I loved this post of Rita’s as well, especially these two paragraphs, arguing that eating disorders are NOT selfish:

Eating disorders are selfish, and that’s why it’s so hard for people to be understanding. Outwardly, it seems the afflicted person is just being vain to the point of killing themselves. I’m here to tell you that’s not the way it works.
Eating disorders, textbook ones, like the one I had, stem from the inability to control one’s life. In my case, it stemmed from two bouts of maternal cancer at a formative age, mixed with a super-Type-A personality and shot through with an inherited predisposition toward the melancholy. Sometimes there may seem to be no trigger point, but I guarantee that somewhere in that girl or woman’s past (and it usually is a female) there was a combination of bad circumstance, perfectionism and a mean comment about the girl’s butt.

Here’s the rest of the post. I cut out a few paragraphs to make it a bit more concise and edited some of her language (she has a vocabulary much like mine … including a few profanities). So go read her original post by clicking here. Below is the G-Rated one:

I spent this weekend with two dear college roommates and their families. A good time was had by all, with four children and five adults (my friend J., who happens to have this little job on the Human Genome Project, had to work this weekend at the last minute) and one very sweet and old yellow lab who I remember K. getting when the dog was just a wee puppy and the girl lived with me on Church Street.
How time flies.
So there we were, watching the Hawkeyes get their butts handed to them by the Buckeyes, cradling babies and startling toddlers awake when my beloved would bellow profanities at K’s parents’ 65-inch, flat-screen HDTV. (Who says you have to GO to the game to get the view from the field?) Her parents often offer up their gorgeous and enormous house when we all come to visit, since our burgeoning group keeps getting bigger, with C. now pregnant again and my best friend with a new beaux and N. living with some fellow in DC that she never brings around and blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I remember sitting there thinking how far I had come in the past 11 years since I graduated from college and left behind (mostly) my eating disorder.
Ironically, K. brought home this week’s People magazine, which boasts a cover screaming of celebrinniness. The picture of Nicole Ritchie running on the beach brought up bile in my throat, because she looked so much like me at age 18, when I consumed 700 calories a day and vomited with the bathwater running on a regular basis.
I’ve blocked out a lot of that time, but I still remember making lists of the calories I ate that day in the margins of my college textbooks. I counted gum. I counted alcohol – probably why to this day I’ve never consumed a beer. I never developed a taste for it when most people were choking down Natty Light for a cheap buzz in dilapidated, rented-out houses. When I pledged my sorority in 1992, I wore a size 2 red dress. I now wear an 8 or 10, depending on the season. At the time, I was thirty-five pounds lighter than I am now. I am in the middle of my BMI now. And yet, I never dipped below 105 pounds, and that was my ticket to assuring most people that I was still “normal,” even though I’m 5’6″. Even at my lightest, I was still dense.
Despite the numbers not being that scary, my bones were horrifying. I would trace my fingers over my ribs every night to be sure I could still feel each one. I could feel my heart beating through my ribcage. Sometimes that scared me. A heavy door was hard to open, even though I exercised an hour and a half every day, seven days a week, including weekends and national holidays. Even when I was sick.
My head was too big for my body. I could make my fingers into a circle and fit them around the very top of my thigh. When I tried to go parasailing on vacation in Florida when I was 18, the parasail guy looked at my parents and told them he was afraid the rope might snap and whisk me away forever.
My sister, my parents and hometown friends were beside themselves, and they were sick of telling me I was going to die. Despite the fact that they stuck with me, they must have really wanted to shoot me if I wasn’t already on the fast track to a heart attack. I was a pain. I denied my problems. I told them there was nothing wrong. I told them it was my life. I hated them for getting in my business, for caring about me when I was so hell-bent on hurting myself.
I don’t really remember how I got better, I just know it wasn’t an overnight process, and I never got professional help at the time. I started off a vegan, mostly to avoid eating anything with any real calories. I was eating cheese and eggs again by the time I was a senior. I incorporated fish after I graduated from college, and I added back in poultry and pork after I married my beloved. At my friend C’s house for S’s wedding last year, I ate a hamburger, and everyone freaked out. It was the first time they’d seen me eat beef in 14 years. I kind of had a tummy ache afterward, but it was good to be normal. This weekend, I ate a piece of hot dog and garnered a similar response, even though, unbeknownst to them, I’ve eaten my fair share of hot dogs since the little angel started solids.
Pregnancy forced me to gain weight for someone else. And I hated every minute of it. However, the irony of the situation is that pregnancy seemed to reset my ailing metabolism – the same metabolism that had me gaining five pounds after one week of eating 1200 calories a day. Yes, your ridiculous, low-calorie dieting will actually reset your metabolism at 800 calories a day, so that if you try to recover, you will gain weight faster than you want. Faster than you know how to accept. This message is not: Keep dieting. This message is: Don’t go low-cal in the first place. I was lucky. Pregnancy fixed my body. After the little angel was born, I went back to my pre-pregnancy weight in four months, and dropped five pounds below that after she started crawling. I’ve since gained back the bonus five, but I never became the dumpy person I was so afraid of becoming.
Eating disorders are selfish, and that’s why it’s so hard for people to be understanding. Outwardly, it seems the afflicted person is just being vain to the point of killing themselves. I’m here to tell you that’s not the way it works.
Eating disorders, textbook ones, like the one I had, stem from the inability to control one’s life. In my case, it stemmed from two bouts of maternal cancer at a formative age, mixed with a super-Type-A personality and shot through with an inherited predisposition toward the melancholy. Sometimes there may seem to be no trigger point, but I guarantee that somewhere in that girl or woman’s past (and it usually is a female) there was a combination of bad circumstance, perfectionism and a mean comment about the girl’s butt.
I grew up tormented by skinny people. I was not a skinny person. Looking back at photos, I was not as fat as I thought, but I never was a skinny kid in an age when most kids were skinny. It wasn’t like now. People were wearing 6x into middle school when I was a kid. A lot of comments got through to me. Wearing a leotard in dance class drove home how different I was from the others – something I worry about sometimes at Twinkle Toes. I have to remind myself that the little angel is not me and may not be plagued by my own insecurities.
I found myself stressing this week over my job, and as a direct result, I started stressing over the fact that I’ve grown out of my jeans. I’ve been growing out of my jeans for months, but it’s only when some other cup runneth over that I get pissed at my own ass. I apparently made too many comments about it this weekend, because my beloved (who has been known to make fun of my weight and live in the past), actually pulled over and pretended the car wouldn’t start en route to Iowa City. He laughed as the blood drained from my face in the Casey’s rest stop, and then he said, “I’ll bet for those ten seconds you weren’t worried about your stupid jeans.”
I try so hard not to ever criticize my appearance in front of the little angel. I don’t want her growing up with a complex. But my own mother was a skinny bird – she never said things like “I feel fat” when I was growing up, so I most certainly didn’t get it from her. I want the little angel to always feel she is beautiful, but I’m a woman, too, and I’m just not naive enough to think she will understand how beautiful she is as a teenager. I am terrified she will doubt herself the way I have doubted myself. I want her to skip the journey and emerge on the other side.
My friend K. commented some months ago that I seem to have a lot of body confidence. Most of the time (when my jeans fit), I do. Somewhere along the line, I learned to put more stock in the quality of my words and my friendships and relationships than I do my jeans size. I’m not completely cured, though. I don’t think I’ll ever fall into the abyss again, but the first thing in my mind when life is completely out of my control is that maybe dropping five might make me feel better. I’m sure I’ve got it under control now, 14 years later, but that pain lurks somewhere in the depths of my personality. That ability to blindly, fervently hate yourself.
I hope to God my daughter never feels that way. I love her so much, and I can’t stand the thought of her hating herself.
I’m sorry, Ma.