CW: this piece discusses eating disorders at length
“Do you want to get better?” a nurse with kind eyes whom I’ll call Sharon, asked me. I lifted my contempt gaze, one that might’ve made Tyra very proud, from the floor and shrugged.
I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I definitely didn’t want to be there, on the third floor of an office building, in Cleveland, Ohio. It was May 11, 2010. I had just come home from spring semester at college and was supposed to be spending the summer in New York City at a dream fashion internship. I had to back out to seek treatment, and was, understandably, pissed.
I wasn’t particularly interested in recovery. In fact, I didn’t even know what that meant. I didn’t want to eat. I wasn’t willing to give up overexercising. I certainly didn’t want to see my body change. I just didn’t want to die, and faced with that as a very real possibility, felt depleted of options. Driven by fear, exhaustion, and the ambition to get the hell to New York, I, a specter of myself, agreed to seek treatment.
“We can give this a try, but in order to keep you outpatient there has to be some sort of self directedness,” Sharon told me sternly. And what she meant by that was, I had to be compliant while in treatment and at home, or else I’d find a new home for myself at the children’s hospital across town. I was medically unstable and naturally met with concern that I might need a higher level of care, especially considering I wasn’t exactly gung-ho to be there. In other words, I was on thin ice, but up for the challenge.
With what little energy I had, and certainly not enough to deflect with my signature humor, I nodded. I signed the paperwork.
A week later, my alarm went off at 5:15am, which it would do every day for the next three months. I got dressed and drove my little white car named Donatella (yes, named after that Donatella) an hour to Cleveland into the unknown, where I would spend the entire day in therapy and meal support. It was Hell, or at least one version of it. And having to literally relearn how to do something so basic, so instinctual, felt humiliating. If I could go back in time, I would give myself a big hug.
I naively thought that would be it. I would be “fixed”, go back to school, and all would carry on as normal. I didn’t realize that it–or rather, I–would take constant fixing. That the choice I made in May 2010 to save my own life would be a choice, rarely an easy one, I’d have to keep making. And EDs are a shapeshifter.
I did succeed in treatment that summer. I did the work, gained the weight, and made it back to college, albeit a little tardy. But this chapter was far from closed.
Fifteen years and over a dozen hospitalizations and treatment admissions later, I am still actively working on rewiring the dark side of my brain, made even darker through the often-traumatic experiences that occur on an inpatient setting. (The “darkness” is not all bad though–I’d say it’s where I derive most of my best work from.) This journey has been sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, unbelievably difficult and mostly transformative in ways I’m still processing. Perhaps this whole adventure might have been easier if I, and the millions of others plagued with this relentless disorder, weren’t trying to heal in a world that continues to prioritize thinness at any cost, normalizes disordered eating behaviors, and rebrands diet culture as wellness. Among other things, of course.
I don’t take issue with or villainize people, particularly women, who desire thinness. Unfortunately, in Western society, it is something that is injected into many of our brains at a young age, like a poison, and I can empathize with that better than most. A drive for thinness is not a moral flaw, and what anyone chooses to do with their body is their rightful choice. What I do take issue with, however, is someone using their platform to repackage and sell disordered eating to impressionable young women who may not know better as something that is not only desirable but effortless, glamorous, elevated, or whatever else it’s being coined. I find this incredibly dangerous, irresponsible, and insidious. Even as someone with over a decade of intensive therapy under her proverbial belt, this type of content even fucks me up sometimes, so I can’t imagine what it has the capacity to do to people at risk for, or in the throes of, an ED. At the very least, it frustrates and discourages me beyond belief.
According to the Alliance for Eating Disorders, the nation’s leading nonprofit providing resources and education, one in five recent calls to their helpline mentions “Skinni” culture, and 30 percent of all calls come from people under the age of 18. (The word “skinny” being intentionally misspelled by its fearless leader to avoid censorship after she was banned from TikTok upwards of seven times.) The founding father of Skinnytok (now banned entirely from the platform), a 23-year-old thin-obsessed, self-proclaimed “skinni coach” publishes and sells “tips” to her subscribers that I’m not going to explore here to avoid further harm, but the nature of which are, in essence, how to eat less and replace food with things that aren’t food. Such tips can easily be used as a sort of ED manual, and it’s overall a very sad state of affairs. Perhaps this might seem harmless to some, but it clearly has the capacity to do great harm, and is highly reminiscent of content you’d find on a pro-anorexia website in, like, 2003.
I make it a point, for the sake of protecting my energy and mental health, to dwell on the positive and avoid the dark underbelly of the interwebs. I try to have empathy for people who harm others, even consciously, knowing they are likely coming from a place of self hatred which isn’t so fabulous either. But the fact that this type of shit still exists, and with enthusiastic support, is so utterly disheartening.
For anyone who needs to hear it: a size, in the name of vanity, is not an achievement. Thinness is not an accessory–or an outfit. And your body is not a trend. We are, however, deeply conditioned to think our worth is tied to our ability to shrink at will, thanks in part to ever-changing beauty ideals and the discourse (ahem) that surrounds them. And I don’t know why there’s this widespread and dangerous idea that the less space a woman takes up, the more power and value she holds.
Or, perhaps, I have an inkling. And it might be inextricably connected to the current political climate. Naomi Wolf said it best: “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.”
The truth is that shrinking oneself via restriction or other eating-disordered behaviors will never give you the happiness and peace you seek and deserve. You won’t get to live a life worth living simply in a smaller body you find more desirable, acceptable, and comfortable. It’s never that simple–if it were, there wouldn’t be so many of us fighting for our lives, desperate for a cure, or even just a break. Because the more weight you lose, the smaller the chamber of your life gets. By numbing the things you don’t want to feel, you’ll close yourself off to the feelings you do want to experience. Something I am constantly reminding myself is that: I can’t have the life I want to live, and the body my eating disorder wants me to occupy, simultaneously. In fact, your brain doesn’t care about aesthetics when determining your set point, and everyone’s is different, by the way. I’ve found it to be true that one’s best weight is whatever number you’re at while living a healthy, full life–whatever that looks like for you. Sitting beneath that seems to breed further obsession, taking us away from the things that actually do hold value. Maybe that sounds overly earnest, but it’s the honest-to-God truth.
I wish I’d recognized that sooner. Hell, it’s even easy to forget now. The devil, ever conniving, still sits on my shoulder arguing with me about this, and his voice is still hard to decipher from my own sometimes.
I didn’t know, at the tender age of seven, that putting myself on a self-imposed diet was not innocuous. I didn’t realize that thinness, when reached by dangerous, unnatural measures, can carry a hefty price tag. I didn’t know that, in the absence of proper treatment, if it didn’t kill me, it would live with me for the rest of my life and then kill me. But had I known, I probably wouldn’t have listened, because that’s just how this disease is. Still, I wish I’d listened. And I often wonder about the trajectory of my life if I had.
When anorexia nervosa first wrapped her bony hand around my world at the age of 12, it was the early aughts. At the grocery store checkout, stacks of tabloids with sensational headlines surrounding female beauty were ubiquitous. Many of them spewed ruthless criticism of female celebrities’ bodies, brightly in all caps: who had gained weight, who was “too fat”, and whose beach body was “unworthy” of being seen and should be put in Time Out until further notice. And that’s putting it gently.
To me, this implied that to be beautiful, one must strive to be thin. And I lacked the insight in my developing brain to comprehend that not everyone is built to be super thin, and that there is nothing wrong, certainly not morally, with not being thin. I didn’t know that everyone could eat the same exact amount and move in the same way and still exist in vastly different, equally beautiful frames.
A disciple of high fashion from an early age, I devoured issues of Vogue, Teen Vogue, and others, which centered impossibly thin young models as a standard of beauty. Body diversity wasn’t even a whisper of a concept then. And while neither fashion nor media caused my eating disorder, their surrounding messaging re: weight and beauty, whether implicit or explicit, certainly didn’t help matters.
Genetics load the gun, and the environment pulls the trigger. I was a high-achieving, people-pleasing, sensitive, and anxious child obsessed with fashion and dance. I had (and still have) a deeply imaginative inner world and intense fear of confrontation. I was a jack of all trades yet master of none, and felt like trying to control my body might finally make me feel good enough. At something. And for a while, it did.
Back then, if I wanted tips on how to be “better” at restricting, I would have to actively seek out such content on Tumblr or a host of other graphic pro-anorexia websites. In 2025, it simply bombards my feed without consent. And the algorithm, cunning as she is, will continue to serve it so long as you even glance at it for an extra second.
The difference is that, now, I know better. I have the insight to close out, mute, scroll, block, log off, click “not interested”, report, hire an Etsy witch (I’ve considered this), etc. But not everybody does. And it’s quite literally killing people.
Over the past couple of weeks alone, two young women with whom I was in treatment tragically passed away due to medical complications from anorexia. This of, course, can’t be blamed on one single thing. It’s extremely nuanced and I can’t say for certain whether or not either of them were engaging with Skinnytok, as it’s called. EDs are far more complicated than simply body image. Their tragic deaths mostly underscore a lack of access to compassionate, evidence-based, effective treatment in this country (especially for adults), but it also points to how painful, life altering, and ultimately lethal for many, this disorder and its comorbities are. And our culture, as you may be gathering, enables it.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And still to this day, EDs are frequently excluded from the larger mental health conversation. Why is that? I don’t know for sure, but I can hypothesize. For one, they are notoriously difficult to treat, and while recovery is certainly possible and real, EDs can be chronic. Recovery is tumultuous and ambiguous; relapse rates are staggering. Treatment is exorbitantly expensive and rarely covered by insurance in full, if at all. Research remains sorely underfunded. These disorders are also extremely deadly, having the second-highest mortality rate of all psychiatric illnesses and claim the lives of up to 20 percent who suffer–including several of my peers and friends, and nearly myself. There are far more questions than answers. And I suspect, because of how deeply intertwined EDs are with diet culture and body image, a lot of people don’t want, or don’t know how, to broach the subject. It’s too sensitive, too prickly, and maybe it feels shameful. Or even trivial. Perhaps it’s a combination of all of these things, among others. But the reality is they’re a subject most people find off putting and uncomfortable. And silence begets silence. This, of course, does a grave disservice.
It still makes even me uncomfortable, and I began doing advocacy work and speaking about my experience in late 2010 after my first attempt at treatment. I do not, by any means, enjoy discussing this topic or sharing the depths of a struggle that has upended and nearly destroyed my young life. But connection is vital to healing, vulnerability is grounding, and the cost of my staying mum is much higher than challenging my own preference for privacy.
What I also didn’t know was that chronic malnourishment would do irreparable damage to my body, particularly to my heart and bones. It’s common practice in the ED advocacy community to avoid sharing specific details of one’s struggle, particularly as it concerns weight, numbers, medical complications, and the like. You’d think such things would serve as a stark warning, but these illnesses are fiercely and ruthlessly competitive, and physical symptoms can serve as a sort of “checklist” for those in the throes of their ED to validate their level of illness and worthiness of treatment. These illnesses affect everybody (and every body) differently, and some people can, somehow, make it through (medically) unscathed. As well, one needn’t experience any sort of complications to warrant care, nor is it a marker of severity. But, it’s important to note that an ED can affect every major organ system, regardless of weight.
For me, it certainly did and has. But it was worth it, right? To be thin? No. Starving will not enhance your beauty. And it might not even make you thin. In fact, only 6 percent of those with eating disorders, including anorexia, are medically underweight–a fact of which most are unaware.
Still, you might be convinced otherwise. In the early days, when high on restricting and quickly dropping weight, I felt on top of the world. Invincible. But like any addiction, the more you “use”, the more you must do in order to maintain it. And so the spiral begins. It’s a race towards the bottom–and no, it will never be enough. Not until you decide to throw your cards down and claim defeat. Except, in this instance, giving up means you’ve succeeded rather than failed.
Through recovery, most damage is, thankfully, reversible. Your body, however, will never be the same. Neither will you.
And neither will I. But somehow, it’s transformed me into a person for whom I am grateful, most days at least. From deep within the caverns of my heart, I’m able to find a kernel of gratitude for this dark, amorphous thing that lies just beneath my skin’s surface and seeks only to destroy me. It nearly did, but reaffirmed my values somewhere along the way and has given me a greater sense of purpose, humor, and resolve. I’m so thankful for the very scared yet willing girl I was 15 years ago this week (and for all the “Sharons” who helped me along my not-so-merry way). She’s not always easy to love, but she got me here, and “here” is better in a body rapt with life and obsessed with things beyond precipitous shrinking.
I hope this helps someone <3
Love,
Christina
If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, please visit the Alliance for Eating Disorders for more resources or call +1 (866) 662-1235. If you’re working in an image-driven role, such as fashion or entertainment, please consider joining the Chain and the Alliance’s virtual, therapist-moderated group for more support.
you are very brave in your writing. you are right body image obsession is forever haunting regardless of how many years one has been symptom free. I could never talk about my bulimia to anyone even my therapists. My friends etc never knew and if revealed there was never another word about it. It was like i had two lives. My family ignored it and even my mother would say “are you still doing that thing?”. I even write a novel about it but it didn’t get picked up by a publisher. No one wanted to touch the subject. They still don’t in a way that makes a statement or impact. Thank you for being a courageous voice.
Thank you for sharing this Christina!! I admire you so deeply. I know how hard it is to chose health and yourself each and every day. All my love, always.