Just because I’d stopped starving didn’t mean I didn’t still have an eating disorder. My eating disorder felt the same to me. It took up the same space in my head, and driving around the city to find the perfect comfort foods took up as much time as driving around the city to find the tuna with the lowest sodium content. It was still there. It was the other side of the same coin. As it turned out, I wasn’t quite ready to rejoin life. I still wanted to disappear, and I chose to disappear behind layers of fat. I still felt unattractive to both sexes, still not really living, merely existing. I was still testing the theory of whether I would be loved and accepted for my mind, my kindness, for everything about me other than what I looked like. I went from one extreme to the other. I went from 82 pounds to 168 pounds in ten months.
At first, after starving for so long, it was difficult to begin eating again even though I knew I had to in order to regain my health. A component in breaking the cycle of starvation was medicine. When the bone-density results showed that I was osteoporotic, I was put on hormone replacement therapy in an attempt to strengthen my bones. I had also quit smoking after hearing the diagnosis and started on a psychotropic medication after having brain scans by a renowned neuropharmacologist, Dr. Hamlin Emory. The chemical changes in my body, and I think most importantly, the psychotropic drug quelling the obsessive behavior, helped me to eat again and gain weight.
At the time I walked through the doors of the Monte Nido Eating Disorder Treatment Center, I had gained 27 pounds. It was only four weeks after my diagnosis. I had gone from 98 pounds to 125 pounds in four weeks. Toward the end of my starving phase of my eating disorder, I knew that hovering under 100 pounds didn’t feel like my real weight. I was almost certain that the second I began to binge I would immediately catapult back to the weight I’d been before I started starving myself. I knew I would be 130 pounds within weeks. And I was.
I have never felt so ashamed as I did walking into an eating disorder clinic to be treated for anorexia at 125 pounds. I didn’t belong there. Even though my treatment was private due to the fact I was terrified that my shameful secret would become public, I was fearful that I might run into people who really had anorexia, who really deserved to be there. I struggled with the feeling of unworthiness throughout my entire treatment. Even though I was paying for it and driving almost daily to Malibu to seek treatment with Carolyn Costin, one of the most well respected and successful counselors in the country, I felt compelled to lie. Every single session I lied to her about my feelings, my eating habits, and my progress. I lied to her because I was embarrassed. I felt like I wasn’t worthy of her time when she had girls in her program who were fatally ill when I was so average in size.
I was being treated for anorexia, but due to the fact I was 125 pounds and at a healthy weight for my height, I thought there was no reason for me to be there. I thought that the psychological healing and my relationship to food were not worth talking about. Bulimia and overeating, abuse of laxatives and excessive exercising were not life-or-death illnesses in my mind, and I really didn’t share with Carolyn as much as I should have about my dalliances in all of those practices. Despite the fact I thought anything other than anorexia was a second-class eating disorder not worthy of attention, when I was being treated by Carolyn I was severely bulimic. I was grossly overeating. The pendulum had swung the other way, and I was sicker than I had ever been in my life.
Since ending my bout with starvation, I had become addicted to low-calorie, low-carb, weight-loss food. I especially liked low-calorie frozen yogurt and would drive around town all day to different yogurt stores in search of peanut butter—flavored yogurt as all the stores rotated their flavors almost daily. I would drive from east Hollywood to Santa Monica in a day on the search for peanut butter, eating the less tasty flavors along the way. I figured that if I drove all that way, I might as well sample the flavors they offered. I could’ve called ahead, but then that would leave me with unfilled hours in the day, and as my work on Ally McBeal only occupied two or three half days a week, I really didn’t know how to fill them.
There was a yogurt store at the Malibu mall and every day before my session with Carolyn, I would stop there. I would order the 12-ounce yogurt regardless of the flavor they were serving and eat it on the floor of the backseat of my car. I was terrified of being photographed eating in my car by paparazzi. Nothing seemed more piggish and gross to me than eating in your car, with the exception of being seen doing it. I had gained so much weight and was so worried that it was noticeable. I figured that all the press would need to do was to get a photograph of me eating to confirm that I had in fact gained a lot of weight. I couldn’t think of anything more shameful than my weight gain being obvious enough to talk about. And because the tabloids seemed very interested in my weight loss, I thought for sure they would be just as interested in my weight gain. In fact, during the months when I was at my highest weight, there was a lot of talk about my weight gain. A morning radio show, Kevin and Bean on KROQ, commented on the fact that I had “a face like a pie.” I distinctly remember this because I listened to them every morning. I remember this because it’s not something that you forget.
After eating the yogurt on the floor of the backseat of my car, I took the plastic bag I had asked for in order to carry the yogurt and I threw up into it. At 9 calories an ounce, it was 108 calories that could easily be eradicated. I would then throw the plastic bag into the trash can that I’d strategically parked very close to, and head to my session with Carolyn, feeling very worried that the whole scenario could have been captured on film as Malibu was a hot spot for paparazzi. Without hesitation, when Carolyn asked me if I had binged or purged since my last session, I would reply that no, I hadn’t. I hadn’t binged or purged or even thought about bingeing or purging. I would tell her how healthy I was and how great I was doing. I don’t know why, but it was very important to me to not appear sick to the only person that could help me get better. However, Carolyn had herself recovered from an eating disorder, and combined with her expertise and knowledge gained from treating hundreds of cases, she could see straight through the lies. There is a great deal of shame surrounding an eating disorder, with its abnormal practices and bizarre rituals, and so lying in treatment is common. My stories were only some of many she has had to decode.
My weight gain was horrific to me. I was bulimic again because I didn’t want to be fat. I didn’t want to be fat, but I couldn’t stop eating. I knew that I should work out again to combat the amount of food I put into my body, but because being fat caused me to be depressed, I didn’t have the energy. That’s the feeling of pulling away from anorexia. The anxiety of feeling fat turns into depression about being fat, and the lethargy and apathy that depression brings make it impossible to get off the sofa. I had found a passion in being thin. It nearly killed me. And while I hated being fat, my new passion was eating. Carolyn encouraged me to write down the amount of food I ate, and while I mostly lied to her, copying entries from the journals I used to keep for Suzanne, my nutritionist, I decided to send her this email. I had written this entry in November 2000 but only sent it to her in February 2001. It was one of the rare times I wrote down all that I ate in one day. It read: