Dealing with an eating disorder at 35 feels very different than 25
Thoughts on having an eating disorder and recovery over the decades
My Facebook timeline alerts me to a picture I posted 13 years ago, and as with most walks down memory lane, the picture gives me a visceral reaction.
The image innocent and youthful. I’m at a party and I have my signature full, tipsy college smile spanning over my face.
Surrounded by friends, I look inebriated. I look happy.
And likely, I was both.
Only I’d later binge eat a box of cereal and puke til 4AM next to what I’m sure was my shared, disgusting, rarely cleaned college house toilet.
I’d go to treatment less than two years following that picture, though obviously I needed it long before the time finally came — as it goes.
And the picture is a reminder, in the long continuem of reminders, that prior to treatment eating disorders, exercise, calorie counting, body checks, and ruminating took up so much real estate in my mind that even now - 13 years after I graduated college - I can still see old pictures on Facebook and remember how I felt in each outfit, what I ate or didn’t eat at a certain dinner, if I puked or not, and the years I was more anorexic (my main pride) than others.
The eating disorder years an all-encompassing, daily rumination of secretive habits, behaviors, and the various ways we try to make them work alongside our ‘public-facing’ lives.
Leaving parties early to go puke at my bathroom at home. Constantly checking myself in frat house mirrors.
Way too many cigarettes to quill the anxiety.
I see my past … and I find it exhausting even to just think about now.
How in the world did I have that much youthful fear and anxiety to be that out of control 24/7?
At times, I’ve truly wondered if all the shit I wrote back then that made me briefly “in the public eye” about the eating disorder years was really real. Or was I writing it for likes and comments on social?
Did I really do some of this bleak shit?
But then I read old diary entries, or see old photos like this, and I’m starkly reminded that I did. But I really can’t even relate or remember how I could’ve felt that frankly whacked out in my mind.
Was that 21-year old girl really me? Appears so.
Because even now, I still find the occasional calorie count scribbles in old spirals from high school. Scrap pieces of paper in my childhood desk my parents still have in their new house. Between the incredibly long, boring rambles of what I ate or exercised and the lists of foods off limits and the anxiety I felt about weight — there were sprinklings of me as I know her. A funny story here and there. A crush on another page. Grief pouring out of me after my best friend died. Acute observations about life, friends, family.
It really was me. I know that when I read those pages.
But it makes me question at times (mostly when I fuck up something at work or hurt someone close to me or a romantic relationship ends): if I did clearly think like that, how can I be trusted now as an adult? Shouldn’t I have the Scarlet Letter somewhere tattooed on me like: yo, she can’t be trusted. Look how she used to think.***
I digress: a question I’ll handle in therapy perhaps this week.
***please don’t @ me about this sentiment. Obviously, I don’t question it all the time. Just on the off days. I know it’s dark.
Anyway, eventually I went to treatment and subsequently got out of treatment at age 24, and thus began a long 11+ years now of defining what recovery is, what it means to me, what I want from it, and how do I manage an eating disorder that is and may possibly always be a thing I’ve got to handle in this life.
I’d define the first few years of recovery, in my mid-20s, as a lot of dusting myself off and getting back on the saddle. An onslaught of revelations and unlearning. It was primetime when Instagram body positivity and social justice were unleashing into the public.
And my writing also took off.
In turn, the first few years of recovery were more or less as time consuming as the eating disorder itself… just different and arguably less harmful. Trying to unlearn and rebuild.
Every break through profound. Every new perception or understanding of my illness awe-striking. Every cultural unearthing mind-blowing.
I felt so like consumed by the new experiences in recovery. The freedom. The social justice beginning to form.
Everything was a new type of high. And then a new type of shameful low when I’d slink back into the habit of my eating disorder during random periods of time.
Essentially, recovery in my 20s was chaotic and beautiful. And rocky and eye-opening.
And I think a lot about how different it feels now in my 30s to manage the same recovery ride and eating disorder versus my 20s and teens - the very distinct differences I feel within the decades.
I find that at 35, my eating disorder has morphed into a quieter, irritating buzz in my ear now, and less a blaring ambulance signal.
A babbling brook instead of a whirlpool.
There’s an almost eerie quietness to my eating disorder now.
She remains, but instead of a backpack weighing me down on a hike, she’s like an annoying sweatshirt I brought and then have to tie around my waist when it’s too hot.
((Digging all those metaphors lol?))
I thought to attribute it to the 20s being naturally more chaotic than 30s, but in all sincerity my 30s have also been up and down, no beating around the bush. And I now reckon no one has anything figured out and every decade has its share of years you’d rather skim over.
Like currently, I’m living in Medellin for the winter, working loads & working lots as a PR freelancer and writer, my van in a storage unit in Chicago til I head back to the USA, and I’m still living the end of a dream I could only envision in my 20s.
On the flip side, I had an absolutely shit year in 2024, financially and romantically (the two linked), but I’m alive and I’m kicking and mostly in a better place from it (though I definitely didn’t ‘skip’ over the chapter lmao that break up being the basis for what would start this entire Substack journey).
The point being I’m in a pretty good spot right now, I wasn’t last year. It’s how it goes.
And through it all, my eating disorder and my recovery have still been along for the ride. Sometimes, a song I’ve heard so many times I sing the lyrics in my sleep and don’t even try to listen. Sometimes, more of a burden, like a wart on your heel (which I currently have lmao so forgive my additional metaphor). Sometimes, a passing thought. Sometimes, a neurotic impulsion to go exercise even when I’m tired.
The difference being that while it’s still unarguably an annoying plot of land in my brain — it’s less… intense? Less emotional? Less all consuming most certainly.
Have I therapized and recovered myself into a new, less intense stage of what it means to have an eating disorder? Or am I simply just getting old?
Much like many aspects in life — relationship woes and friendships disagreements and a bad day or two at work — I wonder if with longer time on this earth, with the crescendo of experiences and the noise of having been alive now 35 years instead of say 18 or 20, if it’s just a simple progression in existence — to give less weight and meaning to the emotions that may have once dominated my urges or behaviors.
Can I still feel overwrought with emotions? Absolutely. I would say I was more or less overwrought with this break up I went through last year — a kind of youthful, naked pain I haven’t felt since my best friend died. The loss of what I thought could be a good future. A fear that just took over my mind of being 35 and still childless. The ticking time bomb of fertility.
It’s calmed somewhat, but it was rough there for a bit.
Anyway, point being I can definitely still strongly feel emotions as much as I can at times feel the urges of an eating disorder.
But maybe one of the gifts of aging is being able to get to some sort of homeostasis a little quicker than in my 20s.
Maybe too, an awareness that with all the years I lived out of a dominant eating disorder mindset, using the eating disorder to quell the anxiety or hurt, I didn’t ever really get what I wanted out of it.
And boy have I tried — so many different ways — to get what I was ultimately searching for from how I looked or the self-discipline I possessed and the control I loved to openly showcase for anyone who would see it.
It just … didn’t really work. Or at the very least, it never felt as good as I thought it would.
But like I said, I still do revert at times, don’t get me wrong. I’m not cured. I imagine for the next three decades or more I’ll still be managing this thing. I fear for how I’ll be post having a child.
But I also can’t not know how miserable some of those youthful years felt to be so wrapped up in the disorder. Not every day, not every hour, but a large percentage of the time.
It seemed brutal. I remember it as such. I can’t conveniently forget how awful that cycle was to my overall life.
And I certainly don’t desire to self-harm the way I was once wired. It seems like an act too far done now. And frankly not one I could ever get the same satisfaction out of again, even at its best.
But, of course, to trivialize an eating disorder as purely a choice is offensive. Anyone who has struggled with one knows that I don’t always choose when to have it or when I am compulsive about it.
There are behaviors I’m notably very removed from now: calorie counting a habit I left behind almost completely by year 5 of recovery and haven’t done with any sort of consistency in years. I remember the calories on certain foods as it seems locked into my brain (sigh), but I don’t count ever.
Bulimia - bye. Haven’t puked intentionally in like 10 years.
Binge eating, too. Can’t even remember when the last one was or what it entailed. I hate binge eating so notably I was really ready for that behavior to be over early on in the process.
Compulsive running, definitely not an issue. Long gone are the days of half marathons and multiple runs a day. I don’t even know where I’d find the time.
On the other hand, I’m frankly still pretty subpar at food portions. If not given sound of reason by a partner or friend or parent or sibling, I will more likely eat relatively less than I should and truly not think it’s the case.
I’ll go a few weeks eating enough, but it’s a peculiar thing: if I miss a couple meals in tandem for one reason or another, it will set off the spark plugs in my head that still crave the anorexia high.
It’s like clockwork and it’s frustrating because it becomes a sort of debate in my head whether to fight it or whether to start the little sneaky cycle of “you’ll feel better, just do it. It won’t last, you can eat more tomorrow.”
It’s not as dramatic - these little mental debates - they don’t take up hours of my daily life. But, they’re there. To deny them is to deny the sickness exists.
If I eat a small cookie or two every day, I don’t care. If I eat a large piece of cake at a birthday party, I’ll struggle the next day with thinking about whether that was a good idea.
It’s a weird amount of old behaviors that still show up - just on a lesser scale it seems. Or a quieter one anyway.
If I miss a couple days of movement, I don’t flip out. If I miss a week - I get anxious and snippy. I start to spiral into how to make sure I plan the next few days around exercise.
I begin to self-shit-talk silently. About my age. My muscle mass decreasing. I begin to get irritable at what other people eat, how they eat. I get snippy about the house being dirty. Anything I want to control.
More often, when that’s going on, partners in the past (or my boyfriend now) intervene. Sometimes, my parents see it or my brother and his wife. It’s not a wild fight or meltdown — but a kind of “hey, you’re getting a little over the top. Simmer down.”
And even though I want to immediately balk that they don’t understand that I already hadn’t worked out in X days and that I do need to do this second work out… I usually hear them to some capacity. And can weigh whether doing 45 minutes of mat pilates is going to be worth being late to Christmas dinner or pissing off my boyfriend when he’s made a reservation for us.
Most of the time, I choose the logical thing and forego the second work out. Every now and then, I don’t. And it does in fact piss off everyone close to me when I’m inevitably 30 minutes late to an event because I couldn’t re-prioritize.
Overall, it’s an interesting marker in the whole eating disorder ordeal. To be 35 and managing behaviors as well as the aftermath of the years I spent drilling eating disorder thoughts into my subconscious.
Would I erase it all if I could? Need I even write that - of course.
I’m so bored with some of these thoughts that even writing them feels tired. I don’t have novel reflections anymore about the recovery process.
I’m a 35 year old woman who grew up in 00s diet culture and is a product of that constant zeitgeist. In it, I gave myself an eating disorder which I do believe re-wired some neurotransmitters in my brain at a pivotal time in life - youth.
As my brain was forming, I allowed it to mature with an onslaught of eating disorder thoughts and behaviors.
In turn, it gets confused still. It craves the endorphins. My reward system likely still a little out of balance. I imagine it may always, and I’ve accepted the outcome, hoping I’m wrong.
I can live with it either way. I think that’s the point now.
I’m okay - even if I have to deal with the eating disorder throughout the rest of my time on this planet.
Is it a nuisance? A detriment? Sure. But, we all have shit to manage. And I do feel a weird gratitude that it’s not nearly as strong as it once felt.
It doesn’t dominate my everyday life. It doesn’t keep me drinking two glasses of wine in place of meals (drunkorexia). Or running til my shins fracture.
I’m an active, alert participant in my daily life. I can talk to my boyfriend about the world, our days, the future — and not have the eating disorder at the table.
I can enjoy steak and rice and cheesy french fries, like tonight, and forget what I even ate. The blur of life replacing the meals of today.
My eating disorder doesn’t hold me back in this decade - it doesn’t keep me from attending social gatherings, eating a good cookie, growing my business, etc.
It doesn’t ruin my plans. Or keep people constantly worried about me.
It does, however, tag along for the ride. And I manage best as I can.
I don’t know how the next decades will shape my relationship with food or this ED. But I do know that I’ve outgrown some behaviors, left others behind, and no longer feel like I’m trapped in the same relentless loop. And that prevails as a huge positive in my 30s.
I used to think the weight I carried was purely physical, something to shrink and sculpt into submission. But now, I see time adds its own weight—of lessons, of losses, of knowing better.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s a different kind of weight also worth keeping.
