My eating disorder recovery is a lifelong journey

Content note: This article contains descriptions of an eating disorder that some may find distressing. If you are affected by this story, please refer to the support links provided below.

I always assume women around my age (37) at some point had an eating disorder. It feels like a safe bet, and may even be brought up casually as a shared experience – the default, even. The price we had to pay for being women at a time in which you could never be thin enough.

I told my parents I was vomiting because I was scared but also because I was angry at them and suspected that it would hurt them. I was 15 years old and all over the place. I had been throwing up food and hating myself for eating it for at least four years before that. I committed to vomiting as a plan B when I couldn’t just skip a meal or when doing so was going to raise questions. I counted calories in every bite, I heard the voice telling me that I deserved to be fat and all the things that came with it, though I was never fat to begin with.

My parents asked me to stop doing it and then brought me to a psychologist who basically told me to stop doing it. Surprisingly, it didn’t work. I then went to a psychiatrist, who gave me pills for the anxiety and told me to drink Gatorade after vomiting. I replied saying that I wasn’t going to do it again, and they said that we both knew that was a lie. They told me that eating disorders were a bit like alcoholism, that I was going to live with it all my life, and that I just had to learn to not act on it. “Don’t forget the Gatorade, it is important for the minerals in the body. And wash your teeth after, the vomit is awful for the teeth.”

That narrative helped the same way crutches help someone with a broken leg. It allowed me to understand where I was at that moment and what I needed to become my new normal. But it was also devastating, and I felt hopeless. I was going to count calories in my head and feel guilt and shame around food my whole life, and the most I could aspire to was learning not to act on it, to have a balanced diet, to breathe it out instead of planning exactly what to say when coming back from the bathroom with watery eyes.

I only started properly understanding feminism many years later – almost 14 years after that psychiatric meeting. And it took at least other four or five to connect what I learnt rationally with what I felt emotionally. I kept sporadically vomiting after dinners until maybe four or five years ago, feeling every time that it was just a relapse and I had to just keep it under control. I still believed that I was going to be like that forever, but the voice inside me had less volume. Sometimes I didn’t count calories at all and stopped dreading to look at myself in the mirror.

In my journey as a late-bloomer feminist and, eventually, an author and trainer on gender equality, I could very easily see how the world traps us in this unnatural level of self-hate. The films and TV shows we watched had beautiful and good thin characters; fat ones were evil, uncool or mostly-adorable-but-forgettable supporting characters without a story of their own. If a fat person had a main storyline it had to be one that showed a before and after, or one that related to overcoming the struggles of their fatness and with a lot of effort to make that dream come true. It all conspired to keep us toeing the line of ‘thin is in’. I was 22 when Kate Moss popularised the regrettable quote, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” but the world had already sold us different versions of that same message for decades. They sold it to her too.

Women are told from the moment they are born that beauty is their most important asset. Over and over we hear it through language, but also in the clothes that are chosen for us, which prioritise looks over comfort and warmth. We are praised loudly when we conform and we are warned when we don’t. If only you’d wear this. If only you’d lose some weight. If only you did this with your hair. And so on.

I don’t remember any woman speaking well about the way she looked growing up. I can’t recall any single woman, on TV or in real life, accepting a compliment gracefully or, perish the thought, giving one to herself. Instead, we have been exposed to women who talk loudly about how they are too fat, too old, too ugly. And we learn to live on that hamster wheel, forever spinning but always falling too short. We don’t know any better.

It’s one thing to know this, which takes time and intention, and another thing to feel it; to internalise it. I am so happy to share that both are possible. And I think it is an important message because we need hope. We need to know that there are people out there that love themselves unconditionally, who once too were scared to look at their bodies in the mirror and now embrace every version of themselves.

I have never been larger or weighed more than I do now. And I never loved myself and my body more. I can’t recommend enough the mantra of ‘fake it until you make it’, but also to welcome body neutrality. We don’t have to love our bodies and all of its parts. I don’t have to love the things that I don’t even like about my body, but I love me as a whole with or without them. A minor dissatisfaction is not enough to derail me from my utter respect for this vessel that I get to enjoy while alive. I no longer measure my worth in centimetres or stones and I feel freer for it.

I try to listen to my body and the way it shouts back at me (through bloating and indigestion when I enjoy too much of the cheese platter, for example). I correct myself with patience when my brain describes foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I sometimes wonder if I am really hungry or if I am bored, or sad, or anxious – not to judge that or avoid it, but just to understand myself better.

I still have a long way to go to have a completely healthy relationship with food in a world that shoves all the wrong narratives down our throats. But I no longer think of myself as a person with an eating disorder, I gave up the crutches that were no longer helping me but holding me back, and now I run free. It is the joy and confidence that feels better than skinny ever did to me. 

Bodywhys, the Eating Disorders Association of Ireland, provides support for those affected by eating disorders, including a national helpline (01 210 7906), online support groups and information on how to start your recovery. Find more resources for your mental health and wellbeing here.