Obstructed — One Size

Eating disorders create a barrier between oneself and the outside world. Due to neurological changes, people suffering can lose sight of who they truly are and what they really look like. The desire to continue restricting food intake tends to start with stress or trauma, it’s not just simply wanting to be skinny.

Below, each individual story is mirrored with a conceptual depiction of the complexities that define their experience.

“When you're in it, it feels like this huge wildfire that comes in and destroys everything. Everything is just destroyed by this fire.”

Callie Cohen started purging while she working as a dishwasher at summer camp, the first time she’d ever lived away from home. No one seemed to notice the behavior; it felt like a secret. Though when she’d return home on breaks, people told her she looked great.

“I very clearly remember thinking to myself, oh, I'll just get back to my normal habits when I get home. It'll just go back to normal as soon as I get home. Then I got home. And it definitely morphed more into the anorexia binge-purge type.”

Cohen’s mother, who’d struggled with eating disorder habits in the past, found her using behaviors early on and things worsened. Their relationship became solely about the disorder, which fueled anger and a desire to sink deeper into her illness. Cohen rejected love and support because she didn’t think she deserved it.

“It wasn't guilt, it was shame. Guilt is the feeling that I did something bad. Shame is the feeling that I am bad, there's something inherently wrong with me... You fall so deep into this hole that’s so hard to get out of without people there.”

“[I thought] maybe it would mask the darkness and the chaos and the sadness and the cancer in my brain. Because I wasn't a person. And so the eating disorder was a reason behind that feeling. But it was also the reason that I had the eating disorder. It was self-fulfilling. The relationship between my feelings about myself and my eating disorder. And my feelings about the world and the way that I relate to the world.”

Emily Lund’s eating disorder began as a means of processing unresolved trauma. As a child, she was sexually abused by her older cousin who was living in the same house at the time. The incident remained hidden for years, something she had to repress.

“I knew that it was wrong, but I never really could address it for what it was. And then suddenly, when I was a young teenager, it kind of all came to the surface, not necessarily all my feelings about it, they were still pretty repressed. But just my understanding that something happened, and that it was a secret, which was suddenly very overwhelming to me.”

During this period, her parents went through a messy divorce, adding to the turmoil that made her home a place of conflict and anguish. She couldn’t focus in school and started to feel powerless. Anorexia provided comfort by giving her the sense of control she’d never had.

“I was dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma that I didn't have the bandwidth or the resources to address. And I quickly realized that being hungry was painful enough that it overshadowed the emotional pain that I was dealing with.”

Around age 20, Lund’s disorder escalated. She’d been in an abusive relationship and once it ended, the intensifying trauma of her past exacerbated feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and resentment. Her ex preferred bigger women, so she’d become that for him. When he left, she wanted to oppose his desires, shrinking into herself and finding a sense of power through controlling her size.

“When he was gone, I thought, oh my god, I have to be my own person. And I started getting attention from [men] in a way that was on my terms. Not that they saw me for who I am and who I feel like I am inside. But I had kind of resigned to the belief that nobody was ever going to see me for who I am.”

“My ballet teacher had said, you have the right body to be a ballerina. And that was one of the things that still sticks with me today. I had an underdeveloped body, I hadn't grown yet, and I didn't have boobs or anything. So I thought that if I wanted to be a ballerina, I had to look like that for the rest of my life.”

Bernadine Kwan grew up in Malaysia, a country where food and family meals are integral in the culture. Once she stopped practicing ballet at 14, her body started to naturally develop and she gained weight but not necessarily in the places she’d hoped. High school boys made fun of her for being flat-chested while her family told her to drink milk and eat carbs. Though, once she started eating more, they responded critically.

“I fell asleep at my grandma's house and it was not a flattering angle, how I was sitting and leaning on the couch. And my aunt took a picture of me. When I woke up, she showed it to me and said, you have gained so much weight, look at you, you need to lose weight. And it was a horrible, mortifying picture. It was no one's best angle when you're sleeping on the couch, slumped up like that. And to have that picture just thrown at me. I was just mortified. Absolutely mortified.”

When she’d eat less, her family made comments just as they had when she ate more. So she found an alternative method through purging, inspired by pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia accounts on Tumblr. Around the same time, she started watching the UK show Skins that features a female character whose vice is food restriction. Kwan began to receive more male attention and comments like “you eat but you’re still so skinny.”

“I had like, all these weird sorts of habits when you're a teenager and you get your heart broken, you start being aware of the male gaze and what-not. And I don't even know what happened. But it ended up just spiraling completely out of control.”

“It was like my eating disorder is a glass box. I can see outside, but nothing can touch me and I’m safe. But I'm not quite in my life. I'm not living.”

Rachel was finicky around food from a young age, a quality that a psychiatrist later attributed to OCD. The thoughts started to manifest into a disorder around age 13 when her dad was diagnosed with cancer. By the time she was in eighth grade, he couldn’t fight the disease any longer.

“When my dad did pass away, I think that connection was solidified more. It felt like, in a metaphorical way, that as I said goodbye to my dad in the hospital, I left holding hands with my eating disorder.”

Restrictive eating acted as a maladaptive coping mechanism, like addiction, offering a sense of security and comfort. It kept her isolated and withdrawn, but in her mind, it protected her from the outside world. For years, she denied its destructive nature and the intensifying severity of her illness. After a relapse her freshman year of college, she went to treatment for the first time.

“My mom came and picked me up and was flying me back home. My dietician had prepared her and told her I might look really scary or whatever. And my mom, when she saw me said, oh, you look fine. I'm sure she looked up anorexic and saw the pictures on Google. I know, she didn't mean to hurt me. But when you're in an eating disorder, hearing that is crushing because if they think you look healthy, they're basically telling you that you're not sick enough to need help.”

“I clung on to the idea of wanting to be thinner and that's not really what it was. So when I got thinner, I hated myself even more, my body and everything, but I just couldn't stop.”

Juju started dieting with their mom at a young age, participating in programs like Weight Watchers and reading exercise magazines. They said that it started with a health obsession, but morphed into anorexia in their teenage years. When the illness became apparent, their mom scheduled appointments with a nutritionist who monitored their weight and they had to start eating. So purging became a habit.

“I started purging because it was some way that I could continue to kind of beat the system. And I don't even know what triggered that. But I was like, I can't believe I'm even doing this right now, when it was happening. But it just started happening, constantly after a while.”

The eating disorder persisted on and off throughout their young adult life, letting up in order to start college but intensifying once the nuanced excitement wore off. As a child, Juju struggled to define their identity and didn’t have adequate communal support. In retrospect, they believe that the inability to truly express themself influenced the eating disorder’s development.

“I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to blend in. I never really considered gender dysphoria until I met people like me... I always said that I wanted to be a boy when I was a little kid. And up until the age that people started making fun of me constantly for it, I just told everybody that's who I am like, I wish I was a guy, that's just who I am. And then I started hiding it when I got made fun of around the age of puberty and became really uncomfortable with myself.”

“I would only eat goldfish and then that made me pass out all the time. I couldn't focus in class because I was so dizzy, and I felt like I could fall at any moment. So it affected my everyday life and my brain and everything.”

SL was in middle school when her eating disorder started. Viewing images of “perfect” girls on social media acted as the primary source of her body image issues.

“That was the cause of everything. The media and social media and constantly comparing myself to other people was huge, especially in middle school when your brain’s really vulnerable. And Tumblr was so depressing. People were glorifying eating disorders, glorifying self-harm, glorifying things that should definitely not be glorified. But I just kind of thought it was an aesthetic, I guess.”

SL decided to become a vegetarian, though admittedly, it was another way to restrict. Her then stepdad would make aggressive comments, telling her she wasn’t a part of the family when she didn’t want to eat dinner or something like chicken nuggets. The inner conflict combined with her family’s withdrawal made food avoidance a consuming thought and behavior. Ten years later, the eating disorder continues to manifest, resulting in various health issues like kidney stones, muscle cramps, fatigue, dizziness, and hair loss.

“My mom tried to get me admitted when I was younger, but I've never been fully treated because I'm scared. I know that my body would be feeling better and, honestly, just everything overall would be better. But the pressure to be thin is literally consuming my brain.”

“I remember my mom, a very small lady, would always say things in front of me, like oh, I need to lose weight, or I look too big and stuff like that. And I think that is huge for so many young girls. I've heard that before too. They see their mom talking about their own weight and then that influences how they see themselves. That's kind of like your role model.”

Roxy started experiencing body dissatisfaction around age seven or eight. She’d felt different than the other young girls, which subjected her to bullying and deepened insecurity. At age 11, she met with a doctor who made a derogatory comment on her weight, causing Roxy to start using anorexic behaviors.

“It was a very, very depressing time. Even after I lost weight, it just got worse. Then I just started comparing myself to everyone that I saw. So it was a really depressing, lonely, isolating time. I was always tired, always depressed, always feeling like I'm failing. So I would say that reality and the disorder both influenced each other. And it was a real sad couple years when I was deep in thralls of it.”

During Roxy’s freshman year of high school, her anorexia reached its most destructive point. Seeing a picture of herself on vacation made her realize that she didn’t just look thin, she looked sick. This moment sparked her continued recovery and she sought therapeutic help about a year later. Though some of the damage could not be reversed.

“I would say the crazy thing is when you do it for so long, it physically damages your body. So, I have horrible problems with digestion, I already did before. But now I still have a hard time with eating from the point that it's painful sometimes.”

“I think I was about 16 and I had a boyfriend at that time. He said to me something like, well, why don't you just throw it up? I don't know if we had eaten too much, or what, but he gave me an idea of why don’t you throw it up.”

In the mid-80s, she was hospitalized twice for her eating disorder, though neither of the treatment stays focused specifically on anorexia or bulimia as both treated generalized mental health issues. Leading up to her first hospitalization, she’d moved to England for her husband’s job and had a second child. Postpartum depression exacerbated her disorder, resulting in dangerously low body weight.

“The thinking probably wasn't right and then I was very isolated. My husband was in the service and he worked all the time. I had two little babies and no social contacts being overseas. So the depression and the eating disorder and the weight got really bad.”

This woman, who prefers to remain anonymous, is now 63 years old. She’s struggled with anorexia and bulimia throughout her life, making her guarded and reluctant to engage in social settings that involve food.

“I know that I've never had self-confidence. And I compare myself to others all the time. I feel like I don't measure up.”