Just over two years ago, I was laying in an emergency room hospital bed staring at my phone thinking, “How do I explain this to my mom?” For 30 years I had hidden an eating disorder from her but this time it almost killed me. It was time to break the silence; I needed help.
I have complex anorexia; I restrict calories but I’ll also binge. My eating disorder isn’t just tied to my self-image—it’s tied to my emotions. Binging generally occurs when I have lows, which can then trigger a phase of restriction. But I also restrict my food to control my weight. I’ve had periods of time where I eat relatively “normal,” or at least my eating disorder becomes disordered eating; there’s a subtle difference.
An eating disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis. Disordered eating has characteristics of an eating disorder but doesn’t warrant a diagnosis. On a spectrum of eating properly to eating disorder, disordered eating falls anywhere between the two, depending on the person.
As a child, I was bullied about the way I dressed and how I looked. This started a pattern of disordered eating when I was seven years old—I wouldn’t eat the sandwich my mom put in my lunch. I remember getting yelled at for it, which just made me afraid to explain why I wasn’t eating it. When my family stopped eating breakfast together, I skipped the meal whenever I could.
When I was 12, my best friend ran away; by the summer I was 13 she had died. As my world became more chaotic, I realized there was one thing I could control: eating. I began restricting my food even more. My family still had family dinners so I began finding ways to limit the amount I ate without raising suspicion.
That same summer, my life took another very unexpected turn. While out with friends being a typical teenage mallrat, I was approached by a modelling scout. Because I’m tall, my family had always said I could be a model. Their hopes were so high that when I was five years old, I started to practice walking with a book on my head (it was an ’80s thing). So meeting this scout and being asked to come to the agency to talk about a contract seemed like a dream come true. Or maybe it was a hint of the nightmare to come.
The modelling industry has come a long way since the ’90s, when I started. At least in Europe, there are now laws that ensure models maintain a reasonably healthy weight. When I started, “the thinner the better” seemed to be the mantra. So, being a teenager who already had self-image issues, sitting with agents at go-sees and listening to negative comments about my weight turned my disordered eating into a full-blown eating disorder. I began avoiding family dinners.
A photographer friend of mine who does portfolio work says that it’s common for models to have an “on your knees moment.” Sounds crass, but holds true for me. I had an agent from Milan say he’d take me to Milan if I could lose 10 pounds before he came back the next month. This was the big break I needed in my modelling career, so I starved myself in anticipation of that meeting. But it wasn’t enough. I was devastated. As I was leaving, my agent told me I needed to hit the gym more; I broke. I went home and knelt at the edge of my bed sobbing; I couldn’t continue down this path.
I still had an upcoming hair show to do. I kept the gig and hatched a plan to give a big fuck-you to my agent. My hair was halfway down my back when I started the hair show. For the final segment of the show, they chopped it off to chin length. My modelling contract had a clause that stated that I couldn’t change my image, but, being 17, suing me for breach of contract wasn’t worth my agent’s time. I didn’t have any more bookings, so there was no consequence for him if he let me go. So, he did; he ripped up my contract and told me to get out and never come back. I did, but, unfortunately, I took my eating disorder with me.
In breaking my silence, what I’ve had to own up to the most isn’t the fact that I’ve had an eating disorder for decades, it’s the manipulation and deception that went into covering up the eating disorder. The longer I lived the lie, the harder it was to admit to the deception. Laying in the emergency room talking to my mom, she asked me how she could’ve missed that I was harming myself. I began listing off some of the things I had done over the years; she was gobsmacked.
Old habits die hard. I continued to convince people that I was eating and everything was fine. Even while laying in the hospital I told my kid’s dad that I was “dieting too much” and messed up my electrolytes. I didn’t have the guts to tell him I had hidden my eating disorder from him when we were married. The potential damage it could’ve done to our friendship was too high and it would’ve been too difficult to own up to. I don’t know if our kid ever told him; he and I have never spoken about it again. He knew I struggled with my weight and was prone to dieting.
The hardest person to confess to was my friend Brennen. It wasn’t the fact that I had an eating disorder; he already knew that. Owning up to the lie that I had my eating disorder under control was the difficult part. For a few years, he had listened to me complain about my psychiatrist’s threats to hospitalize me based on my weight. She didn’t believe I had it under control; she was right. I would lament to Brennen saying, “I eat; you see me eat. You can tell her I eat.” But the truth was I’d eat when I was at his place every week, and I would eat small portions.
Calling Brennen from the hospital to tell him I was being admitted and needed him to pick up some clothes took me a while. I stared at my phone trying to think of what to say. How do you ask someone to do you a favour when you also have to admit you’ve been lying to them for a few years?
I was pretty out of it from not eating; I don’t fully remember the conversation. I do know Brennen got me what I asked for, and all the things he knew I needed that I hadn’t asked for. What seemed to matter most is that I got help: breaking the silence and letting my friends help me was the first step on my recovery journey.
Hospitals during February 2021 were very busy places. Normally, eating disorder patients go to the psych ward, but it was full. My electrolytes were too out of balance to be treated as an outpatient. I needed to go somewhere other than the emergency room. So, I was put in what would’ve normally been a patient lounge in the renal ward. The upside was that it was a private room; the downside was that the nurses on the ward weren’t the psychiatric nurses I needed.
I was treated in the hospital for five days. There was a constant stream of doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, blood draws, and extremely vile-tasting vitamins and minerals. I had the most intense stomach pains, commonly referred to as “re-eating pains.” When your digestive system isn’t used to eating three meals and three snacks a day, it goes through shock. Doctors use the analogy of going to the gym for the first time in a long time: your muscles are sore but eventually get used to the workout. But this is much worse.
No matter how much I cried or complained about the pain I had to continue eating a certain number of calories. From a previous stint in the hospital for bipolar I knew if I played the game I could get out; old habits again took over. When the nurse wasn’t looking, I started throwing out food and only eating the entrees (psychiatric nurses sit and watch you eat to avoid being able to dump food). I needed that consistent check mark indicating my food was gone so the doctors would let me go.
Don’t get me wrong: I wanted to recover; I just didn’t like the treatment approach the hospital was taking. I didn’t like the feeling of being force fed, and I felt like nobody was listening to me. I was isolated, in a renal ward rather than the psych ward, where I could talk to psychiatric nurses any time of day. Instead, I had psychiatrists that were only concerned with outpatient treatment options, not what was going on right then and there. If they didn’t want me there, I wasn’t going to give them a reason to keep me there. (I do blame a lot of this on the pandemic, though: hospital beds were in high demand.)
It’s been a long, slow road with challenges and setbacks but also some progress. There are various paths to recovery, with different resources and treatment options. What works for one person may not work for another. When one option isn’t helpful, it’s not a failure, it’s a roadblock that requires a detour.
First, I tried Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous (ABA). Since we were in the middle of COVID, all the meetings were online, which was actually pretty cool. I met women from all over the world while sitting in my pjs in bed. Every morning at 5 am PST there was an international call; I bonded with a few women from New York who invited me to their Friday afternoon calls. In the end, that recovery program didn’t work for me. It was too rigid, and when I couldn’t stick to the meal plan I felt like a failure.
ABA is based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which some people like and others don’t. ABA is the same—the program is highly successful for many people, and I would recommend anyone with an eating disorder look into it. That might be the path to recovery that suits them, but I was in search of something different.
Next up was an eating disorders clinic run by the Ministry of Child and Family Development. Through the clinic, I took cognitive behaviour therapy geared toward my thoughts about food and eating. But we couldn’t talk about our eating disorders specifically, as that could be triggering for other participants; that was frustrating at times. While the programs were helpful, I needed an actual support group, and they didn’t have one at the time. Then, on short notice, the clinic closed indefinitely due to a lack of funding.
At the SIED Clinic, they compared recovery to a hike. First, we walk along a flat path, which is a time of preparation where we gather the tools we need to recover, such as friends and family, community resources, books on recovery, and support groups. Then we start walking up a long, small slope of recovery. Recovery progress at this stage varies from person to person. The slope is gradual, so some people go quicker than others; either way, it’s a long path. The next phase of recovery is a steeper slope where recovery progress gets slower and can be hard until we reach the recovery plateau. Like any hike, we can trip, fall, slide down the hill, and even roll backwards. Sometimes we sit at a certain spot for a while before moving on. The important part is that we pick ourselves up and try again.
My last hope was the Looking Glass Foundation. They have a variety of programs for teens and adults; the one I’m in is called Hand in Hand. It’s a mentorship program that matches people up with someone who has been through recovery. Before COVID it was done in person; now it’s online. I’ve been meeting with my mentor via video call weekly for over a year now. We also communicate via chat when I need to talk in between meetings.
I’ve been asked extremely thought-provoking questions that have made me look at my eating habits and relationship with food in different ways. I have a stronger understanding of what trips me up; how to learn from those stumbles; how to celebrate the wins; how to keep going. We don’t just talk about my eating disorder. Sometimes we talk about school, my kid, work, and relationships; all these things impact my eating in different ways.
It was always my plan to go back to school when my son started high school. I thought I was far enough into recovery that I’d be able to continue it while attending Camosun. What I didn’t anticipate were the setbacks I would face. First, the meetings with my mentor became sporadic due to me being overwhelmed with the amount of homework I had. It was too easy to cancel a meeting to get an extra hour to work on a project.
Just scheduling meals has become difficult to manage. Breakfast is still a difficult meal for me to eat; having 8:30 am classes doesn’t help. Both last semester and this semester I have classes around noon; navigating when to eat lunch has become such a challenge, I tend to skip it entirely. I’ve had the odd day where I’d have soup or a sandwich. But overall, that might have happened a dozen times.
And then there’s dinner. When I’m swamped with homework I don’t stop and cook for myself. During the weeks when my son is home, he cooks for me. Toward the end of the fall semester, I started paying him to cook my meals for the week he’d spend with his dad; this was helpful but not consistent. Ordering DoorDash at 10 pm is my usual go-to.
One thing that always plays in the back of my mind is my mentor saying, “You need to celebrate the wins; when setbacks happen remember how far you’ve come.” The fall semester was hard: I had a setback. I was skipping lunch more than I was eating it. But at night, when I realized I had gone all day and not eaten, or not eaten enough, I ordered food. I could’ve just went to bed, but, instead, I stayed up and ate.
There was another moment during the fall semester I had a setback. Actually, it was more of a downward spiral. I have modelled on and off since I was a teenager, but since being hospitalized I’ve gained a significant amount of weight and don’t want to be photographed. Those self-image issues are back. I struggle every day with hiding the weight gain.
Turning down local photographers is easy. If I tell them I’m busy they move on to the next model. But when a class assignment in the fall semester was a self-portrait, that was harder to deal with. I thought I could do it. Who’s going to see it—me and my instructor? I had no intention of posting it to the class discussion board. There was no way in hell I was going to subject myself to a critique of any kind. I tried to psych myself up to do it. The location to do the photoshoot was all arranged. I was getting ready and as I was doing my hair, I started to cry.
With half my hair still in a clip on top of my head, I fell to the ground and started sobbing. I kept thinking, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror anymore. How the fuck am I supposed to take a self-portrait if I can’t look at myself?” I had flashbacks of modelling as a teenager, going to awful go-sees, listening to my agent criticize me; it was too much. So I did the only thing I could think of: I emailed my instructor and said I wouldn’t do the assignment and I’d take a zero.
I’ll give my instructor credit for being willing to work with me on finding an alternative assignment, but I had to go into more detail than I was prepared to share. I wasn’t mentally stable; I was still crying and my hair was still clipped on top of my head. The feeling of dread and a desire to run away and never look back had a tight grip on me. I would’ve been fine with a zero. I just wanted an end to this nightmare.
Luckily, my friend whose trailer I was going to do the photoshoot at is good at talking me down. After about an hour of talking to him, I stopped crying. My hair stayed in the clip for the rest of the day. It was almost a week before I could look at myself in the mirror. I began looking at food as calories again, not as food; restriction had set in once again.
It still haunts me that I wasn’t able to do that assignment properly and then spiralled into restriction, but with every setback, there’s an opportunity to learn. I learned that deep down inside I had buried a lot of negative emotions from modelling that needed to get out. Recovery isn’t just putting food in my mouth or not binging on food; it’s about finding the reasons why I have these behaviours.
An eating disorder can be very isolating. It’s hard to explain to people what’s happening (I’m only scratching the surface of complexities), and everybody’s eating disorder looks different. I now try to be open and honest about having an eating disorder, but I do catch myself falling into old habits. There are times when I get frustrated with the slow progress I’m making in recovery or fighting the intrusive thoughts I get and want to just say, “Fuck it! Who cares? You’re not getting any better.”
Then I have my weekly chat with my mentor and we talk about it, come up with strategies to work through it and try to move forward. Having that one person who fully understands what it’s like to live with an eating disorder makes a huge difference in my life. The rest of my friends try to support me the best they can, but they can only understand so much.
Being in college at any age is stressful. Between getting to class on time and getting assignments handed in on time, plus non-school work, it’s a juggling act. For me, there’s the added time-suck of staring at food thinking, “I don’t know what to eat.” I’ll stand in the caf and look at everything, knowing I need to eat, and, being unable to decide, I leave.
After years of ignoring hunger pains, I rarely feel any. After the hospital, I had alarms to tell me when to eat meals. When I started the fall semester I had to turn off most of those alarms because of my class schedule. It was very difficult to find a consistent time to eat lunch so I never reset that alarm to a different time. I tell myself that I’ll eat when I get home, but then I get home and start on assignments or talk to a neighbour or my kid or find some other distraction. Then 10 pm rolls around and I realize I haven’t eaten. Not because I’ve chosen not to eat, I just forgot to.
I’ve been open with some students about my eating disorder. What I discovered is I’m not completely alone. There are other students struggling with disordered eating or an eating disorder. Having other people around me who understand and support me when needed is a great relief. I even had one student offer to eat meals with me to help me remember to eat, or just for accountability. Help can come from the most unexpected places. But getting the necessary help from friends and family, or anywhere else, requires breaking the silence.