How can we “pay forward” what we learn from personal health struggles?
Tara has lived with anorexia for most of her life. Now a medical student, she aspires to become an empathetic physician who draws upon what she has endured to provide compassionate care. Listen to her story here.
Interview by Annie Robinson
Audio editing by Annie Robinson and Winslow Ferris
Lyzz, a 19 year old college student, has struggled with issues of weight, and ultimately with self-love, since childhood. Growing up, she watched her mother struggle with anorexia and endure multiple hospitalizations, feeding tubes, and seemingly endless suffering. She didn’t want to end up this way, and promised herself she would never have an eating disorder. Despite her best intention, she developed Bulimia by the time she was a teenager. With her mother as a role model, she had no idea how to have a healthy relationships with food and her body. She didn’t know how to love herself.
But most of us struggle with issues of weight, even when we have had healthy role models. The pressure to be thin in our culture is enormous, especially for girls. Thin is considered better, and eating disorders are pervasive. According to the National Institutes of Health, about 10 million people in the U.S. have an eating disorder, and 90% of these are women. Approximately 4.5% of all American high school students reported in a recent survey that they’d vomited or used laxatives as a means to lose weight in the past 30 days, and approximately 4% of college-aged females have bulimia. According to the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 35% of adolescent girls believed they were overweight, 60% were trying to lose weight. The vast majority of eating disorders go untreated.
The numbers don’t tell the whole story. To truly understand, we have to listen to those who have been directly effected. In Lyzz’s words, “To fully grasp that terror of an eating disorder would take much more than an hour long interview. The struggle for perfection is destructive and unbearable. Not only is this goal an impossible one, but the process is crippling and fatal. An eating disorder needs you to feel imperfect, unworthy, ugly, fat, disgusting, wrong, horrible. It strips you of your health, your self worth, your life, your soul. It blames you for everything that goes wrong and berates you if you can’t fix it. You do not need to fix everything. It is not your fault. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be the best you can be and not be afraid of who you are. That is true beauty.”
Story first appeared on WBUR’s CommonHealth blog on February 3, 2011: http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2011/02/eating-disorder-bulimia-takes-over-life
Resources:
To learn more about eating disorders, visit
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/eating-disorders/DS00294
For support as well as information about treatment options, go to
http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/treatment
630-577-1330 is the ANAD Eating Disorder Helpline in the United States that is open Monday-Friday 9:00am-5:00pm and provides information about symptoms and contacts for further support and treatment. The email anadhelp@anad.org is also available for these resources.
http://www.anad.org/eating-disorders-get-help/eating-disorders-helpline-email/
To listen to more stories about personal struggles with eating disorders, visit
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/14/health/healthguide/TE_EATINGDISORDERS_CLIPS.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephaniepapa/eatingdisorders_b_4265845.html?utm_hp_ref=mental-health
At the age of 17 at an all-male boarding school in Virginia, Jenks developed what would grow into a life-threatening eating disorder. It began with over-exercising, and quickly spiraled into bulimia, stimulant abuse, and drug and alcohol addiction.
Over the following ten years, the eating disorder ruled Jenks’s life and took uncountable things away from him. He hid his disorder for years, ashamed to tell friends and family that he was struggling with what was considered by many to be a “women’s disease.” It did not help that he did not know any males with eating issues to whom he could turn for advice.
Eventually, Jenks opened up to his family about his co-occurring issues with alcohol, drugs, and food. Hospitalizations and treatment programs helped him address his substance addiction first, but in the absence of those behaviors the eating disorder surged. He realized his pattern of trying to fill the void he felt inside with whatever was at hand: drugs, alcohol, relationships, exercise, or food.
Now 31 and in solid recovery, Jenks discusses the mixed feelings he had for years about letting go of his eating disorder: part of him wanted freedom, but another part was unwilling to give up the rituals. When Jenks began his journey towards recovery in earnest, at a treatment center called A New Journey in Santa Monica, California, it was not without stumbles.
From these experiences, Jenks realized his passion for service. He describes how his recovery is based in giving back to others who are themselves recovering from alcohol and drug addiction and eating disorders. One of Jenks’s primary missions is to encourage men to engage in open conversations about their struggles with food, which he believes is the essential first step to healing.
Originally from Rock Hill, South Carolina, Jenks currently resides in Venice, California where he works as a House Manager in a sober living house for men.
Each fall at Boston College, the Women’s Center hosts Love Your Body Week (LYBW), “a week of programming dedicated to promoting healthy body image on campus.” The Women’s Center, in collaboration with other organizations, aims to give students space to reflect on their relationships with their bodies. Inclusivity is a key feature of this week, as many of the events of consider how body image intersects with race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. This year events ranged from lectures on body image and the media and panel discussions on colorism, to a performance of Eve Ensler’s Good Body andEmbodied Expression, a therapeutic painting session.
The week kicked off on Monday, November 9 with the opening reception for Embodied Stories, a photography exhibit by Ben Flythe, a student photographer. Flythe photographed students and their bodily identifiers—tattoos, scars, burns, skin color, and birthmarks, for example. Accompanying the portraits were quotations from interviews with the students, who discussed what their bodies mean to them. Although the portraits highlight the specificities of each body, the students never become just bodies: their identities shine through; the photographs celebrate the dynamic and complex ways identities align with body image. In his gallery talk, Flythe emphasized the diversity of the stories he captured. These individual stories, he noted, speak to our own stories of embodiment. We each have an embodied story, and putting our own stories into dialogue with the stories of others—those portraits, for instance—is to understand that we are all connected.
This year I was fortunate enough to have a small hand in LYBW, as I helped to bring two student speakers to the opening reception. Leading up to the event, Marwa Eltahir—a Women’s Center staffer and co-coordinator of LYBW—and I sat down with Erin Sutton and Justin Kresevic and heard their stories; we were struck by how their stories spoke to the goals of LYBW and the complexity of body image. My work with Health Story Collaborative prepared me well for this task, and I adapted the Healing Story Session guidelines and questions for the purposes of the event. What’s more important, however, is that Health Story Collaborative taught me how to listen, to be present as someone shares their story, to accompany them. What mattered most was letting them tell their stories that needed to be told.
At the reception to Embodied Stories, Erin told her story of living with bulimia and her difficult, continuing journey to recovery. She spoke to the difficulty of coming to love her body at Boston College, where body image and appearance issues so often go unnoticed, unsaid. She expressed her gratitude to the people who have supported her, and spoke to the daily challenges she faces in coming to love her own body. Justin spoke to the difficulty of being short, when masculinity is associated with being tall and muscular. This dissonance has affected his personal relationships, and he works everyday to accept his own body. Justin emphasized the need to work against the problematic ideals of men’s body images: masculinity is as individual as each of our bodies.
Erin and Justin challenged all of us in attendance to understand truly what Love Your Body Week means. Loving one’s body isn’t something to be taken for granted, to be considered easy. When so many images and ideals of bodily perfection and worth hold up problematic and impossible standards, coming to love one’s body is a challenging and harrowing experience. By sharing their own stories of embodiment and acknowledging their continuing journey towards loving their bodies, Erin and Justin asked us all to consider our own stories.
I am so grateful to have been a small part of LYBW and to have heard these stories. Erin’s and Justin’s stories, along with the stories of students photographed by Ben, speak to how important it is to talk about these issues and how valuable it is to enter into meaningful conversation with others. These stories have stayed with me, in my own process of coming to terms with my own body. Sharing stories, at the end of the day, is about building community, starting conversations, and realizing that none of us are alone, that our stories all matter. I look forward to hearing more stories, perhaps telling my own, and continuing the worthwhile conversations around body image happening both at Boston College and beyond campus.
Erin ended her talk with a powerful statement about our selves, our bodies, and our stories: We are all worth it.
Some of the most impactful people encountered in our recovery journeys are our treatment providers. They provide invaluable education, compassion, faith in our capacity to heal, accountability, and the best of them help us relearn how to trust.
I met Kim Wyman, the dietician at Monte Nido Vista, my first night of residential treatment. It was a Monday, the day every week when those furthest along in recovery prepare dinner for the whole house. To bless the beautiful meal they prepared and to cultivate a positive mindset before eating what for some of us was quite a challenge, Kim sang “Amazing Grace.” Her heavenly voice, glowing presence, and palpable joy for sharing this food in community brought me to tears.
Though we only worked together for ten weeks, Kim’s wisdom resounds in my head to this day, guiding me to stick to recovery’s course and reminding me of the healthy ways to meet my needs. In this podcast, she shares some of her perspectives on the process of healing from an eating disorder.
How we feed ourselves is an expression of how we feel about ourselves. Sometimes the most effective way to change how we feel about ourselves is to change how we feed ourselves. Kim considers Recovery to be a process of Recovering Self. She elucidates the different parts of Self that need to be actively, compassionately cared for, and explains how one must separate physical needs from emotional needs (to be seen, heard, witnessed, and acknowledged) in order to meet them all appropriately.
Activating sensory experience is one of Kim’s hallmark methods for recovery. She encourages people to get out of their heads and into their bodies by seeking pleasure, enjoying nature, and cultivating a loving relationship with food through the creative act of cooking, truly tasting food, and eating with others.
Kim explains the 3 tenets of recovery – never weigh yourself, journal, and reach out to others – and also offers advice about how to find the best dietician for you.
In addition to being a Registered Dietician, Kim holds a Master’s in Public Health. She has been working primarily with men and women who struggle with eating disorders since 1997.
Eating disorders are grossly under-recognized as a condition that affects not only women and girls but also men and boys. Because of this, when Thomas developed anorexia at age fourteen he was faced with the added challenges of combating stigma, finding treatment, and connecting with male peers undergoing similar experiences.
After a hospital stint that restored his physical health, Thomas was declared “cured,” but his emotional problems remained unaddressed. He relapsed several years later, and this time struggled primarily with orthorexia. Undeterred by the obstacles facing men with eating disorders, Thomas took his well-being into his own hands. He made it his mission to cultivate the community and comprehensive understanding of holistic wellness that enable someone to truly begin the journey of recovery.
Thomas recalls how small his world became when he was in his eating disorder, and how obsessed he became with controlling not just food but everything in his life. He shares the techniques and tools he adopted -- like writing -- that helped him detach from ED thoughts and behaviors.
As an eating disorder recovery activist, Thomas decries the insidious gender and age discrimination in eating disorder treatment and awareness models across cultures. Societally imposed appearance standards plague men too, and it is not unusual for them to remain undiagnosed despite showing hallmark symptoms of eating disorders. Thomas’s story calls upon us all to recognize that men get eating disorders too, and to help expand treatment options and shift the recovery culture to be more inclusive.
Originally from Sydney, Australia, Thomas is a student in Tübingen, Germany, pursuing two degrees: one in Communications majoring in Media Production and the other in International Studies majoring in German. Learn more about Thomas’s work as a wellness coach, health activist, creative producer, and author of You Are Not Your Eating Disorder on his website: http://www.thomasgrainger.info/.
When Natalie was in college, the ramifications of her eating disorder reached their pinnacle when she landed in the cardiac intensive care unit. Her heart was in severe distress due to the toll that restriction and over-exercising had taken on her body. Though previously she had minimized, rationalized, and outright denied having an eating disorder, immediate attention became mandatory.
After stabilizing in an inpatient unit, Natalie sought residential care at Monte Nido Vista because she has been exposed to Carolyn Costin’s views on recovery from the book 8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder.
Natalie stayed at Vista from July through September 2014. Transitioning back into life in Chicago proved harder than she anticipated. While Monte Nido believes that everyone can become fully recovered and live a life free of an eating disorder, Natalie’s step-down treatment program in Chicago promoted the more limiting model that eating disorder symptoms can only ever be managed, never fully alleviated.
Nearly one year later, Natalie considers the tricky relationship between her depression, anxiety, and eating disorder, and admits that although she is sometimes inclined to isolate, it never serves her recovery. She reflects on what is gained by being vulnerable, and how much better she feels when she speaks her truth, without judgment. She knows she needs to be vigilantly honest with the people in her life, and to nurture the relationships that are healthy and to let go of those that aren’t. Despite the bumps of recovery, Natalie reminds herself: “I am capable” – truly, we all are.
Currently 23-years-old, Natalie lives in Chicago and is completing her last semester at college, pursuing a bachelor’s in nutrition and dietetics.
Emily’s eating disorder developed when she was just 14, shortly after she left home to attend boarding school, when her parents were getting divorced. She talks about the difficulty she had – and sometimes still has – in speaking and claiming the word “bulimia”. She reflects on how her eating disorder was not born from body hatred, but rather a plethora of painful emotions seething inside her.
For years, Emily’s eating disorder was her hidden identity, active to varying degrees but always present. She was convinced it would always be a part of her life. But finally, when she was 28, her family confronted her and revealed that they knew about it. Emily allowed them to serve as her initial motivation to begin recovery.
When she first entered treatment, Emily struggled to even find the words to articulate her feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. But as she began to crumble in the safety of treatment, she also began to blossom.
Now 32, Emily resides in San Diego, California where she devotes herself to mothering her 20-month-old daughter, Winnie. She shares her aspirations for Winnie, and the values born from her experiences in recovery that steer her parenting decisions. And she speaks about how being a mom has bolstered her along the path of recovery, and celebrates how far she has come.
On July 7, 2014, Kelly arrived at Monte Nido Vista. On July 7, 2015, she celebrated her first year in recovery. When we spoke just before her anniversary, she marveled at everything being in recovery has afforded her.
Originally from New Jersey, Kelly stayed in California after finishing residential treatment in order to complete her college degree at Pepperdine University, where she is now a senior.
Kelly developed anorexia when she was just thirteen years old. She spent the following nine years cycling in and out of eating disorder treatment, trying to manage her primary behaviors of restriction and over-exercising. Told by her doctors that she would never fully recover, Kelly became intensely focused on maintaining her identity as a person with an eating disorder, which provided her with a meaning and a purpose. She excelled at her eating disorder. Furthermore, the treatment centers felt like safe havens, retreats from the challenges and uncertainties in life. But eventually Kelly’s behaviors took too great a toll: her body, her mind, her spirit, and her family needed to be freed from the depleting cycle.
In her story, Kelly speaks about the impossible desire to have just a “little bit” of an eating disorder, shares the challenges she has encountered in trying to strike a balance between recovery work and social life, and identifies what keeps her committed to recovery when the road gets bumpy. She acknowledges that recovery is a long process, but she harbors the essential faith that becoming fully recovered one day is absolutely possible."
When she was a teenager, Kristie began competitive weightlifting. The sport proved to cultivate a culture of restricting and binging, and she soon developed an eating disorder. Over the years, she cycled through various behaviors, including compulsively exercising, restricting, binging, and purging.
Kristie – like so many of us – was told her disorder was chronic, that “recovery” meant maintaining her eating disorder, not overcoming it. But she wasn’t willing to settle for this prognosis. So she sought out treatment options in the Northern Hemisphere, found Monte Nido, and embarked upon her path towards recovered.
Kristie speaks candidly about the challenges of recovery: there is no clear way it is supposed to look; sometimes it is necessary to follow a meal plan, but the goal is to move towards intuitive eating; she had to acquire basic life skills that the eating disorder prevented her from learning previously; her eating disordered mentality also manifested in finances and relationships; and the differences in motivation to start recovery versus to continue in recovery.
Now two years into committed recovery, Kristie serves as a mentor for those earlier on in the journey through a global eating disorder recovery peer support program called MentorConnect. She describes the unique recovery team that she had to create herself, as professional eating disorder recovery resources are greatly lacking in the Southern Hemisphere.
Kristie expresses her perspectives that hope is the “first and crucial” element in recovery, and how important it is to revolt against cultural messages that encourage body-hatred. Her story and her dedication call us all to join her in manifesting a body-positive, hope-filled society.
Born in England to New Zealand parents, Kristie grew up in Australia, but has been living in New Zealand for five years now where she currently works for Outward Bound.
Megan, a 23-year-old New Jersey native currently residing in California and pursuing a master’s degree in global public health, arrived at Monte Nido Vista on June 5, 2014. This interview took place in June 2015 during the week of her one-year anniversary.
Once consumed with restriction and compulsive over-exercising, Megan admits that currently she struggles with orthorexia, a condition where one obsesses about eating “healthy” foods. But she has moved past her former life of dissatisfaction with herself, by stepping out of life and into treatment, where she did major self-assessment. She found her “Soul Self” – also referred to as “Healthy Self” at Monte Nido.
Megan speaks about the imperative of connecting with people, especially those who are in recovery or have recovered. She reflects on the impact both her eating disorder and her recovery have had on her family. And finally, she shares the tools, motivations, and goals that help her stick with recovery.
Anna left her home in Burlington, Vermont to begin treatment at Monte Nido Vista on April 28, 2014. More than one year into recovery at the time of the interview, 25-year-old Anna is living in Denver, Colorado and pursuing a nursing degree.
Anna is admirably candid about the challenges of recovery. Six years into her eating disorder – which involved cycles of purging, binging, over-exercising, and restricting – it became clear that she needed more intensive support than just an outpatient team in order to break the patterns. The four months Anna spent in residential treatment and then a transitional living house in California were transformative, but life back in the real world proved surprisingly difficult.
Anna admits her eating disorder still tempts her and occasionally catches her off guard with unexpected triggers. In addition to support from her boyfriend Thomas, her parents, and the recovered therapist she works with, Anna possesses an impressive self-awareness and “Healthy Self” mentality that she honed in treatment. She discusses how she challenges cultural misnomers about what “healthy” means, and the benefits of life in recovery: deeper intimacy and presence in relationships, a burgeoning sense of spirituality, and growing motivation to heal in order to help others. Though it has been rocky at times, Anna is proud of and committed to her recovery.
Listen to more stories in the Eating Disorder Recovery series here.
