anorexia

I’m in recovery from anorexia. I’m also learning how to have sex again. The two have more in common than you think.

“Do you have problems eating in front of people?” my date said. When my restrictive anorexia is bad, I tend to limit food consumption.

The main argument against having more open conversations about anorexia is that one person’s recovery memoir is another girl’s manual.

Users exchange tips about restricting food intake, and there’s a lot of “thinspiration,” a phrase for photographs of women with thigh gaps and angular bodies. So many bones.

I could tell you the story of the eating disorder itself, but there’s a lot of good reading out there about that. What I want to talk about is recovery.

When I was first diagnosed with anorexia ten years ago, I vaguely knew that eating disorders were a feminist issue.

If you wake up and you’re thinking about dinner, and it’s not because you forgot to thaw out the pot roast, you have a problem.

I told her in graphic detail about my binges, about the amount and type of food that I forced into my mouth long after I was full, about the lengths I went to to make sure that what I was eating was as unhealthy as possible, maximizing the damage I could do to myself.