I Thought I'd Overcome My Eating Disorder. 30 Years Later, I Found Myself In Its Thrall Again.

“For 25 years, making fun of my weight was a national sport,” Oprah Winfrey recently said, when she revealed that she’s been taking the weight loss drug Ozempic. That’s in addition to using the Weight Watchers point system, having her last meal at 4 p.m., and drinking a gallon of water each day. I wished I couldn’t comprehend the desire of a woman who had it all to want one thing more: a thinner body. But I did understand, intimately.  

“Your eating disorder will always be your Achilles’ heel,” a red-haired nurse told me when I was 21.

I was shocked and offended. I’d left college to enter Waltham-Weston Hospital in Massachusetts in 1994. Unintended weight loss at the start of freshman year had given me a dieter’s high. If I had lost 5 pounds by accident, how much could I lose if I really tried? After two years of bulimia and anorexia, I found out the answer: 30 pounds. No number on the scale was ever low enough, though. Part of me wanted to get better. The other part of me wanted to get thinner. 

By the fall of junior year, my better self won out. I was ready, as my best friend suggested, to “give myself over to the program.” This was a hospital, right? I was there for the cure. 

That’s what I informed the nurse when she came into my room to tell me to double down, try harder, my dad’s insurance wouldn’t pay for this care forever. I was one week into treatment, and we were supposed to work up to finishing whatever was on our plates at meals and snacks. But I was still eating only foods low in fat and calories. 

“You need to push yourself!” the nurse said, like a coach rallying a player dragging their feet through a game. “I want to see you do better at dinner.”

“Oh, yeah, totally,” I said. “I’m going to be a normal person from now on.” 

But I’d never been a normal person when it came to eating. Born with cleft lip, I couldn’t latch, so I was fed with a turkey baster, drop by drop, like a baby bird. My parents were supposed to feed me every two hours, but my mom told me each feeding took about two hours, so as soon as one ended, the next one began.

As I got older, I was picky, and I soon found that refusing to eat anything other than the five or so things I liked was a way of exerting power in a family that was often governed by the shifting winds of my mother’s mental illness. It was my own boundary: I won’t eat that, and you can’t make me. 

I knew the cleft lip scar on my face made me look different, and though my selective eating as a child wasn’t designed to keep me slender, it did. My mom’s highest praise when we went shopping was, “You look like a model.” But we both knew it was just from the neck down. I picked up early on our family’s rule: If you can’t be pretty, you damn well better be thin.  

I was tired of that, though. Look where it had gotten me. 

“Don’t worry, I’m done with this part of my life,” I told the nurse. 

But was this part of my life done with me? 

I regained the weight I’d lost, went back to school and graduated on time. In therapy, I analysed my desire to control the uncontrollable. A nutritionist offered strategies for tricky situations, like multicourse work dinners and vacations, where the food was unfamiliar. I worked my way up to a great job, got married, and had a son I adored. I thought pregnancy might trigger an eating disorder relapse, but it didn’t. 

I was better, I was sure.

Thirty years later, I came to the difficult decision to leave my 14-year marriage. I was so anxious about the breakup that I lost weight. Then my mother fell, fractured her pelvis, entered a state of delirium, and spent two months in a psychiatric hospital. I was so busy coordinating her care, that I lost several more pounds. It was like when I was a freshman in college, that accidental weight loss, effortless. At first.

Sitting by my mom’s bedside one day, I got a call from my primary care physician.

 “So your test results came back...” she said with the tone doctors used when they had bad news, “and the cells are cancerous.” 

Months before, an endocrinologist had identified the pea-sized bump on my neck as a thyroid nodule. 

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “Or it’s cancer. But don’t worry. If it’s cancer, it’s the good cancer.”

I had a sonogram and biopsy just to be on the safe side, not worried at all. Now here it was, cancer. The good cancer, but still. 

I lost a few more pounds, and before long, my weight was lower than it had been since I was hospitalised back in college. Friends noticed and expressed concern. 

“Yeah,” I’d say, looking down at my loose pants like, what can you do? 

But I knew what I was doing: eating less.

The growing space between my body and my clothes created a barrier between me and the rest of the world. It made me feel safe. It was a buffer — a reminder that no matter what else went wrong that day, something had gone right. 

Every statement of concern felt like validation.

“Eat something fattening!” a neighbour said. 

“I will,” I assured him, all the while thinking: Never. 

Now nearly 50 years old, I realised what that kind of irrational thinking meant: My eating disorder had returned. In my season of stress, I’d subconsciously reverted back to my old tricks: Skipping meals. Waiting to eat until I got dizzy. Finishing only half of what was on my plate. Trying to eat less than anyone else, to be just like Oprah, in her recent array of ever-smaller purple dresses on the red carpet. Her size wasn’t a national joke anymore — it was a national goal.  

“I know everybody thought I was on Ozempic,” Winfrey said. “But I worked so damn hard.” 

I worked so damn hard, too. Taking care of everything while denying myself anything beyond the bare minimum. My too-thin body was a great and terrible comfort. 

I wish I could say that I hated the return to a problem I thought I’d left behind 30 years earlier. But I didn’t hate it. I loved it. I was happy to welcome it back, because I’d missed the figure that came with it. I knew I was supposed to think I looked better when I was a healthy weight, but I liked how I looked when I was at my slimmest — just lines and angles, nothing rounded, nothing extra.  

Months stretched into a full year. I kept the summary printouts from many doctors visits with my ever-lower weight printed on each one, as proud as I used to be of As on my report cards.

Maybe, I hoped, this would last forever. 

It didn’t. 

My ex and I learned to co-parent harmoniously. My mother’s condition improved and she moved into a memory care facility, where she was getting the appropriate support. My cancerous thyroid nodule was removed. 

I’d said goodbye to so many things that past year: the hope my marriage could be saved, the wish my mother could return to living independently, the family I had envisioned for my son with only one home, not two. And now it was time to let go of one more thing: my eating disorder. In some ways, it would be the hardest farewell, because it was between me and myself.

But I couldn’t enjoy my new free life from a prison of my own making. So I opened the door and stepped out. I knew it might not be the last time. An addict is always in recovery, and this was my addiction. But I had left it before, I could leave it now, and I’d leave it again in the future. If the past 12 months had taught me anything, it was this: Few things last forever. 

Oprah seemed happier on Ozempic, but we had seen her happy with her body before, like in 1988, when she pulled out a red wagon containing 67 pounds of animal fat to show her TV audience how much weight she had lost after a crash diet. If weight issues were so easily managed — by meal-replacement shakes or prescriptions — we’d all be just fine. But Dr. Bessel van der Kolk said it best in his book by the same name: The body keeps the score.

I don’t know Oprah or how she really feels, but this isn’t about her, it’s about me. I believe unless we find a new way to say what we have been trying to say through food and eating, we’ll keep saying it the same old way over and over.  So, I kept seeing my therapist, looked to loved ones for support, and loosened the reins on my eating. A few more dinners with friends here, a few less skipped lunches there. Three meals a day plus snacks was the goal, just like back in the hospital. I could tell some of the lost weight had come back, because my pants stopped falling off. A recent visit to the doctor’s office for a physical confirmed it. 

Despite the work I was doing, I was still oddly scared that others would be disappointed in me, or consider me weak, as my body returned to its natural set-point.  

“What will people think if they don’t think, ‘She looks too thin’?” I asked a friend in a moment of true vulnerability.

She replied, “Maybe they’ll think: She looks happy.”

Joy Peskin is a writer with work published in Salon, Glamour, Parents Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Lilith. Her essay “My Mother, the Imposter” received first place in the Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism, Writing about Seniors category. Joy is an executive editorial director at a major publishing house and a CASA (court-appointed special advocate) for a teen in foster care. For more info, visit joypeskin.com.