I was nine years old the first time I remember starving myself. I didn’t understand why I was bigger than most people my age. Looking back, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe not. Regardless, the mirror brought me so much distress that I didn’t want to see the person staring back at me.
I had a vision of how I wanted to look, and I didn’t match that vision. I would squeeze and pinch parts of my body with the hope that they would morph into something different or disappear entirely. They never did. Starving seemed like the only option. But it didn’t work. Instead, I found myself eating more. Food lit up the parts of me that lay dormant.
When I started secondary school, something changed. I had always felt like I was on the sidelines. I had friends, but as I became more self-aware, I realised I couldn’t fully relate to them. I saw myself as boring and ordinary and undeserving of attention. Around the same time, I began developing intense feelings towards girls, though I didn’t recognise these feelings for what they were. I thought this was normal, the kind of feelings you were supposed to have towards people you looked up to.
The fact that I had no interest in boys but became deeply attached to girls should probably have been enough to make me question whether I was queer. Instead of exploring this, I internalised all the fear, confusion, and uncertainty I felt about myself. I restricted myself from being myself.
I found other ways to cope with the overwhelming feelings I couldn’t articulate. I didn’t know who I was, who I was becoming, or how to imagine a future that felt liveable. Growing up terrified me.
I discovered vegetarianism, then veganism, and began constructing myself into the kind of person I thought other people would like. I was constantly adapting to fit in with the people I was hanging out with. I became deeply detached from my own interests, desires, and identity.
I was 14 when I was diagnosed with anorexia. I had a very fixed idea of the kind of person who had an eating disorder: thin, beautiful, popular, disciplined. I saw myself as the opposite. Even after receiving the diagnosis, I didn’t fully believe it. I felt ashamed of the label, almost like an imposter. Recovery became difficult because I didn’t believe I deserved care.
I skipped Transition Year, made new friends, and slowly found myself in queer spaces. In my mind, I was simply an “ally”, supporting my queer friends while remaining on the outside where things felt safer.
My teen years were spent attending appointments with a multi-disciplinary team. My treatment mainly focused on weight restoration and eating behaviours. Because eating disorders can have severe physical consequences, this focus was critical. But for me, I also needed to work on something beyond my relationship with food; my relationship with myself. Food was never truly the issue, as is often the case for many people with eating disorders.
Food became a way to cope with emotions I could not express. Controlling what I ate helped me manage aspects of my life that felt unbearable and unpredictable. As a perfectionist, there was comfort in following rules. Restriction made me feel disciplined and obedient. These are characteristics that society praises. People admire those with high willpower and self-motivation. It was difficult for me to recognise my behaviours as dangerous because the world around me was simultaneously cheering it on.
The constant monitoring and control gave me the illusion that I was doing everything correctly. That fear of doing something wrong shaped so much of my life. I wanted to be the perfect daughter, sister, friend, and student. I had a very clear vision of how my future should look: a good career, the ideal husband, children, stability. I believed that if I achieved all of these things correctly, there would be no reason to feel anxious, sad, or out of control.
Then secondary school ended, and I started college. And suddenly I was confronted with a truth I had spent years trying not to see: I was gay.
I had spent much of my adolescence trying to recover in order to return to a life that was never truly mine. I didn’t need to make myself desirable to men because I probably wasn’t going to end up with one. Instead of feeling liberated by this realisation, I became even more disconnected from myself. I now had a new identity I felt pressure to perform ‘correctly’. Within queer spaces, I became hyperaware of labels and categories: masc, femme, hyper-femme, butch, androgynous... Once again, I was searching for the right way to exist.
It took me years to feel safe in my sexuality and, eventually, in my body. I had to slowly unlearn the scripts I had absorbed throughout my life. Because recovery does not happen in isolation. I was trying to heal in a world that continued to reward thinness, control, self-discipline, and perfectionism. Everywhere I looked, I was surrounded by messages telling me that my body was something to manage, optimise, improve, and shrink.
We live in a culture obsessed with self-improvement. Doctors comment on weight and give unsolicited advice regardless of why you are seeking care. The BMI (a tool never intended to measure individual health) is still used to decide if someone is healthy, worthy, or even acceptable.
Outside of healthcare, the pressure continues. We are constantly encouraged to optimise ourselves, monitor ourselves, and perform health in visible ways. I don’t even need to mention social media because it is saturated with this messaging. Underneath all of this we are face-to-face with diet-culture and fatphobia rooted in racism, classism and sexism. It’s just been packaged up and sold to us as health.
The so-called ‘beauty’ and ‘wellness’ industries thrive on our self-doubt. Cosmetic procedures have become so normalised that altering your appearance no longer feels extreme, but expected. Meal plans, fitness plans, weight-loss plans, productivity plans. We are taught that our bodies are projects in constant need of improvement. Self-surveillance is at an all time high.
Eventually, we stop experiencing our bodies as places we live in and begin treating them as objects to control.
In eating disorder recovery, people are encouraged to reconnect with hunger cues, eat intuitively, stop obsessing over shape and weight, and allow themselves freedom around food. But recovery does not happen in a vacuum. How can you feel okay gaining weight in a culture where the default aspiration is weight loss? How can you eat freely when foods are constantly moralised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’? How can you rest when productivity is treated as virtue?
For many people with eating disorders, traits like perfectionism, sensitivity, and people-pleasing are deeply ingrained. There is often an intense fear of doing things incorrectly, of taking up too much space, of becoming difficult or unlikeable. Recovery asks people to move directly against these instincts. It asks people to resist.
Recovery is an act of resistance. To eat when restriction is praised as discipline is resistance. To rest in a culture obsessed with productivity is resistance. To exist in a changing body while constantly being told smaller is better is resistance. To stop performing perfection is resistance. To take up space is resistance. To be unapologetically yourself is resistance.
Those in recovery from an eating disorder have to constantly self-talk their way to the present, and remind themselves why they are choosing recovery in the first place. We cannot fully escape these messages, so part of recovery becomes learning how to exist alongside them without losing ourselves to them.
For queer people, this can become even more layered. Many of us grow up already watching ourselves carefully, feeling different, and learning how to adapt in order to stay safe or accepted. Eating disorders can emerge not simply as a desire to be thin, but as ways of coping with shame, fear, detachment, and the pressure to become someone more acceptable. Recovery involves allowing yourself to take up space – emotionally and physically – in a culture that teaches many of us (particularly women and queer people) to stay silent, small or even invisible.
Recovery, then, is not just about changing our behaviours around food. It is about returning to yourself in a culture that benefits from your disconnection.