If I had to put a number on it, I’d say I’m about 90% recovered. I never imagined I would get this far.

This essay discusses disordered eating. Please take care. 

It’s 7.10am and I’m ushered into a little room by an exceptionally kind nurse to run through a pre-op checklist. I’m tired and thirsty but the benefit of being booked for morning surgeries is that you’re “in and out”, as the anaesthetist put it over the phone last night. It’s a fairly simple and quick procedure: removal of a plate and screws from my left ankle. Shrapnel from a time when I was 23 and a little too tipsy in a bar. I’ve never really minded surgeries all that much. I like being looked after and I like the drugs. 

The nurse runs through questions at lightning speed. Have I eaten today? No. Last time I drank anything? 6am. Taken any medications today? No. He pauses, looking down at the forms I filled out online a week ago. I know what’s coming. 

“Past and present conditions…” he says.

“Yes.”

“You’ve put endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome and an ectopic heartbeat but also several eating disorders?”

“Yeah, the bulimia probably caused the ectopic heartbeat, or that’s what I’ve been told. That’s when it started, anyway.”

“So, the eating disorders are past conditions?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re better now?”

Better now. 

I’ve always said yes because it’s the kind of redemption story people rely on, the one they desperately need to hear when this subject comes up, lest it be awkward. I don’t know what it would be to say no. I fear the oxygen would be sucked out of the room and replaced with something cloying, like pity. Worse, embarrassment. You’re how old? 

“Yes.”

The surgery goes well. Somebody delicately stitches a seam into my ankle and then carefully covers and wraps it while I am asleep. Somebody tucks me in. I wake up in the recovery room and the first thing I tell the nurse is that for the first time under anaesthesia, I dreamt. In my dream I was 19, but happy this time. She smiles at me as I let my eyes close again. 

Back at home, I look down at my padded foot and think about what I’m going to eat during the week to make up for the lack of movement I’ll be doing. To gain weight is to put myself in danger. The threat of relapse is a dim tune that plays beneath everything of consequence I do, like an ex you take great pains to avoid running into.

I take two tramadol and fall asleep with my phone in my hand, googling organic vegetable boxes.

At 31, you finally tell someone. 

“Yeah, that checks out. Every girl I’ve dated had an eating disorder,” he says.

 “But I’m not a girl,” you say. I’m a woman. And I still have one.”

 He shrugs. 

You sit with that shame for a while till it blooms so thick that it pushes him out of the room and out of your house to his electric bike. You think about how if the bike weren’t electric, he would burn more calories. How stupid he is, to buy an electric bike, when he could be working towards looking and feeling better. 

You download Myfitnesspal for the 100th time, start tracking your calories again. You buy the premium version; you don’t know why.  

Sometimes I like to reach a hand back to my former self, dig my fingers into when it started to get bad. I’m not sure I have the arm span to reach all the way back to the beginning, but I can so vividly see my 16-year-old self and her obsession with healthy eating. Chewing raw green beans to the point of mush because it was better for digestion. Researching thiamine, leucine, polyphenols and anthocyanins in bed at night. It gave me a high to see the other girls at school on diets, drinking Cup A Soups for lunch, when I knew they were essentially nutritionally void and packed with sodium. 

My food diary from that time was evidence of my obsession with “healthy” eating, a relic that is now safely rotting in a landfill somewhere. I filled it with facts about food and pictures I cut out of the Healthy Food Guide my mother subscribed to. 

I wasn’t sick; I was healthy! My weight loss was praised! It was the early 2000s! My empty-stomach breath was from fasting and fasting is good for you! Didn’t you know?

I can see the slippery slope now. I see my younger self at the precipice, celebrating fitting into her ball gown. At the bottom of the slope, a monster sits next to me, filing her nails while she waits. Her spine shows through her shirt like the vertebrae of a snake.

She looks at me and raises her eyebrows. 

“What a shame you didn’t ask for help,” she says. 

You love the supermarket. You love looking at the labels of everything and you love that you know that vitamin C can be used as a preservative. You do really good this time; you don’t buy anything processed. But you could even buy cheese now, if you wanted to. You could buy crackers or cereal and it isn’t scary at all. You buy wholefoods and imagine a reality where clean eating revolutionises your life to a point of complete and utter euphoria. You know you should get chocolate or something for balance, but you don’t need it, do you? Other people don’t need it. You’re “other people”, now. You’re recovered. You’re fine.  

You get home and examine your hoard and then realise you have to wash the herbs because the herbs have pesticides on them.

 For fucks sake, does there need to be something wrong with everything? 

During my late teens, every minute of every day was spent, in some way, thinking about either food or my body. The emphasis on health had soured at some point and turned to restriction. I began each day scrutinising my appearance in the mirror before weighing myself, and that blinking number would dictate the kind of day I had. I ate very little and exercised a lot. I had a calculator in lieu of a personality. My body was a number; every mouthful of food was a number. I knew all of them at all times. I planned meals down to a fine point. I weighed every ingredient. I grew mean as I rotted from the inside out. 

I had a limitless and relentless hatred of myself. My sickness was a parasite with a voice that would haunt me at any given time of the day – I was a bad person, I didn’t deserve to eat, all I had to offer were my looks and they were not very good. To become smaller was optimal. To take up less space was the goal. I was so scared of food that at times I was convinced that to even touch it, I would somehow absorb some of it. I worried about the calorific content of toothpaste. I googled fluoride and if it had any effect on hunger cues. I was frightened of tap water.

People often think eating disorders are rooted in vanity and I understand why. To lose weight is to look “better” in the eyes of society, most of the time. But most sufferers of eating disorders with physical symptoms of a lower body mass know they don’t look good. It stretches far beyond wanting to be beautiful or to have a “beach body”. I must have taken thousands of photos of my face and body during this time, but not because I thought I looked good. Each photo was a “before” photo, taken before the next “before” photo, and the next. 

The day I reached my lowest weight, I expected to feel some kind of hallowed elation. I expected my aura to change and to finally feel the elusive happiness I had been chasing. I felt nothing except anxiety that the scale was somehow wrong because I didn’t feel finished. I also felt very cold all the time. When I lay down in bed at night, my heart rate would lie somewhere in the early 40s. I hadn’t seen my family or friends in weeks. Nobody knew what was going on save for one friend who I made promise not to tell anyone. I looked down at my bluish nails. This was not a maintainable state of being. I met my own eyes in the bathroom mirror. This is not a life, I thought. 

You go to a three-day music festival and experience a freedom so intense and joyous that you think, “Oh my god, is this what it is? Is this what other people feel like?” 

In reality, you’re doing 25,000 steps a day and deep down you know that’s a foundation you’re relying heavily upon. You could eat anything you want and not risk gaining any weight, but you don’t, so you lose it.

You’re too excited to get to the next act, to see your friends, meet new people. You eat half a chicken wrap and throw the other half away to make it in time to see an act you’ve been waiting all weekend to see. You make eye contact with a beautiful girl in a tent during one of the music acts where everyone’s sweating and some people have their shirts off. You make eye contact again. You smile, she smiles back. You’re too busy to think of eating. How wonderful to not even think of food.   

I’m 20 and in a dentist’s chair, leant back with my mouth wide open while an older male dentist probes at my gums. The dental assistant hovers nearby, smart in her light-blue uniform. Her clean hair is pulled back and she’s all clear skin and shining eyes, smiling down at me. I am very aware of the little sores I have next to my mouth. I thought they were pimples but a google search showed me pages and pages about physical signs of stress and malnutrition. Being run down, run through. The dentist pulls away slightly and asks if I have acid reflux. I know what acid reflux is because it’s a symptom of oesophageal cancer, which my great aunt died of. 

I tell the dentist I don’t have acid reflux. 

“The backs of your teeth are showing damage, commonly seen from acid erosion.” His eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, search mine. I stare back, unblinking, challenging. 

If you ask me about it, I will lie. 

He doesn’t ask me about it. 

Dentists know if you’re making yourself sick, because of the enamel erosion from stomach acid, but also because of the bruising at the back of your tongue and throat. Other sick people know, too. It’s a sort of loose-skin, puffy-faced appearance. Red knuckles on a dominant hand, stained teeth, distended stomachs, under-eye bags. Even if we recognised each other in public, we never acknowledged one another. 

After the dentist appointment, I make my way home to my disgusting apartment to chain smoke cigarettes and log into Tumblr, where a blog of mine has just hit 7,000 followers. You see, in lieu of acknowledging each other in public, we met each other at night on pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia blogs and traded ways to get thinner and sicker. We shared images of our wrists and waists and ribs and through this black market for mental illness, we became friends. 

Every once in a while, one of us would disappear and it was assumed that they’d been found out and forced into recovery. 99% of the time, they would come back and confirm our suspicions, but some of them gave up on their own accord and some of them, I can only assume, died. Death was a constant threat and it didn’t matter to any of us; our illnesses were bigger than death. They were more important to maintain than whatever mortal coil we crouched precariously upon; sometimes crawled across; made our way over the freezing bathroom tiles to the toilet bowl, haul everything up again.

We held shaking hands in the dark and our illnesses crossed oceans and time zones to encourage and commiserate. I was five years deep into my illness before I found the blogs. I had moved from restriction to bingeing and purging back to restriction so many times I had lost count. But I was also a “healthy” weight. To tell someone at this time would have invited criticism and disbelief. 

My heart started throwing an extra beat in every now and then. In the pause that reigned in my chest afterwards, I could hear my own voice repeating, “please, somebody help me.”

You often think about running into the hills and screaming so long and so loud that it acts as a signal to every other person so swamped, so mired by thoughts about food, that they all come running, crawling, howling so that you’d have someone to talk to that actually understood. Somebody that knew there wasn’t a right thing to say. Somebody who knew when to not to say anything at all.

My therapist argues that it’s important to find the root of something in order to extract it and examine it. I argue that even if I were to find it, it would be impossible to remove it completely. It is not such an easy thing to pull out, even after having pulled any number of things out of my mouth with my own fingers. It wouldn’t be easy even with the house to myself and the bathroom fan going. Not that I do that anymore. I mean, I do it once every 18 months and remember how hideous it is and then I swear never to do it again. Then I do it again the next year. But I don’t really do it anymore.

But OK fine, the root is probably that I was an overweight kid and then “heavy” teenager. I began talking about my weight at seven years old. My family made me feel bad about it. Later, my friends’ boyfriends and their friends made me feel bad about it. I wanted to wear a bikini and I didn’t want it to be embarrassing for someone to have a crush on me. I felt tainted, wicked and unseemly. I felt deeply and unforgivably ugly. 

In truth, I believe it was a virus I was either born with or predisposed to, and it’s one that has reactivated at different points in my life, like shingles or herpes. I have tried so incredibly hard to rip it out. I have used both hands, I have turned myself inside out in order to locate it so that I might throw it into the fire and finally hear it die. 

At this point I don’t think I will ever be rid of it completely, but as much as I convince myself at times that I have changed so little, at times when my first response to anything going wrong is a little voice in my ear telling me to just stop eating; I am much changed. I have grown in ways my younger self would hardly believe. I have been in active recovery for just over 10 years now and that seems like a long time to anyone currently in the grips of an eating disorder, but the time will pass anyway. I am happy. I live a life very much worth living. 

I eat at least three meals a day, complete meals with carbs, fats and protein. I keep chocolate in the house and it lasts weeks at a time, sometimes. Other times it lasts two days. It has no moral value. My favourite parts of the week are when I meet one of my friends for a huge oat latte in lieu of a black coffee and we split a pastry. I sneak a bite of their sandwich. 

The numbers come flooding back and I begin to panic and plan tomorrow where I will go to the gym and then the numbers

float away as we bend from the waist to howl with laughter on the street. I still plan my meals and I often eat the same thing for dinner for weeks on end, sometimes months, but I recently stopped measuring out olive oil. I’ll drink a cocktail over a vodka soda if I can afford it financially and then sometimes after big nights, I’ll order Uber Eats and eat too much too fast and

 pour nail polish remover over the last of the meal so I won’t eat anymore and begin to spiral and think about how bad it would be to bring it back up, just this once, just this one more time but then I

drink a big glass of water and sit outside. I make my bed, brush my teeth, clean up.  

I am 33 and I still have an eating disorder. I may always have one. I tend to just say I have “weird food things” when discussing it with other people. My flatmates know about it, they don’t question why I have to have my fruit separated from theirs in the fruit bowl or why some weeks I’m measuring out egg whites and some weeks I’m aggressively eating processed food as a form of rebellion. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say I’m about 90% recovered. I never imagined I would get this far. I thought it would either kill me or I would die with it. 

 I recently started buying organic food which my therapist says is almost definitely a form of control or restriction, but I know where that begins and where it ends. I don’t hate my body. Some days I don’t like it very much, but it survived such an intense amount of pain and self-hatred and it still heals wounds for me. It creates dreams where I can reinvent my past into a much more forgiving one. It allows me to reach out a hand to you, now, in the hopes that you might grasp it if you need to. A healthy hand, a warm hand, a hand with a strong pulse and pink nailbeds. The other hand I reach out to my younger self, she’s shocked that I’m telling everyone. 

I’m shocked too.