Every Body’s Story Belongs

Jan 30

As we move toward National Eating Disorders Awareness Week and this year’s theme, Fighting for Change, Committed to Change - Every Body Belongs, I’ve been thinking about the stories we hear most often. The oversimplified ones. The ones that leave far too many people out. When we widen the story, we make room for all of us, and that’s where belonging begins.

When we think of eating disorders, we often picture young, thin, white cisgender female bodies, often from a middle-class or affluent background. We blame an appearance-based obsession with perfection. High standards to the extreme. But that narrative is misleading. It flattens the lived experience of eating disorders into a single stereotype.

What you don’t see on the recovery pamphlet is that for many of us, it’s part trauma response. Eating disorders affect people of all genders, ages, races, and sizes. They are, according to the National Eating Disorders Association, “bio-psycho-social diseases, which means that genetic, biological, environmental, and social elements all play a role.” (1)

As someone who lived through 30 years of disordered eating and body dysmorphia, my story looks nothing like the classic tale. I can only tell my truth, but I hope it helps tell the truths of many others whose experiences fall outside the afterschool special script. Here’s what I know:

It's not about food or the body. Not really.

I think I always knew on some level that I didn’t have a great relationship with food and my body. I never understood why I simply couldn’t eat the way a “normal person” eats, because that would put me in a bigger body. Instead of accepting that bodies are all different, and mine happened to come in a larger frame, I blamed it. I saw it as a problem to be solved. When I couldn’t solve it, I felt betrayed, and that perceived betrayal began the mistrust I have with my body.

Now I know that the problem didn’t start with my body, it started with my brain. I’m not the only one who has been shaped by diet culture and the objectification and dehumanization of women’s bodies. We all have. So why did I respond to it in such an extreme and regrettably participatory way?

Thanks to a very all-or-nothing mindset with a compulsive edge and complex PTSD, my need for control and safety drove me toward behaviors that felt comforting at the time but were anything but safe.

Poverty and food insecurity can be a factor.

This is something that I feel isn’t talked about enough in eating disorder recovery conversations. Growing up, I went through times where I didn’t have consistent access to food, and the resulting weight loss had everyone treating me like a human.

Sometimes, when you’re food insecure, going hungry feels like the moral choice. Then you get all this external feedback telling you that now you matter more, and it’s easy to understand why you would slip into unhealthy habits that turn into compulsions that turn into a disorder.

When food became available again, I felt torn. Hunger didn’t feel safe, but fullness felt like failure. It left me more disconnected from my body than ever.

If you look fine, you must be fine.

My eating disorder took many forms over the years, from the recognizable and overt behaviors like purging and starving into my 20s to when I got a little smarter about concealing it through the shiny veneer of achieving perfect health. I purged through a demanding exercise regimen, severely restricted through “fasting,” and although I was usually eating a few times a day, the rules I set for myself of when, what, where, and how much became more rigid as I became more obsessed with them.

Still an “atypical anorexic,” I was in the high normal BMI range the whole time. (I know now that BMI is not the indicator of health we have been led to believe, but back then I accepted it as absolute truth.) My doctor was pleased with my healthy lifestyle and peers commended me for my discipline and energy. I thought I was thriving, especially compared to the sad teenager who was using extreme and dangerous means out of desperation.

It wasn’t until August 2021, after having two kids and successfully “bouncing back” (God, that phrase alone makes me cringe in the most dramatic way possible) that I realized nothing had actually changed. My disorder had just evolved. And now it wasn’t only affecting me. It was affecting the family my husband and I built, and I couldn’t have that. I had to heal.

Eating disorder treatment is inaccessible for many.

After hitting dead end after dead end trying to find outpatient services for eating disorders, I found a trauma therapist that did her best to understand where I was coming from. She helped me name the traumas that got me to that point and helped me practice healthy habits to move forward, but she didn’t fully understand that I was terrified of being in a bigger body. “So what if you go up a couple of pants sizes?” she countered.

Um, it’s literally my biggest fear.

I had to face the fear alone, and I wish I could tell you that I had some master plan that worked, but it was more nuanced than that. I changed the media I was consuming. I deleted Instagram. I paid attention to the women I admired and wanted to emulate and realized many of those women were in bigger bodies too. It’s like I never noticed before. I spent so long consumed with my own body that I never realized how little it matters to those who genuinely love and respect you. I also learned how many different types of bodies I truly find beautiful.

But finding my own body beautiful, or at least neutral, proved to be much more difficult. Nourishing myself felt like discomfort instead of care. I cried into my cereal the first morning I tried to eat breakfast again. But I kept going. After a (long) time, the discomfort softened.

I stopped weighing myself. I knew the number was climbing, and numbers were such a huge trigger for me that avoiding it was an act of protection. I was doing better than expected with the weight gain, but it took exactly one full-body photo of myself to set me back.

Recovery is not linear.

Seeing that photo sent me spiraling. I convinced myself I’d gone too far. That I had to go back to restricting. That the body in the picture couldn’t possibly be mine. With more distance now, I can see that I looked fine. It just hit the unhealed parts of me without warning.

That moment triggered my only relapse in the last four years. Restricting after a long stretch of food freedom was harder than anything I expected. It felt like betraying my body after finally earning its trust. And curiously, the relapse clarified something: I didn’t want to go back. It was more comfortable to return to eating intuitively, and that comfort wasn’t ease, it was growth.

It showed me that perceived control would never feel as good as coming home to myself.

Eating disorders have been characterized as an obsession with appearance and body size. You don’t see the safety of control, the familiarity of routine and ritual, and the quiet fight to reclaim yourself, especially when social conditioning is practically screaming at you that you’re only valuable and worthy in a smaller body.

We talk a lot about symptoms and treatment, but not enough about the spaces in between, where recovery doesn’t always look how you think it should. This is the part we don’t always talk about. But maybe we should.

Because every body and every story belongs.

Because recovery begins where we belong.