How Many of Us Have Eating Disorders?
This week’s essay contains lots of talk about eating disorders, and could be triggering/activating for some. If you enjoy the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing it in your networks.
On Thursday I baked buckwheat millet bread from my new cookbook and ate some for lunch with vegan cream cheese. I’ve started making my own nut milk; cashew and almond. I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and have removed dairy and gluten and sugar from my diet, except for the two pints of ice cream I ate and threw up on Thursday night.
Whenever this happens (every couple weeks or couple months or couple years, almost always in times of transition or stress) I always think to myself, I can’t be the only one suffering like this. I can’t be the only one who seems fine but sometimes throws up their food.
I can’t be a writer and a bulimic or a grown-up and a bulimic.
I was a teenager when I first started throwing up— thirteen. Adults (all women) told me about the window of time when they were sick too, as if it were something I’d grow out of. I’m forty-one now.
I cannot be the only forty-one year-old who has a totally fucked up relationship with food and my body.
Let me be clear: I am mostly okay. Most of the time my relationship with food feels self-congratulatory. I congratulate myself for not binging almost every meal. I congratulate myself for cooking meals. On my stove right now is a Staub pot full of stonefruit and fennel, slowly simmering down into a compote that I’ll use to top my porridge in the morning.
I don’t congratulate myself for eating a certain way because I think that other ways of eating are bad (though binging is, well, not good). I used to congratulate myself for eating certain foods in moderation, like donuts or potato chips— foods that were, for most of my life, “bad.” Categorizing foods as bad got me into this mess, so I don’t do that anymore. I don’t diet, which as far as I’m concerned is as unhealthy as my bulimia, and inextricably linked to it. To recover from the worst of my bulimia (that uncontrollable self around all food, eating and purging every day) I had to stop working out. I took a summer away from the gym, which was part of my “you’re good enough” pendulum, constantly swinging back and forth. This helped me find a sense of self-worth outside of the fitness industrial complex as well as to find ways to move my body that felt good.
I also went through a very long phase where I let myself eat whatever I want. You see, regular people who don’t live with eating disorders know how to gauge their body’s signals for satiation and hunger. Because I was raised to distrust myself around food, and used food for emotional comfort, I didn’t learn this. For a little under two years I ate a lot. Without throwing up. I had to force myself to sit with the sensation of fullness, the discomfort of it, to help navigate my way into a healthier relationship with food. I also had to eat lots of different foods, especially the foods I considered “trigger foods.” I remember one summer in Honolulu, when I was teaching creative writing, I bought a bunch of (delicious) Hawaiian pastries for my classroom. There were some left over. In the classroom, after the kids had left, I began eating some, and then I threw the box in the trash, still full of some delicious pastries, instead of taking it back home with me.
I felt so good about myself for doing this. It was something to be celebrated. Letting go of food I once coveted. It occurs to me how absurd and fucked-up it is that I live in the same world as people who can’t access enough food, and how terrible it is that my relationship with food is so fraught because of diet culture. It interferes with my gratitude.
Many years ago I listened to a This American Life episode about being fat. The episode featured a woman who was on diet pills and had gotten thin. She recalls men in her building not recognizing her as their fat neighbor anymore, how suddenly they saw her. Then she detailed how she still takes diet pills even though she knows they’re bad for her heart— being this is more important to her than her own health. She recalls discussing her thinness with her husband, asking him over and over again if he’d love her if she were fat, and knowing that if she’d been fat, they wouldn’t have dated in the first place.
Can I say that that episode harmed me personally? That I knew the “secret club” the woman referred to? The one where people acknowledge each other’s thinness? Can I say that when I was sixteen and first began my serious and long-term abusive relationship with bulimia I lost a bunch of weight and suddenly they saw me? I went from ghost world to real life. The popular girls complimented the blue mascara I’d been wearing for months; my hottest peers asked me if I was new at the school (I wasn’t) and if I wanted to go on drives with them, or to movies. Being in the family I was in, with the childhood I had, this completely ungrounded me and there was nothing to bring me back down. It reinforced everything I’d been taught about my worthiness; that it was material, superficial. That my brain meant nothing. That to be loved, I needed to be thin.
Can I also say that, twenty years later, I decided that being fat was better for my health and well being than being thin? Even if it meant forgoing that external praise?
I am sober. I quit heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, alcohol. I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore, or weed. I don’t even have sex. I’m essentially an ascetic, turning away from so many indulgences, knowing that most indulgences are, for me, a trap, just as they were for my heroin-addicted grandmother, my alcoholic mother and father.
But you can’t quit eating food. I tried that before bulimia. It didn’t work.
Imagine being an alcoholic, but you have to choose between different kinds of alcohol every day, several times a day. There’s the booze that tastes really good and makes you feel good, and then there’s the booze that tastes alright, but doesn’t necessarily satisfy you completely. Also, the stuff that tastes alright requires more labor. Like, you have to make it yourself. The good tasting stuff, the shit that will fuck you up, tastes amazing and is pre-made, ready to drink.
Every time you go anywhere, there are signs and symbols pointing you towards the one substance you’ve struggled with almost all of your life. Booze (food). You have to drink it. But you can’t drink too much.
I don’t know. I’d be a drunk in that world. And I am a bulimic in this one.
I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling shame around food. It started when I was very little, when my mom would ration food because we didn’t have enough money. But as I got older my mom got stricter, and it wasn’t so much about money as control. She couldn’t afford a babysitter or day care, so in the afternoons I went home by myself and sat in front of the television for several hours. I didn’t have siblings.
The turn of her key in the deadlock struck dread. Throughout the afternoon, in the yawning white-walled cavern of our apartment, I ate. The voices and pictures on the TV were a poor replacement for community I’d never had. As I ate I buried the evidence of my eating (wrappers, paper towels etc.) in the garbage and washed and dried all my dishes, but my mom would go through the cabinets and refrigerator. If I’d eaten too much, I didn’t get dinner, and I couldn’t watch television with her. She’d send me to my room for the rest of the night. Sometimes she’d make popcorn and the smell was so enticing I’d sneak out into the living-room, groggy from trying to force myself asleep, and ask for some. Sometimes she’d let me have some, other times, not.
I knew I was eating too much, but I didn’t know why. My now-developed brain can see clearly that I was doing whatever I could to numb myself from life as a neglected kid who moved often and never had any real friends. Food was one of the only things that gave me pleasure. It relieved a pressure valve that, if left pressed down, surely would kill me.
Food also hurt me. Pain and pleasure. My shame about eating compelled me to eat more.
My mom never stopped shaming me about food. My last Christmas with her before her suicide, we ate at a nice restaurant in Seattle, and when I ordered dessert she pulled it away from me with her finger and asked if I really needed it. I was twenty-nine. She was blacked out and wouldn’t remember what she’d done, but it wasn’t the first time she’d done it. She also knew I threw up. Knew that I’d never recovered, despite a two-week stint in ED recovery in Seattle at Swedish when I was a teenager. After two weeks the insurance ran out and my mom and stepdad pulled the plug. My mom, explaining her decision years later, told me that it was clear I wasn’t going to get better. Her and my stepdad? Never came to one meeting at the center. It was too far to drive.
I’d never felt so seen, being amongst all those sick girls. My roommate was an opera singer in her early thirties addicted to laxatives because throwing up would ruin her voice. One of my favorite girls was a high achiever who lined her eyes in black but was on varsity cheerleading somewhere in Idaho. I knew these girls like I knew myself. I knew how much pain they were in. And they knew me. None of our parents knew us at all, and the world? It was out to kill us.
I wonder where they are now. I’ve thought of them often. When I think of that time, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos and Sunny Came Home hum in the background. We were always cold, always tapping our feet or shaking a leg. We couldn’t sit still. When I left, I entered the abyss of home. True recovery was a pipe dream. When my mom and stepdad weren’t home I’d raid the house, eating food I didn’t even like and throwing it up, then eating more food. I shoved the food down while in a television trance, completely dissociating. There was something inside me that needed containing.
I can see clearly now that the thing inside me was my opinions, thoughts, dreams and hopes. Things that had no space to exist in my life or family.
I’d try for recovery again and again, but I still don’t know if I’ll ever be lucky enough to say in earnest that I am recovered.
I am better, though. So much better. For decades of my life I would spend days eating and throwing up, sometimes throwing up as many as fifteen or twenty times a day, until I’d cry from desperation, not knowing how to stop myself. If I lived with roommates I ate their food. If I nannied, I ate their food. Wherever I was, I ate other people’s food, but never bought myself foods I liked because I didn’t trust myself around them. I felt (and still feel) shame when eating in front of others— there’s always a sensation of being watched, and if I hear laughter I am sure it’s about me and how I shouldn’t be eating what I’m eating. This never went away no matter what size I was, and no matter what size I was, I was never the right size.
On daytime TV, which I became accustomed to in my childhood summers, a La Jolla fat camp commercial gave me hope. I ordered a booklet from them, but when I saw the price I knew I’d never be able to go. Probably a blessing, though I’m not sure how I could have treated myself worse, or hated myself more than I already did.
TV was my refuge but also reinforced all my feelings about being fat. There were no fat people on television unless they were being made fun of. Even now, most films and television shows are lacking in larger-bodied folks. If someone is fat, the story has to be about their being fat. Writers can’t even seem to imagine into a world where fat people are allowed to exist just like their skinny normie neighbors.
My eating disorder has gotten better, and I can directly give credit to Lindy West and Roxane Gay and many other fat people, particularly women and trans and nonbinary folx, who have shown me that being loved, being cherished, being successful aren’t just relegated to the world of the skinnies. That said, as a yoga teacher who is in a larger body, I live in a world where thinness is coveted. We all do. To exist as a fat person is to constantly move up-current, with resistance.
My mom lived in that world, too. She told me about how, during her childhood, there was a year when she and her sister could finally wear pants. Looking at a picture of her as a teenager, sitting on a bed in jeans, she said to me once, “I thought I was so fat. I wasn’t fat at all.”
Same.
I was made fun of for being fat, and my mom called me fat, but looking back at pictures of myself I see a child. Just a child. Not someone whose body size should dictate their worth. I’ll tell you this right now: learning how to diet very early in life fucked up my metabolism and harmed me, body, mind, and soul. Dieting was the most harmful thing I cam across as a young person. More harmful than heroin.
Dieting creates a moving target. A goal weight is never a goal weight. The rhetoric of thinness and dieting burrows into the brain like a parasite, funneling energy away from the more productive things we could be doing. No, not just productive. Caring, loving, nourishing. It makes us hate ourselves and by proxy we hate others. It makes us judge others based upon their appearances and not their actual selves.
Appearance means fucking nothing. I mean it. Like, what even is appearance? The way someone looks physically? It’s nothing when compared to the expanse of who someone is and what they have to offer. That our society grants people privileges based on racist and sexist and ageist and homophobic/transphobic beauty standards says a lot about us. It brings out the worst in us, and destroys us from the inside. We can do better than that.
I threw up on Thursday, and today I am okay. I am in a yoga nidra training this weekend, teaching yoga this afternoon. I am writing this newsletter. I am not ashamed of relapsing because I know it is all part of the process of recovery. I am not ashamed of my bulimia because I know it kept me alive through some real shit. I also know it’s time to let it go. And that letting go is easier said than done.
Links!
Here are a bunch of links about diet culture and ED recovery. Christy Harrison’s podcast Food Psych has helped me immensely, Jessica DeFino’s Substack The Unpublishable is an amazing resource for those who have been harmed by the “beauty industry,” Sabrina Strings writes and podcasts about how diet culture is inherently racist, Dalina Soto is doing amazing things with Latinx folx struggling with diet culture and ED’s, Haley Jones is doing beautiful work with queer folx.
These prints by Reesa Beesa are wonderful and I love them.
I am making a bunch of foods from Whole Food Cooking Every Day (it’s where I got the compote recipe) and really am enjoying them. I even made bread!
Many years ago I bought a pair of LuLaRoe pants at a yoga studio. A woman was having a pop up event. I wonder if she, like so many others, had to file for bankruptcy. This documentary is a must-watch.
I am learning about yoga nidra from Tracee Stanley and Chanti Tacorante-Perez. Yoga nidra is an ancient practice descended from a fraught lineage. I love what I’m learning and hope to be offering workshops by spring time.
I love Alicia Kennedy’s food newsletter— the way she writes about food is decolonized and her perspective has always been one that I value. It’s been wonderful watching her build her Substack!
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