It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you o….

Recovery isn’t easy, at first. It takes time. It takes more work, sometimes, than you think you’re willing to do. But it is worth every hard day, eve….

You will not stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are n….

I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting..

I don't think people realize, when they're just getting started on an eating disorder or even when they're in the grip of one, that it is not somethi….

All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser ….

People take the feeling of full for granted..

Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and….

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I wa….

We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just do. We forget tha….

In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it..

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's sti….

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

The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mi….

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose..

And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, wher….

It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medi….

The problem is that you don't just choose recovery. You have to keep choosing recovery, over and over and over again. You have to make that choice 5-….

The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive..

I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longi….

[I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone….