'It’s hard to say if I ever had an eating disorder, mostly because it feels impossible to figure out where the line is between dieting and illness'
When I was 21, I suddenly lost a lot of weight. Up until that point, I hadn’t given much thought my size—I’d been more or less the same weight for several years, and I guess on some level I just figured that was the weight I was going to be forever. Then I switched medications and took a new job that was a 45-minute walk from home, and the result of these changes was that I dropped several dress sizes in as many months.
Our culture makes it very easy to slip into disordered eating—in fact, it encourages it. Restricting food and obsessing over the number on your bathroom scale are seen as virtuous behaviours; thinness is seen as evidence of willpower. I can’t remember a time in my life when many, if not most, of the women around me were engaging in some form of dieting. It felt frighteningly normal when, after my initial weight loss, I started counting calories.
I’ve never talked to a therapist or doctor about my eating issues. Actually, the majority of doctors who saw me while my food restriction was at its peak went out of their way to comment positively on my weight, which only reinforced the feeling that what I was doing was both virtuous and healthy. Asking for help in that environment felt impossible, and anyway the obsession that had me in its grip wouldn’t let me.
There’s a part in Bridget Jones’ Diary when her friend asks her how she has managed to memorize the caloric value of every single food. She replies that she just knows, “as one knows one’s alphabet or times table.” That line struck me as funny the first time I read it; now it just feels bitterly real. Even though I haven’t weighed myself in seven years, but I still can’t turn off the internal calorie calculator in my brain, the one that serves me up a number every time I eat something.
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