Let me start off by reiterating that I really can’t think of anything less glamorous than still moaning on about anorexia at 36.
I’d liken it to when you’ve long broken up with someone and you still cannot stop whinging about it to family and friends, even when you know - you can physically see - that everyone around you is dull-eyed and listless listening to the same indignations you’ve been spewing for however long it’s been (re: me and my Colombian ex two years ago for any of you who remember that saga lmao).
Not only have I yammered on about my eating disorder for the past decade+ but the worst part is I haven’t even stayed away from it.
I’m exactly the friend who breaks up with a POS guy, proclaims she’s FOR REAL done and invites everyone to the break up girl power party, only to sheepishly scooch on back to the burping, philandering idiot a few months later.
That’s been my relationship to anorexia for 20 years.
20 YEARS.
I remember writing on my blog when I’d struggled with anorexia for a measly 8 years and making a huge fuss about how much time that was lost to a mental illness.
How naive.
And how much ‘wisdom’ I thought I had at 26, lol, to believe I knew the means to an end.
I think your 20s are a funny era. You’re no longer a child so you assume by proxy you are beginning to know everything. To ‘get’ life. Or, at the very least, feel like you should ‘get it’ even if you don’t. Therefore you pontificate a lot of ego-driven advice to your friends (or worse, like me, to the internet) and then a few years later sheepishly realize you had no idea what the hell you were talking about at all.
Or that the issue you were so sure you were right about - you, in fact, didn’t read the fine print.
By contrast, the best part of being in my 30s thus far is relinquishing the pressure to know anything.
Now, I am truly free.
I can easily, and readily, admit that I do not know shit about how to live your life or how to recover forever from an eating disorder. I don’t have wisdom and sage advice to pass on to anyone. I’ve only become more aware, with time, as to what triggers and derails me back into mine.
I thought I had anorexia licked multiple times in 20 years, only to experience it creep back into my lifestyle in whack-a-mole ways I couldn’t foresee.
But it feels so different talking about anorexia now - at 36 - rather than 26.
It is just so damn boring.
I’m going to say something and as I write it I’m struggling with how to pin my thoughts so please bear with me.
In my 20s, when I wrote about my eating disorder to the world, I felt zero shame.
I’ll caveat that of course the first time I published my blog in 2013 I definitely felt intense hesitancy to share. But once I realized how many of us were dealing with Tyra-Banks-inspired-body-hatred, the hesitancy and fear left my body in a jiff, replaced with a long sigh of relief.
Writing about all the ways I’d tormented my body, starved it, punished it, bemoaned it, lost time to it, been dishonest through it, did not feel shameful when I realized so many others were in the same boat. It felt like I was figuring it out. And figuring it out with women (and men) everywhere.
Like I was a young battered woman becoming. A budding butterfly, owning her mishaps. Taking responsibility for her integrity. Ripping through the patriarchy … you get the drift.
I was main character material in my own memoir.
And I certainly did not think I’d end up at 36 still writing about this. Because … how utterly droll.
I was fully willing to own all of that in my 20s because I truly believed it would mean I’d really not need to talk about all this well into my 30s.
That by 36, I’d be a thriving, eloquent mother working part-time, a wandering novelist, and married with the most supportive, nurturing human who just adored the hell out me and respected my past without question.
Turns out, I lived in increased versions of delulu.
Eating disorder recovery is still something I’m actively thrashing my head against. And much to my utter shock - instead of simply adoring me no questions asked, new romantic interests are often wary of dating someone with an eating disorder for all the same reasons I’m wary of other people with eating disorders.
We are master manipulators.
And I’m used to only telling 80% truths.
It’s not that I’d call myself a liar. More an omitter, if you will. My most notable character flaw, among plenty, is that I have an extremely difficult time telling the truth if it does not cast me in a good light.
I am a dodger — one who will scatter fragments of truth and hope people mistake them for the whole story to avoid getting criticized, judged, disciplined, or in an effort to not be seen as weak.
Having an eating disorder has certainly at times made me feel pitiful. Like why can others prevail against the heroin chic zeitgeist but I couldn’t?
How do others seem to recover seamlessly whilst I have to continue on paying hundreds of dollars a month in therapy to talk about the same bullshit I’ve moaned on about for a decade.
In the aftermath of that mounting shame, and in the years of both willful hiding and self-denial of an eating disorder, it has imprinted on me an unsavory habit of not being forthright with those around me.
In the fall I was dating someone. In our initial months together, I could feel the mounting questions (I’d liken it to Alex and Ashley on LIB IYKYK) he had about my past. The narrowing of the eyes as he’d ask one thing and I’d watch him try to piece together timelines even I wasn’t sure I had straight in my own life.
Eventually, he snapped.
“I don’t think you tell me the truth about x or x. Your timelines, your stories, it doesn’t all add up.”
He paused.
“And I don’t think you’re as recovered from an eating disorder as you claim. Maybe I’m wrong about that and if so I’m sorry if that’s harsh. But I’ve seen you now nearly every day and you’re objectively still underweight and you definitely do not eat enough. It’s just not adding up for me.”
Naturally, I bit his head off. Hid. Cowered. Thrashed about like a caged, cornered dog.
How DARE he - a man - tell me about my weight. Chauvinist! Sexist! Asshole!
He’s just like all the others, I huffed, bemoaning the last five boyfriends of my 20s & 30s who also in no uncertain terms had similar, albeit less articulate, feedback for me.
It was a conversation that lasted well into the wee early morning. I made well and sure to exhaust both of us with my raging indignation before I finally came around, collapsing onto the bed - admitting “yes, you may be onto something.”
“I do have a problem with omitting facts,” I confessed in the pitch-black dark bedroom. “And I know I’m underweight. I’ve been mostly skimming the line, give or take, since 2021 when I got the van.”
Quietly, he moved his hand under the covers to mine, inviting me with his silence to continue.
“It’s a constant struggle between what feels good and what actually is good,” I explained. “Do I think I look good at my current weight? For sure. And it baffles me that others don’t see it.”
I paused. “I really cannot grasp that people think I’d look better with 10 more pounds. I do not fucking get it, and I do not think any of you know what you’re talking about at the end of the day. I think maybe you think I’d look better with 10 pounds, but it wouldn’t.”
“You were 10 pounds heavier a few years ago though,” he pointed out. “I’ve seen your Instagram. I can tell. Your face was fuller, your chest less gaunt.”
Fighting the initial urge to punch him in the face, I interjected “Yes, and back then I was in a pretty good place with eating and that lasted quite a few years.”
“But …”
“But I hated how I looked,” I said flatly. “I never really consistently felt at peace with it. And when I dropped 10 pounds by accident in 2021 in the van living, I felt like an entirely different person.”
“Meaning?”
“I felt confident. I felt radiant. I felt lighter both physically and mentally. I felt in control, pretty without having to keep convincing myself I was pretty,” I sighed. “So I kinda just fell back into the whole cycle and wrote it off as van life. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t an eating disorder because this version of it was so different than as a teen.”
He began to play with the ring on my third finger I’ve worn since I was 14.
“I didn’t obsess over calories. I didn’t puke or binge. I had lost the weight mostly unknowingly just living out of a van and not really making time for meals, so it just more felt like a blessing that’d been bestowed on me without me trying to do it. And so I just… didn’t really do anything about it. I just let it be. I felt my stomach shrink and my body shrink and I didn’t do anything to counter it. My ex in Canada begged me to see a therapist again so I tried that. Gained 2-3 pounds to put him at ease. But I knew I was eating less. And every now and then I’d make another half-assed effort to eat more, like when I went through egg freezing in 2024, but mostly I just let it be or fall off again … and I guess that’s where I am now. Not really obsessing over it, not trying to really lose more weight per se, but not really wanting to gain either.”
We lay there in the dark, and I listened to the ceiling fan above us whirl quietly, disturbing the quiet.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, in what felt like a moment of tenderness. “That must be terrible to live with.”
I hesitated. “People have much worse conditions than being a few pounds underweight.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. “Is that deflection a common reaction? To minimize? You downplay your past too. I didn’t even realize how serious this was until you told me you’d actually been in treatment for anorexia. That’s when I started to pay more attention to how you eat.”
“I just find it boring to talk about now,” I said. “In my early 20s probably there was a part of me that loved the attention. That needed it for this reason or that. Then in my late 20s it made me a career. I kinda had to talk about it. And recovery was so new and interesting because it was still novel. And the body positivity culture was shifting. I got to become someone entirely new who had more than an eating disorder as a personality. I was at the forefront of cultural change.”
“But now,” I paused. “It’s so boring. I don’t feel I have anything all that novel left to learn. At this point, it’s like oh my God just figure it out already. And in some ways I have. I mean I don’t obsess about my weight anymore. I don’t care about what I eat or count calories. I don’t frankly feel like I’m always hungry, my stomach has shrunk and I really don’t feel like I’m not eating enough. But, I also am always aware that I’m give or take 5-7 pounds underweight so it’s like a safety blanket.”
“Right,” he said. “I get that. But the problem is you see it as attractive, the being underweight, which is not how most do. I mean this in the nicest way I can say it - I find you absolutely beautiful. Your personality, your energy, your face. But I’m going to be honest that there are times I catch glimpses of you changing or coming out of the shower and the first thought I have is that you look incredibly frail. And I’m not used to seeing a woman look that way. And I wonder if you’ll be able to have a child like that or how hard it’ll be on you to carry a baby. And I just think, I really think, if you put on 10 pounds you’d look much healthier.”
I cringed, immediately desiring to push him off the second story staircase and stomp out the house. How dare he not find how I see myself as anything less than wafty and beautiful.
“I’m wildly triggered,” I admitted. “I don’t want to continue this convo much more.”
“I’m sorry,” he tried to explain, but I cut him off.
“I get what you’re saying.”
He paused.
“You’re not the first to say something similar.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I just don’t get it,” I said. “I feel fine. I don’t feel like I’m sick. And I don’t get why you think my body shouldn’t look this way. Just like I don’t get why nobody else in my life agrees with me either. I do not understand,” I paused. “But I am getting to the point that I’m aware I must be very fucking wrong if this is the unanimous feedback.”
We fell asleep soon after, that late September night. And over the following month, the idea stayed with me:
“I’m aware I could be very fucking wrong.”
The thought percolating at night as I walked the one mile to and from the gym back to my new home in Austin. Perhaps, just perhaps, what I believe and what is reality may not be entirely accurate when one has a longstanding eating disorder.
Maybe there comes a point where all I can do is accept that maybe I’ll never quite fucking get why my brain sees and interprets food the way it does. Or why I view my own physical beauty in the frame in which it sits in my brain.
But that to continue on this way will only ever invite more of the same. The same patterns. The same dodging. The same untrustworthiness. The same faults of character. The same boring conversations. The same stressful dishonesty. The same bloody writing.
Not long after, I begrudgingly hired a personal trainer. Within five minutes of measurements he asked if I was naturally underweight or if that was something I wanted to work on.
“Oh I don’t really want to work on it,” I scoffed. “But it seems everyone else thinks I should so maybe they’re right.”
He smiled, nodding in a way that let me know he understood. “I used to be in ballet, I get it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “So yeah, I guess let’s bulk me up then. Why not. What have I got to lose?”
He grinned. “Slow down, sista’. Let’s start by working on smaller muscles first. And eating more protein.”
In the months following, I’m both pleased and displeased to report that I’ve consistently signed up for a weekly meal service.
I have budding muscles where I’ve never before seen.
I’ve all but given up my calorie-burning cardio sans my walks to and from the gym.
And more importantly, I’ve gained 7 pounds as of late. And 10 pounds overall since my lowest point in 2021.
I know we’re not meant in this community to talk about numbers. And I’ll never share my literal weight because who cares. But the 7 feels important in what it represents.
An innocuous number. A forgettable amount to so many.
7 bloody pounds.
I am both pleased and naturally displeased.
Accepting and also not.
Proud and also scared.
Gone (for now) are the crop tops I sported so freely in Medellin, my rib cage peeking for all to marvel.
I am certainly not ready for those anytime soon. And maybe ever again IDK.
My family lately makes comments. Even my 12-year old cousin. “Your face looks happier,” he said this past weekend. And I found it both startling and wildly insightful that a child his age could notice something so subtle.
My mom, as we took our make up off together. “You look better,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I think whatever you’re doing is good for you.”
And I begrudgingly nod.
7lbs, to put my close ones at ease.
7lbs, that may well give me the added help to carry a baby one day.
7lbs, which gives my body something to draw from as it ages.
I suppose it’s worth it then - in all of its bloody discomfort.
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