I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just ‘managing’ the illness. It is possible...

Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not...

A bulimic person’s shame may lead her to try to hide not only her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and...

I don’t need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would.

And that’s the problem. When you’realive, people can hurt you. It’s easier to crawl into a bonecage or a snowdrift of confusion. It’s easier to lock everybodyout.But it’s a lie.

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is...

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being...

Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit,...

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her “Health”: if public discourse were really concerned with women’s health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating...

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it....

In yet another paradox, bulimia nervosa serves as both an expression of feelings and a defense against experiencing feelings, particularly shame, anger, loneliness, sadness, envy, and guilt. A person with bulimia nervosa fear, whether consciously...

HOW do you define a word without concrete meaning? To each his own, the saying goes, soWHYpush to attain an ideal state of being that no two random people will agree isWHERE you want to...

Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March……….I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world…I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living...

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.

. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it...

The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because...

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and...

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories,...

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop…”an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution...

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one’s self, to attune to one’s subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience....

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy…

The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because...

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic...

The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll’s house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the...

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....

What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path...

I’m learning how to taste everything.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us…During the past decade, women breached the power structure;...

…compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us....

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty ‘fixes’ that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under...

If I had the capacity to withstand instantaneous physical pain, I think I would have even considered taking a razor to my leg. Because after so long of living in that hole, I would have...

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...

The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any...

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children...

It’s the soul that’s starving, not the body

Invece respiro ancora. Con la responsabilità di chi è stato riammesso al gioco. Dopo un fallo contro la vita.

One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

It’s never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space...

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

The loneliness I endured during that time of my life is something I hope never to experience again.It’s more than just the feeling of being isolated. I was disconnected mentally, physically and emotionally from the...

Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it

Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.

Cosmetic surgery is not “cosmetic,” and human flesh is not “plastic.” Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the...

Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone...