Since anorexia is back on the market (literally… mail order Ozempic?) and the red carpet (yes, I will body shame evident encouragement of emaciation)…
Let me give you some perspective from a lifelong anorexic.
***DISCLAIMER***
I am going to limit the scope of this discussion specifically to disordered eating, not weight loss for necessary health or medical purposes!
We’ll start with the moment I first remember becoming aware of body size.
I am 7 or 8 and starving after a long day at school.
Mother puts down a heaping plate of dinner in front of me. I consume it greedily.
Beefaroni isn’t my favorite meal, but anything warm and filling will satiate me right now. The episode of Pokémon that I’m watching ends, the credits rolling with clips of new scenes from tomorrow’s show.
A commercial clicks on.
Two women named Candi and Delia walk across a field onscreen.
They are sisters and they’ve shared a lot of things.
Even getting fat.
They lost over a hundred pounds together, a whole person.
The last time I went to the doctor I weighed just under 60 pounds. They lost almost two of me!
Candi and Delia feel great. People compliment them and they feel beautiful with the extra pounds shed.
Just one chocolate or vanilla shake in the morning, another for lunch, and a “sensible” dinner. That’s how you too can lose half of a whole person, or an entire child.
The Slim-Fast plan works! Get healthy!
I go back to my meal, but the plate is empty.
I walk into the kitchen. “Mom, I’m still hungry. Can I have some more?”
Mother doesn’t respond. She’s standing in the kitchen, balancing my baby sister on her hip and washing the dishes one-handed.
I eye the still-full pan of beefaroni. “Did you have any yet? I want seconds!”
“Don’t you think you had enough?” Her tone is accusatory. “That was a huge plate.”
A slight shame burns through me. “I’m still hungry…. There’s a lot left here, you didn’t have any?”
“Mommy is having something else for dinner tonight, sweetie.”
“Why? What’s wrong with the beefaroni?”
“Nothing is wrong with it. Beef is just high in fat and calories and mommy wants to be skinny for the summer so I can wear a bikini again.”
She reaches to her right, out of my view, and brings a can to her lips.
She sits it down on the counter next to me.
The can reads: Slim Fast
I pause for a moment.
I put my plate in the sink. “Actually, I don’t think I need any more food.”
That evening, I learned the first three Being Skinny Rules:
Being Skinny Rules #3
No second helpings
Being Skinny Rules #2
Beef has a lot of fat and calories
Being Skinny Rules #1
Being skinny will make you beautiful, healthy, and happy.
As I evolved from child to adolescent, my curves mutated with me. I’ll never forget, when I was 11 or 12, an adult man made a hideously uncomfortable comment about how I looked like JLo “with a body and ass to match!”
I did look different than the other girls my age. I was never naturally thin. My legs were soft and round instead of gangly chicken sticks. My skin was loose and dimpled instead of firm and taut. My stomach was thick and rippled like pancake batter instead of flat and concave.
I became hyper aware of everyone else’s body in comparison to my own.
Mimi too often warned me of gaining too much weight and being saddled with a Ralphie—what she called the protruding extra skin rolls on her lower stomach, a permanent reminder of her first and only child. She said Ralphie was her second and she was eternally pregnant with the fat, the female curse.
She would pinch at her stomach and thighs, pulling back the areas of skin that needed to be firmer. No flesh, only bones.
“No one likes a fatty,” Mimi said.
I didn’t want to be fat.
Fat was the worst thing you could be.
Between Mother and Mimi’s tag-team yo-yo dieting, we had tried them all. Jenny Craig, South Beach Diet, Weight Watchers, Atkins, The Master Cleanse, The No Dairy-Gluten-Fat-Trans Fat-Carbs Diet. Mimi even started us on something called The Tomato Diet.
Restriction was the norm because everything else was always so out of control. Relationships, finances, living situations—all of it was steeping in disorder and toxicity. The cycle has been ongoing for generations of women in our family.
What else was within our direct power, other than the shape and size of our bodies?
Over the years, the Being Skinny Rules started to add up.
Rule #4: No eating after 8PM.
Rule #11: Never take in more calories than you put out.
Rule #18: Dessert is never really necessary.
Rule #21: If you feel hungry, you probably just need a big glass of water.
I’m sitting in 8th grade American History class. My white, southern teacher is telling us about how enslaved African Americans really didn’t have it that bad. Some masters treated their slaves like family, and many slaves lived mostly regular lives.
I’m writing notes in my composition book that challenge my teacher’s perspective when I feel a slight shift in my desk. One of the popular boys, who sits behind me, grunts loudly.
“Ahhh… My legs are so cramped from our baseball conditioning. I need to stretch!”
He pushes the back legs of my desk forward. The metal scrapes on the linoleum tile and the entire class turns in my direction.
“Holy shit bitch!” His voice booms across the classroom “You’re fucking heavy! I think I leg pressed your weight this morning!”
Everyone laughs in unison.
Shame flushes through my cheeks and chest, deep into my stomach.
I feel nauseous.
The bell rings. The teacher dismisses us, instructing us to either go to our next class or to lunch. It’s my lunch period so I head out the door and to the right, walking towards the cafeteria.
Two of the popular girls from class, the ones who laughed the loudest, sneak up behind me and shove their shoulders into me simultaneously.
“You should probably skip lunch today fatty,” one chirps.
The other burns me with her cruelty:
“Yeah, it’s not like you need it. What size jeans do you wear? A 6? I have an extra pair of triple-zero Hollister jeans if you want them as motivation. No boys want to fuck a fatty.” They skip off, cackling.
I sit down at the lunch table near the acquaintances I’ve made in the 6 months since I was forced to start this new middle school. I set my lunchbox on the table, but I don’t open it. I lay my head down in my arms.
“Hey, are you okay? Aren’t you going to eat?” The girl who asks is kind, but morbidly obese.
“I’m not hungry,” I reply. “I have a stomachache. I think I’m getting sick.”
“Well, what do you have to eat? You shouldn’t let food go to waste. That’s what my mom always says.”
I’m sure she does.
I open the lunchbox. Inside is a low-carb turkey and lettuce wrap (no mayo), an apple, and a package of 100-calorie Oreo Thin Crisps. My acquaintances divvy up the goods amongst themselves, and I spend the rest of lunch with my face buried in my forearms, trying to dry up the tears that incessantly leak from my eyes.
Rule #24: You don’t need to eat lunch
Rule #25: No boys want to fuck a fatty
After middle school, anorexia became my sole focus in life. My weight jumped up and down. Sometimes I bordered on emaciation, but most of the time I looked just like a normal, small-framed woman. It was a tremendous amount of effort to stay skinny.
My eating disorder was at its worst point from ages 16 to 20. I had been officially diagnosed by a psychiatrist when I was 15 but never sought consistent treatment. I was purging every minuscule thing I consumed that contained calories. A “binge” for me was a normal meal and I knew every single method of how to evacuate the food.
I would exercise late at night in my bedroom, obsessively counting the reps and only stopping when my muscles spasmed. I took 10-20 stimulant laxatives a day for years, partially paralyzing my digestive track permanently. Without the pills, I’d be constipated for weeks and uncomfortably distended with bloating. I could throw up just by bending over; I didn’t even have to pull trig anymore. I hated throwing up, but I would do anything to purge myself completely empty.
I was constantly freezing with limbs mottled purple and lips tinged blue. I grew a coat of soft, white body hair while the hair on my head fell out in fist size clumps. My gums bled and my breath stank and my tonsils and uvula were constantly bleeding and raw. My bones were frail, fractured and breaking from daily activities. My period stopped at 14 and didn’t come back until I was 20. I still don’t know the long-term repercussions of that.
I didn’t care. I only had the motivation to slowly, tortuously shrink myself until I embodied the hollow nothing I felt inside.
All that to just barely be underweight. To be hardly emaciated, not thin enough to fit the picture-perfect, textbook definition of anorexia. But it is my diagnosis. And I have always believed that it is the symptoms and behavior are what matter, not the numbers on the scale.
I am 19 years old and living alone in a place I hardly know.
My anorexia has devolved to the point where it entirely consumes my life. All I do is count calories and formulate how to expulse anything I intake from my body and weigh myself to see how much I’ve gained or loss. My preferred diet these days is vodka, Coke Zero, and Percocets.
I am miserable and dying, but I can’t stop. I don’t know how to stop. And I feel like no one else cares to force me to stop. (Still, it’s true that no one can save you but you alone)
I visit a new therapist and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I have nowhere to turn and I’m just killing myself without a single witness.
The therapist says something, but I’m high and dissociated, so her comment doesn’t process.
“W-what?” The word struggles to come out. My voice is rough and raw from clawing my nails into my uvula earlier to dispose of my 152-calorie breakfast.
“You are going to die if you don’t get help.”
I understand her this time. I’m silent.
The therapist looks at me seriously, with true care. “Do your parents live nearby?”
“No. They’re 15 hours away in a different state. Why?”
“I know you’re legally an adult now, but someone should be helping you through this.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I reply with dry sarcasm.
She gets up from her chair and shuffles through her desk drawers. Returning, she hands me three pamphlets. They read: Timberline Knolls, Rosewood Ranch, and The Renfrew Center.
“These names make these places sound like a fucking vacation resort.”
She chuckles. “They are all residential treatment facilities for young women with eating disorders. Do you want to call them together and see if any beds are available?”
I hesitate. I need more time. I’m not ready yet.
“I think I’ll take these home and do it myself.”
“Are you actually going to do it?”
Her directness catches me off guard. “What do you mean?”
“Are you going to go home and call the treatment centers or are you going to go home and hurt yourself? Your answer depends on what I do next.”
I stare at her, silent.
My next words will determine if I am involuntarily committed (again) or not.
She continues. “Let’s do this. I know you’re struggling, but I do think you want to get better. I don’t want to traumatize you further. Let’s schedule another appointment for tomorrow at the same time. Go home, get some rest, call the facilities in the morning. Then, when you get here, you can tell me where you’re going.”
I thumb through the pamphlets. “What if they don’t want to take me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t look sick enough. Anorexics who go to treatment centers look like walking skeletons. I’ve seen it. I’m not that bad.”
She sighs, looking out the 15th floor window to the streets of downtown Nashville. She turns back to me.
“You will learn, but it’s never going to be about how your body appears. It’s your mind that is sick and in need of healing.”
I call the rehab centers. The one closest to home has space for me. I talk for an hour with an intake counselor, and she tells me I made the right choice by contacting them.
I, alone, make the decision to recover.
I watch again, as the body trends cycle back now towards emaciation.
And honestly? I’m just so fucking bored of the predictability.
Don’t forget ladies—they want you skinny. They want you frail and delicate and fragile, even if it means you are two breaths from death.
And you already know who they are.
Anorexia is a product of the patriarchy.
Do you know where anorexia is said to originate from?
That’s not a rhetorical question; I’ll tell you—Religion.
Stay with me for a second.
Of course, there is the long-documented fear of being overweight even when extremely underweight, a “nervous absence of the appetite” that became the widely accepted diagnosis of anorexia nervosa in the 1800s.
But originally, it was anorexia hysterica.
Hysterica, as in hysteria, as in uterus, as in women?
Yes.
Simultaneously, religious asceticism, deriving the body of either pleasures or basic needs, a process of purification to realign the body with the soul’s purpose, has existed for centuries.
There is a spirituality associated with fasting. Humans (allegedly) need food to survive. If you can survive without food for as long as possible… what are you? More than human, closer to God. If you can be disciplined and obedient, you can reach enlightenment. You can achieve your purpose.
If you are skinny, you are perfect.
Many women are documented to have died from starvation or extreme fasting, usually under the guidance of a male superior who encouraged them.
Now, a rhetorical question: In modern Abrahamic religions, what do they want women to be?
Think of the not-so-coincidental patterns of timing where conservativism and the shrinking of feminine bodies coincide. There is an impossible paradox of making your body as small as possible to retain a perfect childlike appearance while also being expected to mature into a matriarch cycling new children into this world. They put women in a completely unattainable position by design. And women are the overwhelming majority who suffer from anorexia.
Why do they want this?
It’s the Final Rule of Being Skinny:
You cannot fight back. You must submit.
I am almost 30 and relapsing again—the worst one in a while. I lost my job, my career path, my identity after leaving my doctorate program. I’ve had many, many periods like this when I’ve gone through difficult times, but this relapse is different. Going back to anorexia feels safe, a familiar container for my suffocating sadness. Something within my control in this time of complete chaos.
One of the worst continuing symptoms of my eating disorder is that there is no longer a boundary between intentional starvation and starvation from intense emotion.
I am sad, angry, upset and my stomach turns off. I can’t even force myself to eat right now if I try. Any bite of food or any liquid too thick makes me dry heave. I vomit without warning and most of the time it is pure acidic stomach bile burning through my esophagus.
Inevitably, all the old behaviors creep back in. I secretly weigh myself and watch the pounds drop, I exercise obsessively, I pretend I’m eating more than I do. The compliments and concerns of my family and friends feed me. Even my doctors congratulate me on the recent twenty pounds shed. It’s all too easy to follow the Being Skinny rules again.
Beautiful. Happy. Healthy.
Anything but with lifelong anorexia.
Trust me when I say you do not want to fall into the inescapable labyrinth of anorexia—or any eating disorder for that matter. Although I am constantly choosing recovery, the thoughts of food, calories, weight, size still circle through my mind every single fucking day.
But I can quiet the voices by mentally sucker punching them and saying: “Fuck you! I’m eating this goddamn double bacon cheeseburger, the fries, AND a milkshake.” Eating is rebellion against the patriarchy and a refusal to stay trapped in my ancestral curses.
I don’t know if I will ever truly know peace when it comes to food. I still overthink every morsel that passes my lips. I hate eating in front of people and some days I just can’t bring myself to swallow anything other than water (and maybe a Coke Zero).
I try to enjoy food. I try to just focus on the sensory experience and not the thoughts screaming in my brain. I try not to count my calories, try not to body check in the mirror, try not to notice every little fluctuation in my weight, try not to worry I will be unattractive if I gain weight.
I try because it will require a disciplined, concerted effort for the rest of my life to not succumb to my anorexia.
I’ll save my rehab story for another day, but going to treatment saved my life but it wasn’t a linear path. I will be slowly walking down recovery lane for the rest of my days.
Trust me when I tell you: you don’t want this disease or the consequences of starvation. Anyone who has truly suffered from any disordered eating will tell you they wish they never started.
And those who don’t say that?
They’re dead.
