In 2016, I had an eating disorder

My contribution to the 'Let's look back at 10 years ago' thing

The same night this photo was taken, I sat alone in a Manhattan Starbucks and ate six nuts. That was my dinner.

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It began a year earlier when I was 25, living in Brooklyn, and hating my body with the same fiery intensity I had my whole life. I went on my first diet at age 12. In college I tried jamming my finger down my throat but couldn’t throw up, tried starving myself but couldn’t stick with it.

Nothing worked until I downloaded a calorie-counting app called MyFitnessPal. With the app’s help, I finally developed an eating disorder. (The app still exists and has over 200 million users. It should be called MyEatingDisorderPal.)

MyFitnessPal told me how many calories a day I could eat to reach my goal weight. It was something like 1,250 calories, far below the 2,000 calories that health organizations recommend for adult women.

In the app, I recorded every scrap of food I consumed and every bit of exercise I did. And as I lost weight, I became obsessed with losing more.

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A calorie ticker tape ran in the back of my mind constantly. I weighed myself every morning, naked. I worked out at a gym two hours a day, every day. I skipped dinners with friends because I feared eating restaurant food would slow my weight loss.

I began to binge-eat, which happens when you starve yourself. Deep shame and more intense restriction quickly followed. I went vegan. I felt my bones press into my bed at night. I was in a new relationship and thought he must like me because I was thin.

The more extreme, compulsive and ritualistic I became about food and exercise, the more weight I lost. I was swiftly rewarded with the approval I’d craved my whole life, and it felt like a drug. I was hit on, looked at, praised for my body. When people asked what I was doing, I’d just shrug: “Got a gym membership.”

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“Are you a model?”

I was in Manhattan when a woman stopped me on the street. She was painfully thin, with dark circles under her eyes and dyed jet-black hair tied in a ponytail. She looked like a well-dressed heroin addict.

“No,” I said, “I’m a cartoonist.”

“I’m a model,” she said. “And I can tell you could be a model.” She gave me her agent’s card and told me to email him. I wrote to him the moment I got home.

If approval was a drug, this was the motherlode, and I was clamoring for it. My whole life I had been at war with my body. When I was a young child, far too young, I’d blow out birthday candles wishing only to be thin. And now I was thin. And I was going to be a model.

The agent asked for my measurements and photos. I sent them immediately.

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I got coffee with the model, who was maybe 22. She showed me photos of her 14-year-old self in Vogue and other big fashion magazines. She was stunning, a work of art.

I couldn’t believe it was the same person I was sitting next to now, childlike and frightfully frail, pecking at an enormous cookie. As people walked into the cafe, she’d say whether or not they could be a model. He could be a model… she couldn’t…

She told me about her difficult male-model boyfriend. She taught me how to catwalk in a Pret A Manger. She told me that at 26 I was old but could just lie about my age.

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The modeling agent wrote back. He told me I needed to lose two to three inches off my waist.

I responded as if we were talking about a business deal and not my flesh: “That won’t be a problem.”

I immediately set a new goal on my app, to reach a weight I hadn’t seen since 6th grade. I ate hardly anything and exercised fanatically for weeks, until the day I did hot yoga on an empty stomach and collapsed. I was sick for a week, barely able to leave my bed.

Unable to shrink further, I felt like a failure. I didn’t contact the agent again.

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At the same time, I was falling in love with my now-husband Jack, and despite my secret eating disorder, our relationship had legs. I decided to move across the country, from New York to L.A., to date him and live with my best friend.

In Brooklyn I’d fostered my obsessive tendencies in private. I’d had friends but no romantic relationships, nobody close enough to interfere. I kept my life rigid and ritualized, as any break from routine would slow progress toward my goal: getting thinner, no matter how thin I already was, no matter how sick it was making me.

I couldn’t maintain my intense workouts and eating habits in L.A., where I was around loved ones all the time. It was a wonderful, lucky time in my life. I was so happy, but I was still sick, and struggling to remain as thin as I’d been in New York. I started to gain weight, and with it came debilitating shame, self-hatred, and chronic stomach pain.

Finally, when I was devastated that I couldn’t fit into some very tiny pants, I shared a bit about my body issues with Jack. He was so loving, kind and understanding. I started to consider maybe, possibly, getting better.

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One night I was at a dinner party thrown by a friend’s parents. A woman at the table kept making comments about food, weight and people’s eating habits. I could tell that, like me, she hated her body and thought about food constantly. She was in her mid-60s.

I realized that if I didn’t get better from this illness, there would be no end. I could go through my whole entire life with zero reprieve from this hell, zero light at the end of the tunnel.

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In the depths of my sickness, I followed a legion of fitness influencers and envied their tiny waists and six packs. In 2017, I began seeking out body positivity influencers of all sizes, envying their freedom, honesty and radical self-acceptance.

But the real turning point came when I read Megan Jayne Crabbe’s book, Body Positive Power, a memoir about the author’s eating disorder and recovery. It’s full of research explaining why dieting doesn’t work long-term and how eating disorders develop.

She cited the 1944 Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in which a group of men were deprived of calories over a period of months. Soon all they thought about was food, and as their lives began to revolve entirely around mealtimes, their mental and physical health collapsed.

I realized that’s what had happened to me.

Body Positive Power features a practical, step-by-step guide to recovery that I followed. I purged my social media feeds of any triggering accounts. I deleted MyFitnessPal, threw away my scales, stopped exercising and ate whatever I wanted. It was terrifying to release control, but the book helped me understand I’d had an eating disorder, and I was ready for recovery.

While I found therapy and support from loved ones helpful, this book was the single biggest turning point for me, and I’m so grateful to have found it.

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My body returned to its set-point, the size I’ve always been when I’m healthy. I got bigger clothes. My chronic stomach pain went away. A vast ocean of space opened up in my brain where the self-hatred and food thoughts had once lived. I found a body-neutral Pilates instructor and learned to move my body without any intention to shrink it.

I told some of my story to loved ones, and alluded to it online. When weight came up in conversation, I learned to say, Please don’t comment about my body, and I’d prefer not to discuss weight loss. Anytime I felt embarrassed about setting boundaries, I remembered it’s a matter of life and death.

From The National Eating Disorders Association:

• Eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness behind opiate addiction.

• Every 52 minutes 1 person dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder.

• 9% of the US population, or 30 million Americans, will have an eating disorder in their lifetime

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Two years ago, I gave birth to twins and faced an intense health crisis immediately afterward. My body deserved only awe and care, but as time passed and my body remained bigger, negative thoughts returned along with that same despair over tiny pants.

My recovery had been stable when my body was stable, and when my body changed, my recovery faltered. I didn’t fully slip back into old behaviors, but my brain slipped back into some of that tortured thinking.

The past decade has seen a frightening pendulum swing. In 2017, I felt buoyed in my recovery by a culture that began to embrace body acceptance and seriously reckon with its history of fatphobia.

Today the pendulum has swung back. Thinness is something anyone, even those with no health-related reason for doing so, can inject in the form of GLP-1s. In podcast ads, in conversation, on billboards, on every screen, thinness is being sold, displayed, worshipped. Many of the influencers who led the body positivity movement have lost weight using GLP-1s. The weight loss industry, worth an estimated $66 billion in 2017, is now valued at $160 billion.

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In the two years since I gave birth, my recovery has largely stabilized. I remind myself my body will continue to change my whole life. That’s what bodies do. And while old negative thoughts rise up from time to time, I refuse to let them draw me back into an eating disorder.

That said, I’m triggered as fuck. It’s rare that I go through a single day without hearing weight loss mentioned in every forum imaginable.

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My heart goes out to anyone also trying to maintain their recovery right now. My heart breaks for those who are currently suffering under an eating disorder, or teetering on the brink of one.

Body positivity was an escape rope, one that delivered me safely to the other side of an awful eating disorder. Now I worry that rope has been pulled up, and my kids will grow up in a world as thin-obsessed as the one I grew up in, or worse.

It doesn’t look like the pendulum is swinging back anytime soon, so what are we waiting for? Can we give it a push? I don’t know how to do that, exactly, but I know sharing our stories is a start.

Thanks for being here, more comics coming on Tuesday.

❤️ Hal

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• Please tag folks in the comments who are still doing the important work of talking about body acceptance.

• Share the names of books / newsletters/ films that have helped you in your body acceptance journey.

• I welcome you to share your story.

• If you need help, please visit www.nationaleatingdisorders.org, call 1-800-931-2237 or text NEDA to 741741.