The doctor looked at my mother and said, “Just give her some of your good French cooking.”
The doctor then told me that I’d probably have fertility issues in the future, and my response to that was “Good. I don’t want to get fat, anyway.” Sad as that may sound, I simply had no sense of the danger to my health. I couldn’t see past the present moment. In that moment all I wanted to do was dance, and I knew that I needed to be thin to dance. Honestly, it was the only reason I was living at that time.
On one level I didn’t want to live with my eating disorder; on another level I was petrified of living without it.
Even though the doctor knew enough to diagnose me, he still didn’t know how to treat me. His approach was to give me hormones and steroids to bring on my period and stimulate my appetite. Basically, he was going to fix me with medication. I was still restricting my food intake, but because of all the medications I was taking, I gained weight. In a matter of three months I doubled my body weight! Please note, I’m purposely not giving you numbers here, because I would never want my number to become a goal weight for anyone else. If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, I can guess that you focus on numbers—the number of calories, fat, carbohydrates and proteins in foods you eat; the number you see on the scale; and the number you believe would be perfect. I also need to say right now—because I know that if you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking, That’s it, no treatment for me! No one is going to make me gain that much weight!—that it is extremely unlikely something like that would happen today.
The diet gave me back my sense of control. My anorexia and the exercise bulimia came back with a vengeance.
For me, however, the doctor was giving me all those medications at a time when I felt completely helpless. Up to that point I had always felt as if I were in control, but now, no matter what I did, the drugs were causing me to gain weight. I was incredibly anxious and depressed, and I felt as if everything I’d worked so hard to attain, including my ability to dance, was slipping through my fingers like grains of sand. I was starving, and I figured that since I couldn’t control my weight anyway, I might as well just eat and use the food to numb all those negative feelings. That was when the bulimia started. I never used self-induced vomiting, but I would binge and then purge with laxatives and compulsively overexercise.
At that point, I was about to graduate high school, and this was the time when I should have been auditioning to join a ballet company, but by that point I was too big to be a ballet dancer. Instead, I determined to use the next year to get myself back in shape and back on track. I stayed home and continued to dance at the academy where I’d been studying. By then I was in the most advanced group, so my classmates and I were often invited to take company class and sometimes also given roles in their productions.
Now I didn’t know who I was. My only remaining sense of identity came from my eating disorder. I had, in essence, become my eating disorder.
At the same time, without telling my primary care physician, I also went to see a doctor who was a metabolic specialist and who already knew my history. I remember her asking me what I wanted more than anything in life. I said it was to dance, and she told me that she’d help me make my dream come true. Her way of doing that was to put me on a totally insane plan that involved my taking about thirty supplements a day (to date I still don’t know what was in them) and going on a refined Atkins-type diet. Although I knew it wasn’t healthy and was the last thing that I should have been doing, it gave me back my sense of control, and, in fact, I did start to lose weight.
As I began to regain a (misguided) sense of confidence, I auditioned and was offered an apprenticeship with a ballet company in Orlando. By then I’d achieved what the metabolic doctor considered to be my goal weight, so she took me off most of the supplements I’d been taking. I was supposed to be maintaining my weight, but once I was on my own again, I began to restrict even the meal plan she’d given me and I stopped taking the medications that had been prescribed by my primary care physician. My anorexia and the exercise bulimia, which had never really gone away, came back with a vengeance, and I fell back into my disordered eating really hard and really quickly. About six weeks later my mother came up to Orlando to see me perform, and, of course, she noticed how much weight I had lost.
If I were given a second chance in this journey called life, I would help others battle eating disorders so they wouldn’t travel down the same path I did.
By then I was nineteen years old and really, as the saying goes, sick and tired of being sick and tired. Both my parents and my doctors had speculated that if they took ballet out of the equation, my eating disorder might just go away, and I actually thought so, too. After all, I really believed that the whole thing had started because I wanted to lose weight in order to be a more beautiful dancer. And I even remembered that when I was in high school, I’d look at the kids who were music students and think, Wow, if I were a musician instead of a dancer, I could eat anything I want. I don’t believe it anymore, but at the time the idea that my dancing had caused my eating disorder seemed pretty logical to me.
I resigned from the company and thought that my eating disorder would go away immediately. Boy, was I wrong. In truth, dancing was the only thing that had been keeping me alive. Aside from my eating disorder, it felt like my only identity. Now I didn’t know who I was. My only remaining sense of identity came from my eating disorder. I had, in essence, become my eating disorder.
I was alone in Orlando with nothing to do, and I was floundering. I’d never intended to go to college, and I’d never considered what I might do with my life if I wasn’t dancing. I started to binge more and more, because I thought that was the only way I had to relieve the pain I felt. If you’ve binged yourself, you know that it has nothing to do with enjoying the taste of the food you’re eating. Actually, in the moment, you don’t taste anything at all. It’s all about stuffing down (or numbing) and running away from any kind of feeling or sensation. After I binged, I felt awful and guilty about what I had just done. When I was restricting, I felt good about myself because I felt that I was in control. When I binged, I felt an enormous loss of control.
I called my parents and, for the first time, admitted to them that I really needed and wanted help.
I remember waking up at two o’clock one morning and realizing that I had no sense of who or what I was. My parents had been urging me to go back to school, and I decided to enroll in a psychology course at the local community college, thinking that I might gain some insight into what was going on in my own mind. It was while I was taking that course that I made another decision: if I were given a second chance in this journey called life, I would help others battle eating disorders so they wouldn’t travel down the same path I did. Since all I knew besides ballet was my eating disorder, I determined that I would become a therapist specializing in eating disorders. After sticking my toe into academic waters, I went back to college full-time, entering the University of Central Florida in January 1998 and, in true perfectionist style, starting to follow an absolutely ridiculous, stressful schedule. (I actually graduated college in two and a half years…which is definitely not a healthy thing to do.)
I really had nothing in my life to focus on except school, and being focused on school became another way to numb my feelings. So that was where I transferred my obsession, taking more than the required number of classes. Given that I was in a cycle of restricting during the day and then, when classes were over, going back to my apartment and