Overcoming My Eating Disorder & Raising a Healthy Daughter

I gave birth to my daughter six months ago, and, a few sleep-deprived weeks later, I realized it was right around the 10th “anniversary” of when I was admitted to a hospital for an eating disorders inpatient program.

When I try to reconcile the memory of my scared, enervated teen self with myself today, as a (somewhat) confident mother of two with visibly muscled biceps from lugging around a giant purse, a diaper bag, a breast pump, a baby, and sometimes a 38-pound 3-year-old, it’s difficult. But I still vividly remember the feelings of insecurity, self-doubt, and physical weakness. As it turns out, you can be too thin after all.

There were other factors involved, of course, but I first fixated on being skinny because I knew it would make me “someone” in a world where I wasn’t quite sure yet how I, as a nice Jewish girl, could make any kind of significant mark. What began as a diet veered into rigidity, ruling out hangouts with friends because food was usually involved and an early return from summer camp because, overwhelmed without my typical menu, I just decided to eat an apple and a cereal bar and call it a day. What turned into rigidity became a dangerous obsession when every new, lower number on the scale was a success and anything below that number was my new personal challenge.

Intellectually, I knew I was harming myself, but I couldn’t stop.
Weekly sessions with a therapist and numerous doctor appointments later, I finally realized I needed more intensive help and entered the hospital, where I met a lot of other sick women and several sick men. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, they were almost all amazing, intelligent, funny, warmhearted people who had still fallen victim to the tangled webs woven by anorexia and bulimia. Some of them are still struggling, and some of them will probably never climb their way out.

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