything else, I could get used to some simplicity.
The simplicity of it all makes making most decisions easier. There’s really only one litmus test for it: will doing x make me gain weight, or does it have a relatively higher risk of weight gain than other options?
If no, I will do x. If yes, I will not do x.
Hey, I’m not saying this is a good way to live. I’m just saying it’s what happened. Wouldn’t recommend.
Didn’t I Know Better?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, I “knew better.”
I mean to say that I knew an abundance of facts about nutrition, biology, and chemistry. I knew, for example, the basic fact that living things need energy, and I knew that humans are meant to obtain our energy through food. I knew and have since learned more about the underlying mechanisms and nuances of nutrition science and so on, but this? This is basic. Of course I knew it and would get a question about it right on an exam.
One of the things that has frustrated me endlessly throughout this journey is the fact that, sometimes, it doesn’t matter what facts you know. You can get in trouble for things that don’t seem important, and you can get a pat on the back for something repugnant. Sometimes, things don’t work out the way it seems like they should.
I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore.
I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore.
When do you think it will all become clear?
’Cause I’m being taken over by the fear.
Again with the Lily Allen? At the time, this was one of my favorite songs. Parts of it really do a great job of putting into words some things I’ve experienced.
It’s extremely disorienting, doing something like starving yourself and feeling powerless to do otherwise. You feel like you can’t act in accordance with the facts. And so it becomes difficult to trust your knowledge, or things you may once have considered knowledge.
No, I Didn’t “Know Better.”
Sometimes, knowing the facts doesn’t empower you to act on them.
And going back to the part about identity, above, I should reiterate a couple of things:
- I thought I was sub-human. (Unconsciously, for the most part.)
- This eating disorder was core to my identity. For me, it was like a life raft, if a life raft also kept trying to drown you.
But the truth is that I still don’t understand why I wasn’t able to take the knowledge I had of things like science and nutrition and have that be enough to break the grip my eating disorder had on me. On multiple occasions, with multiple different therapists, I was brought to tears in frustration over this.
I do think there’s something to the “it’s the devil you know,” theory. Recovery is terrifying in ways I just don’t think people can understand if they haven’t tangled with an eating disorder firsthand. What I knew was that I was losing weight this way. I was skeptical about other people’s intentions when it came to my eating disorder. I would gain weight, and then there would be objective, immediate, obvious proof that I was sub-human scum trying to pass for a real, worthwhile person. Anyone who glanced at me would know on sight that it was okay to hurt me, too.
Now, do I think those things about fat or overweight people? No. I never have. It was just me. I want to make that abundantly clear: these have been my views about myself and only about myself.
What I knew scientifically didn’t match up with what I expected of the world. As a kid, I was almost 200 pounds. This was around age 10 and 11. So, as one might expect, I was bullied pretty relentlessly about it. I also had huge, frizzy hair and thick glasses. Might as well have been wearing a neon sign that read “easy target.”
Fatphobia and Diet Culture
What I took away from it was that my safety was at stake as a fat person. I couldn’t count on anyone to treat me with respect and dignity if I looked like I did then. And unfortunately, because fatphobia is a real problem, I’m not 100% wrong to expect these things. If you’re fat, doctors are likely to assume that weight loss will resolve any symptoms you have. If you complain that you try to lose weight and can’t, they’re dismissive. The assumption is that, if you’re overweight or obese, you must be doing something to cause that. It must be in your control, and therefore, it’s incumbent upon you to “fix,” it.
There are many people whose eating habits aren’t great and contribute to weight gain. However, there are also loads of people whose bad habits contribute to weight loss and maintenance of a low weight. That doesn’t mean they’re healthy. So, why would we say that a person having a larger-than-expected amount of fat on their body must lose the fat in order to be healthy?
It’s a sneaky trick fatphobic people pull from time to time: “I’m just concerned about your health.”
That’s great, but do you know whose business my health is? Mine and my doctor’s/doctors’. Mind your own.
It happens with vegans, too, although the presentation is somewhat different. If you’re fat or vegan, or both, people suddenly become health and nutrition experts. It’s like, okay Karen. Didn’t you go to McDonald’s for lunch?
Tell me again about making healthy food choices.
There’s an awesome quote I heard in The Game Changers, a documentary about veganism and athletics. Bryant Jennings, quote:
Most people say, “Oh, where do you get your protein?” As if everybody that’s in KFC is looking at the back of a bucket, like, “Yeah, how much protein is — ?” Y’all don’t know. So, y’all really don’t know what y’all eating.
He’s talking about people who ask vegans where we get our protein, but the same general principle applies to people who pester fat people about their bodies. Suddenly, they’re concerned, acting like they know what they’re talking about, when most of them don’t know a thing about nutrition or what’s in the food they eat.
My parents, ostensibly in an effort to improve my health, made me go on a low-carb diet when I was about 13. My dad and brother were also on it. My mom, who was already tiny, didn’t need to be on it but wanted to be. She had an eating disorder, too, most of her life. We’re a lot alike in some ways. I get my work ethic and a lot of my intensity from her.
The diet went as follows: you can have anything you want as long as you stay under 15 grams of carbs per day. That was it. That was the entirety of how the diet was explained to me. I would go into the “zone,” if I did that, and my appetite would die off, and I wouldn’t be hungry, and it would be effortless.
Well, I had just hit puberty. My body needed fuel to grow and change accordingly, whether I was thrilled about said changes or not. (Frequently, I was not.) This was not a time, I don’t think, when I should have been made to diet with weight loss as my sole objective. I was being fed a steady diet of red and/or fatty meats, supplemented by processed things like Slim Jims and pork rinds, along with the occasional sprig of parsley or quarter-cup of broccoli.
Looking back, I’m mildly amused, because this experience made it very, very easy to go vegan. I was sick and tired of meat by age 15. I cut out all other animal products by 16.
It seems to me that there’s a substantial difference between making sure your kid eats a healthy diet and forcing them to eat specific things so that the kid will lose weight. The former, combined with well-rounded education about nutrition and making good food choices, is a pretty good idea for some kids and parents. It empowers them to make their own, independent choices, which will be helpful as adults.
Placing emphasis on body size is less productive, by far.
What About Binge-Eating Disorder?
Thank you, I’m glad you asked!
Some people gain weight because they have binge-eating disorder, or BED. My experience has been almost exclusive to restrictive eating disorders, primarily atypical anorexia, so I won’t speak with too much authority on BED. But it’s a real problem that really needs addressing.
Bulimia nervosa is a mental health condition in which a person typically consumes large quantities of food over a short amount of time, followed by compensatory behavior, also known as purging. This often takes the form of forcing themselves to vomit, laxative or diuretic abuse, or excessive exercise and/or fasting.
BED is kind of like that, but without the compensatory behavior. That doesn’t mean the emotional and mental aspects should be taken less seriously, however.
A person with binge-eating disorder, or any other eating disorder, typically requires mental health counseling, at a minimum, in order to get better. As with other eating disorders, BED is not about the food.
With my eating disorder experiences, I think my objective, unconsciously, was to express myself. I felt that I couldn’t do that in a constructive way, and “talking about,” my problems through food and weight loss and so on was the only way I knew how to, in some senses, legitimize those problems and myself.
I don’t know how common this is, but I imagine it could be quite common indeed, among people with all sorts of unhealthy coping mechanisms. I’m certain that there are people with BED who can relate to it, and I suspect that there may be a lot of them.
When all this started, I didn’t know BED existed. What I learned about eating disorders, and about BED in particular, is that it isn’t taken as seriously as anorexia and bulimia. This is due mostly to fatphobia, which is not something mental health and nutrition clinicians are immune to.
The thing about fatphobia is that it involves a lot of shaming. Shame is toxic. I’ve experienced plenty of it, and I consider myself sort of an expert. Transphobia and homophobia are other examples of societal tendencies that contribute to (unwarranted) feelings of shame and self-hatred for many people.
Straight people like to ask, “Why is there no straight pride parade?” We have Pride because we’ve been shamed for most of our lives. We’re out here trying to love ourselves for the things people have used to put us down. That’s something to be proud of, I think. Having the courage to be yourself and love yourself is raw as hell.
Which is why I think it’s so important that fat people be allowed to openly love themselves and their bodies. If you’re overweight and want to lose weight, that’s cool. But don’t do it because you think you have to in order to be loved or worthy of respect.
There are lots of bad things in the world, including a lot of bad things you could be. Being fat isn’t one of them.
Can’t Love Your Body (Yet, If Ever)?
That’s okay. I’m not there, either. I don’t rule it out, even though I can’t imagine it.
A more reasonable goal, for me, is to hate myself less over time. And I think I’ve come quite a long way on that journey. Certainly, I’ve come further than I thought possible in the beginning.
You don’t have to “love,” your body. You just have to consciously make an effort to stop killing it. It’s bizarrely difficult, but if you want to live a decent life, it’s absolutely necessary.
There are lots of bad things in the world. Being fat isn’t one of them.
