The conversation around eating disorders often centers on young girls. As adults still coping with bulimia, for the first time my mom and I talk about our progress, pasts, and enduring anxieties.
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I was 6 years old and 55 pounds the first time I got on a scale and decided that I was unhappy with what it showed me. Ten years later I started throwing up in an attempt to purge that same unhappiness. Being bulimic as a teenager was common, internally glorified among online communities that were eager to commiserate and offer support. Suffering as an adult — in scattered spurts, following a four-month stint in an outpatient rehabilitation program — is lonelier, much more silent. It is both born of and breeds shame, resistant to recovery.
My mother Linda has struggled with bulimia on and off since she lost her own mother and sole guardian at the age of 14. She was never silent about her anxieties surrounding eating and dieting, and I grew up as keenly aware of her body's fluctuation as I was her dissatisfaction with it. She is the one I called from Fordham University in the middle of my first semester, when I'd thrown up blood and decided it was time to come home; and she is the one who researched, checked me into, and attended group therapy sessions with me at Mather Hospital's treatment facility on Long Island.
As I near my thirties, I asked her to sit down with me because, though my mother and I are close, we rarely speak about our eating disorders beside an occasional check-in ("Are you taking care of yourself?") at the end of a phone call.
Linda: I'm going to be very frank and honest, and you're going to have to just deal with it.
Arianna: (Laughs) That's fine, that's fine. That's perfect.
Linda: You sure?
Arianna: Yeah, that's why I want to do this.
Linda: I don't want you to think, Oh, well, she's still suffering from this and she seems to be OK. The whole purpose of being a parent is to guide your children in a better direction.
Arianna: No, I mean, I wouldn't worry about that. Don't worry about that. Tell me about the background of when it started for you, your own issues with your body. I know you were heavy as a child.
Linda: Well, I was heavy until the age of about 14. I was heavy until my mom passed away. My weight loss came after my mom died, and I lost a lot of weight then. I started throwing up then. But I had a lot of other issues then too. But that was basically when the whole cycle started for me.
Arianna: And had you tried to lose weight before that?
Linda: I was forced — I was put on diets during my childhood and during my adolescence because I was so overweight. My mom was concerned. So she brought me to the doctor and he put me on a diet and that's why to this day I don't like certain diet foods, because I was forced to eat them at an early age. But that didn't help me lose weight, and I was ashamed, you know? I was ashamed of my body for my entire life.
Arianna: And why did you start throwing up?
Linda: I don't think — I don't have any memory of throwing up before my mom died. I was abandoned, right? And that's when it started. But it became a regular habit for me from that point forward. I was 14 and I remember it. And I lost a lot of weight, and I felt good. I was getting looked at by boys for the first time. I felt that if I was going to take part in life the way I wanted to, now that I was alone, I felt like I needed to be accepted and included, and you can't be that way if you're overweight.
Arianna: Do you remember the thought process before you did it for the first time?
Linda: No. You mean the day?
Arianna: Yeah, well, the first time you threw up. I'm just wondering what pushes that first step.
Linda: I think that for me, it was a process of cleansing, and it still to this day is a process, for me, of getting a feeling out of my body. I don't know if that makes any sense, psychologically. It feels like a cleansing, and... I know people say it's about control, and I feel like part of it is, but a lot of it had to do with just feeling when my mom passed away, I felt, maybe... I don't know, I don't know. I know I wanted to fit in, you know, my whole life kids made fun of me for my weight. They called me names.
And I started losing weight because I wasn't eating and I started feeling, oh, this is cool. This is a good way to start shedding these pounds, to stop feeling so self-conscious. When I was 15, bulimia was a very hot thing to do. It was very popular, along with taking amphetamines. It was just part of the world. And so I lost a lot of weight, and I felt good about myself, but then I gained it all back about a year later anyway, and I basically became a recluse. I didn't socialize. I didn't go to functions. My whole life has been up and down with my weight.
Arianna: Was there secrecy about it with other girls who were doing it? Was there any competition or pride surrounding it?
Linda: Never. No, that wasn't part of our culture.
Arianna: Have you been throwing up regularly since you started, or have there been long spans in which you weren't?
Linda: I wasn't throwing up for the entire time that I was raising you guys. It just resurrected six or seven years ago. Somehow along the line of becoming a mother and taking on that role, it was like I took a sabbatical on these unhealthy things. And I didn't throw up all those years. I never thought about it.
Arianna: So the urges weren't even there?
Linda: I mean, I was always self-conscious about my weight, but I just didn't want to... I didn't think about it.
Arianna: But you definitely still dieted.
Linda: I've dieted my whole life. Life is dieting. (Laughs) I've never not been aware of anything I've eaten. And that's why I hate to see you battling with food. It's a battle that food always wins. It's always a thought process, and it's a burden, a heavy, heavy burden, when you have to think every time you eat something.
Arianna: I have memories of Slim-Fast around the house, Weight Watchers.
Linda: Always. I did Shaklee Shakes. Does that name ring a bell? I had a supplier. (Laughs) But my diets always were... I did the grapefruit diet, I did the Atkins Diet, I did Shaklee Shakes all the time. I did Lean Cuisine. So, yeah, that just reminded me. I lost 10 or 12 pounds on the grapefruit diet after my mom died. Eat nothing but grapefruit, breakfast and lunch. I hate grapefruit so much.
Arianna: I know, I did the banana diet for like a week, which, I mean, isn't even a diet, it's just you eat as many bananas as you want all day and then you're allowed whatever you want for dinner. (Laughs) Bananas and bananas forever.
Linda: (Laughs) I know, I did the same thing. I fasted so many times.