The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those.This is...

Oftentimes, especially during my recovery, I didn’t need to think about everything I was doing wrong; instead, I needed to focus more on what I was doing right—and then do more of the right stuff....

Kessa began to cut her meat into tiny pieces. As a whole it was unmanageable, frightening; but divided and arranged, the meat could be controlled. She cut four pieces. She’d count to four between each...

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a...

You are a beloved child of God. But please remember this, too: You are human. You cannot expect to eat perfectly, look perfect, or be perfect. When you stumble, pick yourself up, even if you...

Als er een nieuw meisje met anorexia binnenkomt, dan ben ik hartstikke jaloers op haar. Want zij is dunner dan ik ben.

When we feel like giving up, like we are beyond help, we must remember that we are never beyond hope. Holding on to hope has always motivated me to keep trying. I have found this...

‘Fat bitch,’ Kessa murmured as the door scraped closed behind Mrs. Stone. ‘She meant well, Francesca. And you see, everyone thinks you’re too thin.’ ‘Since when is Mrs. Stone an authority on appearance. I’ve heard...

Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe...

I used to think, that when my old inner demons started creeping back into my life, that it was a sign of failure or moral weakness. But the saints have shown me that part of...

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic...

Being thin created intense anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that weight for life, and I couldn’t.

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense...

I wrote in my journal about how good I felt when I was not living under Ed’s control. Then, when I really felt like giving up, I read these pages and realized that I was...

Yet because her needs and yearnings are real and pressing, she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot yet put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her...

anxiety becomes high energy when taken to the light. For me, it worked like this: I used to live in a constant state of anxiety, worrying about the past and the future. Now I do...

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don’t you know better? Ugly and wicked, you...

Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever...

With Ed, I always pushed away the good and only heard the bad. Today, I let in the good.

You know you’ve got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you’re thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you’re not pretty.

Real hope combined with real action has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through.

My reflection followed me mercilessly in mirrors, car doors, shop windows. I lived in a world of circus mirrors, the grotesque distortion of my body looking back at me everywhere.

Every lineament of the girl’s wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there’s something...

Connect with supportive people who empower you. The more you jump into your life, the further away from Ed you can get. Don’t have a backup plan for living. Live today. […] Trust in God....

In more ancient times the life was simpler, but now the discovery of all these different medicines for curing dyspepsia shows that people are suffering from this disease. In this country we know that there...

Clinicians have told me that our emotional is arrested at the age that an eating disorder takes control of our lives. After we recover, we pick up emotionally where we left off at that age.

Deception’ is the word I most associate with anorexia and the treachery which comes from falsehood. The illness appears inviting. It would seem to offer something to those unwary or unlucky enough to suffer from...

Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion

Intense pain often pushed me to make changes. The pain of the eating disorder pushed me into recovering from eating-disordered behaviors, and then the emotional turmoil I experienced without those behaviors (not knowing how to...

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh....

During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began...

I was always happy when he was around. My heart did not stay still in it’s place even. Nowadays my stomach replaced my heart. I was filling my stomach as long as my heart stayed...

The good news, however, is that, also contrary to popular belief, full and lasting recovery from an eating disorder is possible.

To stay in recovery, you must be responsible for finding your own motivation. Remember, motivation may not be easy to come by at first. It will probably be a very small, timid part inside of...

I left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed” (17)

Did you ever think about boys?’ I say, staring up into the dark. ‘There wasn’t room,’ she whispers, and her voice is unbelievably sad. ‘At first, after Connor, I was just waiting. I was going...

HEALTHY EATING isn’t about counting fat grams, dieting, cleanses, and antioxidants; Its about eating food untouched from the way we find it in nature in a balanced way; Whole foods give us all that we...

Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we...

We take action when we have the honesty to admit that things are still broken, despite our best efforts otherwise. We take action when we hold ourselves continually open to new techniques, remaining resolutely receptive...

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, ‘That’s interesting....

This woman’s size protected herfrom the hurts of the worldbut it also imprisoned her soul. As the merry-go-round revolved, she ate another French fry,as a silent scream frozen on her face.

It is not easy to find someone your size once the Freshman Fifteen turns to the Sophomore Forty or the Senior Sixty. Even when, through some miracle of self-restraint and bulimia, college girls managed to...

In the past, my brain could only compute perfection or failure—nothing in between. So words like competent, acceptable, satisfactory, and good enough fell into the failure category. Even above average meant failure if I received...

Well, Kessa, I am glad to see that you’re taking your body seriously. I shudder when I see the girls leaving class and heading for the nearest hamburger, coke, and French fry station.The thought of...

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted...

We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way.

Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms...

Ironically, this physically weak feeling signifies that I’m actually getting stronger. I know from my past that I will ultimately feel strong if I just sit with the feeling and experience it.

Kessa ran her fingers over her stomach. Flat. But was it flat enough? Not quite. She still had some way to go. Just to be safe, she told herself. Still, it was nice the way...

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a...