(she wanted grandchildren someday). She sent me to a nutritionist and a therapist. It didn’t really work. I only ate packaged foods so that I knew the caloric content. I began adding calories and slowly recovered physically.
I am an eater who went to college very underweight. I discovered weed and booze. I began bingeing and couldn’t stop. All the foods I hadn’t eaten throughout my anorexia were suddenly mine again: pancakes, pizza, Taco Bell, chocolates, gummy candies, General Tso’s chicken, cookies, ice cream with cereal on top, nachos. I gained fifty pounds.
I am an eater who began taking amphetamines daily. Ecstasy, too. I ran and worked out a lot on ecstasy. I got into laxatives—the chocolate ones. My weight “regulated.” I moved to San Francisco, where I dieted during the week and took laxatives every day and binged on weekends. I couldn’t make myself throw up. I once tried ipecac syrup and puked martinis and Indian food all night. That night was a boyfriend’s going-away party. I didn’t show up or text.
I am an eater who somehow became a normal eater from ages twenty-five to twenty-nine. I still thought about food and worried about weight a lot. A retired baseball player doesn’t stop thinking about the game. But it was the healthiest I had ever been. I think what made my eating more “normal” at this time was that I had just gotten clean and sober. I was no longer drunkenly bingeing on food. The munchies were gone. I was no longer using amphetamines to starve. The calories I’d ingested from alcohol in the past were now freed up for actual food.
I also remember, having been fucked up every day for years, that the world seemed like such a novelty to me during my first few years sober. Like, I remember going through each of the seasons and the magic of rediscovering what it felt like to be in the world: going to a pumpkin patch on Halloween, getting a tree for Christmas. I felt excited by reality in a way that I never had before. I actually wanted to be alive. I wanted to sample what the world had to offer, and this included food.
I am an eater who refuses to be the kind of woman who “lets herself go.” I got married at twenty-nine and noticed that I was gaining some weight. I panicked that I would soon become amorphous, lose my independence, sexual appeal, and maidenhood—like the weight that was accumulating on my belly and thighs was a symbol of the blurring of my identity. Where did I begin and end? Rather than asking myself these questions, I went on Weight Watchers.
Weight Watchers points is a beautiful system for someone who is absentminded about food. They aren’t the greatest for someone who has had eating disorders all her life. The world became numbers to me and I was doing more math than I ever had before. I got off Weight Watchers and went back to just counting calories. The world became different kinds of numbers, the old, familiar kind. This is how I eat now. The world is still numbers, but it is algebra, not calculus.
I am an eater who is a horrible feminist, probably. I dream of what I would eat if I identified as a man and it looks vastly different from what I eat as a woman. There would be so much pizza. The Mountain Dew would runneth over and it wouldn’t even be diet. If I do not believe that I as a woman deserve pizza, what does that say of my views of other women? If I do not love my body, how can I love the body of any other woman? I could say “I love my body” so that I appear to be a good feminist. But that only means pretending to love something I hate.
But I am an eater who is a good feminist, maybe, because I am being honest with you now. I am telling you the truth: that I have not yet dismantled the many warped schemas that define the way I see my body and the bodies of other women. I am giving you permission to tell the truth about where you are in your process of dismantling your fucked-up schemas. I am not pressuring you to dismantle anything. I am saying let’s be here together, undismantled, and just accept that this is where we are. Let’s love each other right where we are, even as