The rulebook of cool: when your eating disorder takes over your life

One sunny September morning in 2015, I was out for a run in my neighborhood, a frequent occurrence for a health conscious twenty-three year old. I was rounding a familiar corner when my foot got caught on an uneven bit of sidewalk, sending me hurtling to the ground. My head smashed against the sidewalk. When I pushed myself up, I felt a searing pain in my right temple. Touching the tender area revealed blood — a lot of it. I walked home with a brave face, clutching my head with my already stained hand. Living with my parents at the time, my mother drove me to the shockingly empty emergency room. I got five stitches, I called out of work for the day, and I laughed it off. Case closed.

At least, that’s the official story.

In reality, it was my “health-conscious” fitness plan that caused the injury. I was so exhausted, physically and mentally, from running three miles almost every day that I wasn’t paying attention at all to my surroundings. I was going through the motions and tripped over my own feet. My autopilot cost me a day’s wages, but they also were indicative of a greater problem that I was failing to address and wouldn’t address for years to come: that my eating disorder had consumed my entire existence.

I am not a thin girl, nor am I fat. I’ve always erred on the petite side of average, being five foot two. Up until my early twenties, I had a largely neutral relationship with my body. But in the last embers of a tumultuous 22nd year, I resolved to get in shape like the girls I saw walking around my native NYC. On the heels of a bad breakup, I resolved to get something of a revenge body — nothing crazy, just enough to make them realize what they let go. (Yes, they, as I went through two pretty big breakups in one year. Red flag number one.) I’d lose ten pounds, maybe, tone up. The shape was the goal, not the weight. I was going to be healthy about this. I ended up losing about twenty five to thirty pounds, depending on menstrual fluctuation.

To the average bystander, I looked like I was in my prime. My cheekbones were cut! My figure was slender! I was sooooo tiny! I got compliments left and right from everyone under the sun, from family and friends to strangers (those weren’t always welcome, but as someone who had never been noticed before, I found it sadly flattering). I wore clothes I never thought I’d have the confidence to wear. I snagged lovers that never would have looked at me twice before. I ran into my ex-boyfriend on public transit and got that double-take that I had been dreaming of. I was on top of the world. And all because of this new body.

However, no one saw what was behind the curtain, and I made sure to keep it that way.

First of all, there were strict rules I had to follow. These were self imposed and I punished myself with even more exercise if I broke any one of these rules. They were the following:

No bread, ever. If I absolutely had to eat bread, like if it would offend someone if I didn’t, it had to be wheat bread, and it could only be one piece. If I had to eat pasta, it would be exactly one cup, measured with a measuring cup, and no more. Ideally, no carbs in general. (I ate a lot of leafy green sandwiches, and no matter what people try to tell you, they don’t taste the same.) No sugar except from fruit, and even then I had to be sparing because all that fructose! That meant no maple syrup, no honey, no agave, nothing. No dressings. No butter, not even margarine. No excess oil, and olive oil was the only acceptable type of oil. Minimal, if any, cheese. Coffee could still be consumed with cream, but only a tablespoon. If I was hungry, I was to consume a cup of coffee and/or a glass of water because if it was too soon between meals, I wasn’t hungry. Eating at restaurants was an inevitability of living in NYC, and navigating a menu with my self imposed restrictions was next to impossible. When I managed to find something to eat, I would only eat half of it, even if it was a relatively small portion and I was still hungry. Hunger was a sign of weakness. I should be satiated with a smaller amount of food.

See how insane that all is? Writing it out makes it plain, but I did not see it that way. Here’s how it actually played out:

I drank coffee instead of eating. I chewed gum and ate sugar free mints instead of eating. I actually stopped drinking alcohol for a time, but it wasn’t for the reason I actually needed to stop drinking, which is that it was bad for my mental health. That didn’t come until much later. It was because alcohol was high in calories. (Hot take: this is the worst way to try to get someone to quit drinking, because if someone is addicted, chances are they don’t care.) Once I figured out that I could drink without eating and get even more drunk, that was out the window. I became terrified of eating in front of people, thinking they were judging me for consuming. And if I did something human like eat junk food or skip a day of exercising because I was tired, I had to be punished. This could be purging. This could be more brutal exercise the next day. Often I would look at pictures of much thinner women, like Hayley Williams or Taylor Swift, and chastise myself for not being like them. They were stronger. They were better than me. (Finding out recently from Miss Americana that Ms Swift was, also, suffering from disordered eating struck something of a chord in my recovered soul.)

There wasn’t a definite moment in which I decided that enough was enough, that I was taking back my body for myself. Other things just started taking precedent, but not necessarily for the better. I went through a major depressive episode as part of my ongoing struggle with Bipolar II in 2017 followed by a major falling out with a friend. I got entangled in several messy not-relationships. I started drinking much more heavily. All of these negative things probably contributed to my weight gain, but there were positive things as well. I started an MFA program in the fall of 2016, the first truly self-interested act I’d done in over a decade, and my mind was occupied by something other than calorie counting and exercise charting. I switched from desk work to more physical work, which built my strength and stamina in ways that going to the gym never could. And my weight continued to climb. I weigh more than I ever have in my entire life now, and I’m learning to be okay with it.

I’ve done a lot of things in even just the past few months of quarantine that have contributed to the reclamation of my body. Since being on leave from my grocery job, I’ve been able to properly control my eating habits, since I’ve been cooking all my meals. This doesn’t mean that I’m reverting back to my old ways. I’m allowing myself to eat rice, bread, pasta, cheese, not-so-lean meats — simple things most people take for granted, but I deprived myself of. I don’t eat when I’m not hungry, but even if it’s two hours after I last ate and I’m hungry, I eat. I’m pretty sure I should have been doing things this way the first time.

I’ve also had the time and mental energy to devote to a half hour of yoga every day. I never really, truly liked running — I just thought it was the most effective type of exercise and it seemed the most accessible, so I did it. The benefits of taking the time to do something I like as opposed to what is recommended to me have been marvelous. Even at my thinnest, when I was supposedly at my healthiest, I couldn’t do push-ups. Now I can do many. I’m not the best at every pose, but I can touch my toes without bending my knees now, which I wasn’t able to do at my thinnest.

Why didn’t you ever tell anyone you were suffering? Why didn’t you reach out for help? Both good questions! I don’t know. I think there’s some sad part of me that wanted someone to notice that I wasn’t doing okay. But I can’t fault people for not recognizing the signs. If the person is not bone thin and a young woman (men and non binary people can have eating disorders, too!), people often can’t tell that someone might be consumed by this disease. And what I was doing is still relatively new in the medical world — it was a form of orthorexia, an extreme form of clean eating in which nothing is pure enough to be consumed. Besides all that, I’m a trained actor, and what better use of that skill than to fool my family and friends into thinking that I was just “taking charge of my life”?

Am I perfectly okay with myself? Not every day. Some days, especially on bad mental health days, I wake up and hate the fact that I have a body at all. I lament its shape and how I’ve “let myself go.” I hate the fact that clothes I once loved don’t fit me anymore. I think about how unattractive I am. But then I recalibrate. Having a body allows me to experience all the great things about this world. I’ve let myself go to a place where I can be defined by something other than my size. I can just buy new clothes. I have a boyfriend who finds me attractive, and even if I didn’t, being attractive is extremely overrated. I am so much more than a rulebook that’s impossible to live by.

If I could sit with my twenty-three year old self in the emergency room that September morning, I would look into her tear-filled eyes and tell her that she didn’t have to do this anymore. She didn’t have to exercise until she literally injured herself. She didn’t have to deprive herself of every food she thought was delicious. She didn’t have to take the revenge body to the extreme. She could just simply be the wonderful person she was, in the body that was entirely hers and no one else’s.