Maggie Slepian writes about eating disorders and their lasting impact beyond the initial struggle for recovery. Her personal reflections reveal how the shadows of anorexia and bulimia continue to affect her relationship with food and body image years later.
My world was reduced to fear, hunger, and shame. There was no self anymore. I feel like everything is gray and I miss color, I scrawled in a barely legible journal entry, one of only a few coherent thoughts in a notebook filled with run-on sentences panicking about food and weight and sadness and self-loathing.
The unfortunate truth of eating disorders is that no matter how “recovered” you feel, act, and look, there are some elements that might never go away. Body dysmorphia is the last thing to go, if it ever does. To be trapped in this mind is like revisiting the most potent mental and emotional elements of the eating disorder without the physical symptoms and behaviors. And it’s all inward facing—I do not judge bodies of different shapes and sizes. This cruelty is solely reserved for me.