disordered eating

It’s taken me a long time to write about this topic because I’m not an eating disorder specialist or clinician.

Is everyone so deeply entrenched in diet culture that we don’t even hear ourselves anymore?

With celebrities suggesting that people eliminate entire food groups in the name of “cleansing” and/or “eating clean," Dr. Jessen comments: “I’ve had many, many patients, so many of them teenagers, convinced that their healthy lifestyle and their clean-eating regime was really helping them when actually all it was doing was helping them hide their increasingly disordered eating and to cover up an underlying eating disorder.”

Eating disorder recovery isn’t magic — at least, not at first. It’s so normal for your brain to try and justify adopting another rule-ridden lifestyle.

Instead of falling in love with the culinary paradise, I was stuck in a cycle of disordered eating and dealing with it thousands of miles away from home.

I struggle to find language that describes the messy tangle of thoughts and memories that weigh down every spoonful. If I had to tell you about my relationship with food in a sentence: I am totally and completely obsessed with it.

Revenge. Body.They’re two dynamically opposite words, one carrying anger and hatred, while the other exudes everything that’s wonderful about us, from births and bruises to our fat rolls and collar bones.

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