Eating-disorder recovery is not easily definable. Recovery and survival from any trauma, mental illness, addiction, or disembodiment of self looks and feels different to and for everyone.
One thing is certain: Eating disorders do not discriminate. And all too often, they are neither obvious nor visible in presentation. All too often, they are stigmatized, or silenced altogether.
As a writer, performer, and body empowerment advocate, I have spent much of my life sharing my eating-disorder survival story. And still, it feels impossible to perfectly articulate the deadly mental illness that is an eating disorder, as the journey of survival is uniquely personal.
We heard from a diverse array of individuals worldwide who have experienced various eating disorders and experiences with body image, who describe their survival in myriad ways. Here are some of the many stories we received.
—Caroline Rothstein
Jenny Chang/BuzzFeed
As a 12-year-old with full-blown anorexia, I was involuntarily institutionalized after having an eating disorder–induced seizure. The institution was not equipped to deal with eating disorders, and their only plan of action was to watch me eat, shower, and sleep to ensure I didn’t throw up, exercise, or throw my food away. I was treated less as a medical patient and more like a criminal, unable to privately mourn the loss of my innocence and adolescence.
This was my first insight into how our health care system is unprepared to treat eating disorder survivors, a travesty compounded by society’s rigid physical ideals for women. Survivors could best be served by the development of new treatment options targeted at modifying harmful behaviors and by eroding patriarchal visions of the female body. Instead, we are treated like social outliers who are shamed and told we have taken things too far. Denying the existence of sexism is a historically convenient method of the ignorant, and to tell an eating disorder survivor that our plight is of self-creation is to validate the disproportionate and unrealistic physical expectations for women that have permeated every aspect of society.
I will never forget the first time I saw my own reflection without wanting to see less of it. It took years for me to regain control of my life and body, both of which deserved respect and love after having spent years as a battleground. Sharing my story was the first step toward total recovery and remains my personal form of resistance. By speaking out, we can reduce the shame and stigma associated with eating disorders and give courage to millions of survivors.
My story begins at age 4. I was extremely underweight for my height and age; however, my grandmother told I had “arms like ham” and was “getting chubby.” I spent my entire childhood surrounded by weight stigma — whether it was from my grandmother constantly telling me to “go on a diet” or comparing my own body to my friends'.
At 12, I went on what I described as a “very strict diet.” I had no clue what anorexia was. I thought it was when someone literally never ate anything due to some underlying emotional problem, when, in reality, accordingly to my personal understanding and experience, it’s a disease that manifests in the mind; an utter fear of weight gain. It does not have a specific physical appearance. It does not pick particular races or genders. It just is.
My “diet” left me with a failing liver, a problematic heart, hair loss, and osteopenia. I went into treatment for anorexia and fully came to terms with my disease, and began to believe that I did not choose this. Anorexia was like a light switch that lived inside my brain, turned off for most of my life. The stigma surrounding my weight is what turned it on.
For me, I will never turn my anorexia off. It’s always going to be a struggle. I can, however, dim the lights. Now, at 16, I remain recovered without relapse. Although every day I see girls in magazines and in person with tiny waists, I am fighting. I am alive. I almost lost my life, and my life is much more important than my weight. Someday, I think I will 100% believe I am beautiful, and I will do that on my own terms, without the help of a boy or Instagram likes. Until then, I remain a 16-year-old girl still surrounded by weight stigma and slowly, but surely, learning to be comfortable with myself.
—Meg Masseron
My eating disorder was a unicorn in shape. I was never terrified of certain foods. I never truly thought I was fat. While I didn’t use my mathematically inclined mind to count calories, I used it to balance an equation in my head: an equation of worth. Growing up, food was taken away when I was bad. In my mind, I equated it to not being worth food at all. I took that mind-set to college, with a bit of freedom, resulting in a streak of bingeing. Each episode left me with this feeling of worthlessness. One might say it contributed to my leaving college after a violent sexual assault campus police refused to do anything about left me feeling even more worthless.
But I was worth the physical demands of the military. I was worth the possibility of dying. During my time in the Air Force, I was told repeatedly that I was nothing. Things I recited to myself for years were now coming out of the lips of those in charge of me. If there was any doubt I didn’t deserve to be alive, let alone eat, it was eradicated. Ultimately, I was kicked out for having an eating disorder, deemed unable to deploy and unfit for service. As a parting gift, the military paid for my first treatment stint.
A couple of years passed before I needed treatment again, this time due to a severe heart problem from malnourishment. I have never been so humbled and humiliated as those days I had to go into work with a feeding tube. I think I needed that. I couldn’t hide the fact I had an eating disorder by lying or saying I had a fast metabolism. I had something sticking out of my nose that couldn’t be ignored. After six months in treatment and the best psychiatrist I have ever had, I have been weight restored and behavior-free for two years. I have found balance. I have found that you assign your own worth. By assigning your own worth, you afford and deny yourself opportunities. So set that worth high. Happiness is not a destination, it’s moments. You won’t get moments of happiness if you feel worthless, because you won’t believe you deserve them. I want you to know: You deserve them.
—K.F.
When I was in college, I developed a binge-eating disorder. As a transgender man, my body already caused me a great deal of discomfort and emotional pain, and it seemed almost natural to take my stress and anxiety out on my physical self. The summer after freshman year of college, I was living at home, binge-eating most nights. In my mind, I was weak; I didn’t have the discipline to restrict eating, and I was running to try to counteract the eating. Almost a year later, back at college, I woke up and couldn’t make myself eat. I just sat staring at my kitchen, crying.
The Emily Program in St. Paul, Minnesota, might be the greatest place in the world to learn how to save your own life. My therapist and nutritionist were patient, constantly morphing a treatment plan to fit where I was at. They helped me understand binge eating, and gave me the strength to identify my binging as a disorder, not a weakness, and work to relearn healthy habits.
While in recovery, a teacher/mentor suggested I take steps to look into hormone therapy, that maybe making such positive changes might help me have a healthier relationship with my body. I’ve been on testosterone injections for two years and can honestly say testosterone is the reason I’ll never have an eating disorder again. Putting such positive and affirming energy into my body and into making slow and steady changes to how I see myself pushes me to take care of myself in every aspect of life. I no longer see my body as something to fight against. I no longer see food as a weapon or as a punishment. Sometimes, when I am anxious or sad or stressed, I find myself getting a small urge to binge, but now I know I can trust myself to take care of myself.
When I look at myself now, I notice how I finally have a beard growing in, or how my face is sharpening and my hips are narrowing to a more masculine shape. I don’t see a weak binger or someone who is nothing but an eating disorder they’ll never crawl out of. For the first time in my life, without any second thought, I see someone strong who has survived and thrived. I see someone who has taken control of themselves and their body in a healthy, positive way. I see me.
There was no real moment when my recovery began. Where I said, “I’ve decided to get better” or could magically shut off the voice in my head. Simply facing the possibility of recovery was a long process in itself, like a flower sitting in the cold of winter and painfully turning toward the sun. Done so carefully, in fact, it doesn’t even register the movement.
But there was a moment when I felt things shift; I was sprawled out in my college dorm room, workout clothes on, reprimanding myself with the typical shoulds and shouldn’ts, when a part of my mind or body or soul that I didn’t know still existed burst bright and asked, “Why?”
I didn’t have an answer, but my eating disorder had plenty. All the answers I knew so well. The ones that haunted me in my sleep and stole me from the day. The answers that had driven me to destroy myself for years. Somehow, though, while my mind continued relentlessly, I realized my answer didn’t matter just yet because the question itself was strong enough. The place from where it came inside me was strong enough.
When I started my recovery, I had lost so much of who I was that, in order to find myself again, I had to start with what I knew: I love the sound of rain through an open window, I love my dog’s sweet kisses, I love how the sun looks in winter.
In the beginning, that I was all I could recall, but the more I recovered, the more I remembered. What was even more exciting were the things I started to learn about myself for the first time. And even though they might look minuscule — like why I dance while making dinner, why I laugh so loud, why I asked “Why?” that day — I’m pretty sure they’re the only things that really add up in the end.
—S.E. Carson
It was the mid-'60s, the Sexual Revolution was gaining traction, freedom was all around, and Twiggy hit the world stage, revered for her gaunt, skinny look. Suddenly, “thin was in,” and I was an anomaly in a family of tall and rail-thin or short and petite; I was just an ordinary child in an ordinary body.
I am a survivor. I have more early memories of my eating disorder than I do of my siblings and family and school. At no point during the more than four decades following my initial hospitalization at age 6 was I able to get properly diagnosed and treated for my eating disorder, despite numerous attempts and cries for help on my part. This was my survivorship, to continue to excel until a major occupational fall from grace in my late forties found me in the treatment system — a system designed for teens and young women that did not want to hear how my older adult struggles and needs were different.
Now I am a survivor of the “treatment” system, a graduate of inpatient admissions where I learned new methods of self-destruction and hatred, where I was never skinny enough, sick enough, needy enough. I have become an “untouchable,” whose needs exceed the capacity of treatment services, so they offer next to nothing. I am back in a race to the bottom, wondering, perhaps if I get sick enough, will they try to help me again?
—Sally Chaster
Growing up in a Jamaican-American household, food was an integral part of my childhood. I remember my grandmother preparing fried dumplings and plantains, church hymns playing in the background. Food was our greatest treasure. Food brought the family together. Food celebrated new beginnings and eased the wounds of life’s untimely endings.
When I was 8, I was diagnosed with dermatomyositis, a muscle disease that caused me to spend most of my childhood in hospital rooms and wheelchairs, slowly gaining weight whilst swallowing prednisone hidden inside mint chocolate chip ice cream. My mom made it her duty to help me lose the weight through fad dieting. I’ve tried every single one. In fairness, my mother did the best she could. As a single mom, she felt the camaraderie of these shared diets brought us closer. However, as an adult, I began to experience a paralyzing fear of food. My “I’ll start a new diet on Monday” mind-set lasted for 16 years as I compulsively ate and deprived my body. I was worried that I was not attractive enough. So obsessed and afraid no one would hire me as an actor if I didn’t win the battle with the numbers on the scale, in February 2011 I attempted suicide and landed in the hospital for multiple days.
We do extreme things to our bodies because of those numbers. Numbers that cannot talk with us or love us. On March 20, 2014, I threw my scale in the trash, and to ensure I wouldn’t rescue it, I threw chicken stock on it. I have had to practice looking in the mirror and telling myself I am beautiful. I have had to stop judging my belly, stop starving myself, stop getting on the scale and staring at those numbers. It took me years to find the courage to stop pressuring my body. Food is still an integral part of my life, and I still struggle to this day after living a life of “quick fixes.” But, I have come to the realization that my life is more important than those numbers on the scale and that the quality of the life I live is more important than how I look in the mirror.
If the hardest part is recognizing you have a problem, exercise addiction is the hardest problem to recognize. Only when mine descended into an eating disorder did I become fully aware of the power and control this condition had over my life and me. We are bombarded with health and fitness in the media to such an extent that even the most intense, devoted training programs seem acceptable and normal. Even whilst running and weight lifting far more than any man ever should, it wasn’t until my weight started to dip alarmingly that anyone around me recognized I had a dual battle on my hands: exercise addiction and anorexia.
My story with this battle began with a lifelong fight against anxiety and depression. As someone who, excuse the pun, tends to run away from his problems, jogging and the gym became a sanctuary away from the intrusive thoughts, anxieties, and low moods. It was my buffer against the world. As the world became a scarier place, I felt the need to continually strengthen that buffer. No doctor or psychologist would explicitly tell me to stop exercising so much; they were conditioned to believe in the ample mental health benefits of it, even at my extreme end. By the time I decided I needed to take time off, my body was broken. I cried as I ran, hating myself for putting my body through hell. Unfortunately, that’s when the eating disorder took over. If I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t allowed to eat. I’d never experienced such a strong force in my life, and I gave in to it, allowing it to control everything I did, thought, and said.
My life turned around when I was threatened multiple times with inpatient treatment. However, my recovery has been hard-fought. I never lost that eating disorder voice, and it still screams to this day. What has helped most is recognizing life is made up of an infinite number of choices, whether we make them consciously or subconsciously. Eating is one such choice. By recognizing I had control over these choices, I was able to modify my eating and behaviors around exercise so I regained control of my body and life. Every meal, I choose to eat and eat well. If I have to do this for the rest of my life, so be it. Recovery is not an easy path, but it is the right one, and the one that takes the most strength to walk down.
—Ben Carter
