"My Love/Hate Relationship With Thinspiration Blogs" at The Frisky

I wrote about "My Love/Hate Relationship With Thinspiration Blogs" for The Frisky. Funnily enough, I thought earlier this week, bingeing on Pretzel Crisps and potato chips was the worst of my eating habits this week, but it wasn't. Let's just say, yesterday was a bad day, but today I sought refuge from the storm at the gym and gave my legs and arms a pretty solid workout. I need to work on eating for health and hunger, not emotional eating, and on carving out time for the gym like I did today. One day at a time, eh?

And yeah, lately I'm realizing that it's in the middle of or immediately after my rock bottom moments that I get to that state of writing the most truthfully, because you have nothing left to lose at that point. For me, it kindof releases something in me that maybe I need to access in the worst possible ways, to figure out what sets me off. I don't want to create a pattern of low, low moments, followed by writing that somehow puts a salve on them, but that is often how it works for me. I'm tapping into a lot of my jealousy and hatred around a certain past relationship and unpacking it, and realizing that it's okay to have those emotions; they are mine, I own them, right or wrong, and that not looking at them, not exploring them, just accepting the way I've treated people or the way people have treated me, is the path to disaster. It's a very slippery slope for me from feeling like "This shitty thing happened" to "If someone treats me in a shitty way, I deserve it." That is what I'm unpacking in some of my writing, and it feels like some Muriel Rukeyser awakening.

Which brings me to that famous quote of hers: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." Trust me, I read about a lot of women's lives, and I do believe in the transformative power of truthtelling. But I think one giant lesson for me this year is that there is something a little suspicious, often, about those who set out to "change the world." I've dated and hooked up with people like that, ones who travel to farflung countries, who are "out there" in the world, far, far from home, and I'm not saying they are not doing good, positive work out there, and being amply rewarded for it. They are. But for me, I never want to be that person who thinks they are "saving" the world but treating the people in their personal worlds like shit. To me, that hypocrisy is sad, and so far from who I want to be that I'm glad I've distanced myself from the people who practice it. I don't admire it and don't want to add to the fawning around it.

I'm not claiming that I act perfectly towards the people in my life; I don't. I fuck up, I hurt people, I am selfish and self-centered. But I try hard to look at those actions, to learn from them, to find ways to satisfy myself first and to still be as good a friend I can be. It took me a long time to learn how to separate those things, to realize that that "good work" might be meaningful, but it doesn't make someone a good person. Ultimately, I think that is something everyone has to judge for themselves, and I used to think it was my job to be judged by everyone around me, to care about what other people thought, and yet there came a point where I realized I'm not in anyone else's head, and I can't live up to their standard or version of who I should be. I can only live up to my version, and that is what I'm trying to do. 2010, in particular the part from 35 on, have been, in a word, bad, so I am eagerly counting the days til 2011.

There is a lot inside myself, and outside, that I don't like, and often my solution to that has been to lie in bed and mope, but I'm trying to fight that part of me, to make concrete changes in how I live and how I take care of myself; obviously, there are blips along the way. I was a wreck yesterday, and realized that there are some toxic people in my life who I need to reconsider spending time with. That is not to blame anyone else for my actions, but again, to go back to self-care, which I think makes me a better person to be around, hopefully, anyway. I know when I am not taking care of myself in the ways I haven't been lately, when I go along with things just for the sake of the experience or to please someone else or because it's the "right" thing to do, I am doing myself a disservice. So, yeah, that was my longwinded way of saying that maybe as I get older my world becomes a bit more myopic, and "the world," in the Rukeyser sense, sounds all too much like hubris. I'm looking forward to going more inward, and there's no way to write that or think that without sounding, to my own ears, utterly selfish, and so be it. I'm ready to relinquish any claims to being not-selfish, and embrace that for what it is--not a path to anything other than learning about myself and going deeper with my writing and whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing with my life.

The other night, I was wading through all the junk scattered around my apartment, starting to panic because I couldn’t find a book I needed to review. I threw out bag after bag of garbage and finally decided to get some dinner, my version of which was a prepackaged frozen entree of organic tofu, vegetables and brown rice, plus a bottle of soy sauce.

No sooner had I popped it in the microwave than I discovered a brown paper bag from Trader Joe’s filled with one giant bag of tortilla chips and one bag of potato chips. I was still lamenting the previous night’s binge on everything Pretzel Crisps (yes, the same ones that pulled their “You can never be too thin” ads earlier this year), but that didn’t stop me from opening the potato chips. I thought I could just eat a few, savor that greasy, so-salty-it-hurts-the-corners-of-my-mouth taste, then throw the rest away. I wouldn’t have gone out and bought them, but there they were, right in front of me. But in the four minutes it took to heat my healthy meal, almost the entire bag was gone, and instead of that pleasant salty taste on my tongue, I felt like a bomb had gone off in my stomach.

Read the whole essay (and, as always, I'd love your comments, there not here) at The Frisky, one of my favorite sites.

Food bloggers are fat sloths, film at 11

The controversy over the Marie Claire "fatties" piece by blogger Maura Kelly regarding the new TV show Mike & Molly has garnered a lot of responses. I can't tackle them all, but I did want to look at this HyperboleMan comment at Jezebel that took the discussion to a whole new level, namely calling food bloggers and people who pay attention to food "fat:"

If you're going to take pictures of your food and tweet them, and you're going to check in on 4square where you're eating... and you start to get a gut. Don't act like being fat is a part of your personality that we can't offend. You being fat is actually because you choose to live a decadent lifestyle.

I'm many things, and one of them is a food blogger. A cupcake blogger, in fact, a food that I freely admit is not vital or even helpful at the level of food we need to eat to survive. Cupcakes are delicious treats and something that I've learned in the past almost six years something a lot of people are interested in.

Through my cupcake blogging, I won't say I've become a "foodie" in the traditional definition of that word, but I do, yes, Tweet and blog and post photos of my food on Flickr. I check in on Foursquare at restaurants and leave my share of Yelp reviews. I also have a complicated history with food.

I became a vegetarian around age 12, and vegan soon thereafter. This was back in the late eighties and early nineties, when people didn't even know how to pronounce "vegan," let alone what it meant. Some people did, but it was far from the everyday word it is these days. There weren't, to my recollection, vegan celebrities on the same level as, say, Ellen DeGeneres or Alicia Silverstone, save for River Phoenix (RIP).

I was extremely committed to what I saw as a major injustice in the world. I spent my free time, when I wasn't pursuing nerdly pursuits like chess tournaments, working with my local animal rights group. I attended protests, including doing civil disobedience at the annual pigeon shoot in Hegins, Pennsylvania. It didn't cross my mind that I would ever eat meat again; I was somewhat of a junk food vegan, loving the potato chips at my health food store, ordering brownies made with turbinado sugar and the like.

Then I moved to Berkeley, California for college and was immersed in an even more ardent animal rights culture than I had once been. The summer between high school and college I was 17, interning at an animal rights group in Maryland. I was also paying increasing attention to what was on the scale, and I hated what I saw. I wanted those numbers to go down, and I made them, pound by pound, by basically eating as little as I could. I was also flirting with the 31-year-old man I'd lose my virginity to a few months later. I remember once digging in to, I think, hummus, and he said, "I love a woman who know show to eat." But that didn't stop me from my quest to keep losing weight. I did, and then I moved on to learning how to make myself puke.

It was a power trip, in its way, but one whose high only lasted for those moments when I thought I was getting away with this magical act. Eat what you want, then get rid of it, with only a little bit of effort and gagging. I don't know how it is for anyone else, but for me, making myself puke never felt the way puking for other reasons feels. I don't do it very often these days (puke involuntarily, and, actually, puke at all), but when I am either sick or used to drink and needed to throw up, it was one of those unstoppable things. My body didn't care if I was near a toilet or sink or anything; when it had to happen, it did. Actually, now I remember, I started 2010 by puking all over my subway stop, just after stepping off the train. I had a crazy killer headache that wouldn't go away no matter how much I tried to shield my eyes from the light, and somehow made it there and then, though I knew it was totally gross and I probably looked like yet another drunk partygoer, I didn't care, I just wanted to stop feeling so damn queasy. I felt lightheaded after but also lighter, in a good way. I felt like I'd gotten rid of whatever was poisoning me.

I never felt like that when I was making myself throw up (which mostly happened during college, but here and there afterwards). It was a struggle, between myself and myself. It brought tears to my eyes, it felt gross, and it was never enough; there was never that pure satisfaction of puking and then being done with it. It hurt. Yet it felt like this mastery of something tricky I had solved, some puzzle that I was privileged enough to have unlocked.

I digress from the topic of food blogging because this all relates to my relationship with food now. I started eating chicken, little by little, and then that became my gateway carnivorousness, because I was craving it. After all the drama with my body and starving and bingeing and purging, I just could not let myself categorically deny myself any foods.

And now I am part of the food blogging community. I rarely don't take photos of my food, and while I don't officially blog beyond Cupcakes Take the Cake, I do read food blogs, food news, and I look at hundreds of cupcake photos each week as part of my blogging. It's not so much a ritual of honoring my food, though I try to do that at least part of the time, though I still have my weaknesses, my moments when I'm shoveling food into my mouth so fast I can't possibly taste it, when I stick my finger directly into the hummus because I can't spare those precious moments to find a utensil and, more importantly, don't want to. I like that animalistic urgency of letting myself be, for a few moments, out of control.

I'm not going to pretend I no longer have "food issues" or "body issues." I certainly do, but sortof like how I've come to see the eating of animals, I don't think it's an all or nothing issue. I try not to eat meat every day, or with every meal, and I try, for the most part, to eat fruits and vegetables, to not waste calories on alcohol, to not eat pizza at two in the morning. The biggest challenge to me as an eater, though, is to eat when I'm actually hungry, to use food to satisfy my body's actual needs, rather than my mind's or my heart's. Last night my stomach hurt and I thought eating would help, and while I was craving salt, probably because I was just about to get my period, I skipped the small bag of salt and pepper potato chips and the Little Lad's popcorn I love (and that my 24-hour deli guy knows I love) for the "healthier" popcorn, which tastes way less salty. Which might be why I shoved about 5/6 of the bag into my mouth trying to find the salt, waiting for it to take effect like some magic pill.

I don't write or talk much about my "eating issues," as I call them because the big words, the a word and the b word (anorexia and bulimia, if that was too subtle), feel, while semi-accurate, a little too dramatic. They were accurate descriptions of me at the time but that was over a decade ago, and I wouldn't say I'm a "recovering" anorexic or bulimic. I'm a 34-year-old white woman who's 5'3" and doesn't know how much she weighs, though it's probably somewhere around 150 (or was last time I weighed myself). I like food, and don't cool hardly ever.

I don't want this post at all to be read as "I'm different from the fat people HyperboleMan is disdaining." I'm not. I do want it to be different from his fatphobia, but mainly I want to point out that, yes, some food bloggers, and I know I'm not the only one, have food issues. To think that we'd all have "perfect" relationships with food is utterly unrealistic, because how many people in general do?

I'll leave you with this excellent post from Oh She Glows called "Food Blogs Changed My World." While I don't take the exact same approach as her, I think her story will be familiar to many people:

In the past, food and eating wasn’t what I called fun. It was associated with so many other emotions that my actual, physical experience with food was stolen from me. I never really had the satisfaction of preparing a new recipes with new foods and enjoying the results. I didn’t think of food in that type of way before.

For me food blogs have opened my eyes to an exciting world where food and health is fun again.

Bottom line, though, why is there so much judgment, about both other people's size and other people's approach to food? So much hatred is disguised in the form of "concern" over health, yet that mock concern is truly obscured by the hatred that is dripping over, under and all around it. It's also remarkably not helpful, if the goal really is to help spread a message of "health," to ignore mental health and to assume that people who are fat (or, let's face it, "fat," because that word is so subjective and gets thrown around a lot, including by me, to describe ourselves) have never heard of fruits and vegetables. Go read the original Jezebel post I linked to - while nobody needs to justify their weight to anyone but themselves (or perhaps their doctor if it's been brought up as a concern), plenty of people there have, pointing out many reasons beyond diet why they've reached the size they have.

I also think this anti-Foursquare, anti-social media, anti-food photo sentiment is part of a disturbing trend of "I don't like what you're doing on the internet, therefore you shouldn't do it" mindset. If there is anywhere that should be totally opt-in, it's the internet, where literally anyone can start a blog, Twitter account, etc. Unless it's something you have to read for school or a job, you do not have to look at it, shocking as that may be to some.

Okay, rant over.

My interview with Purge: Rehab Diaries author Nicole Johns

I interviewed Purge: Rehab Diaries author Nicole Johns for Huffington Post.

I'd love it if you'd pass this on to anyone interested in the topic of eating disorders. I found her book fascinating because she was not a size 2 or 0, but a size 9.

I don't write for free that often anymore because I finally got it through my head that I shouldn't have to, that actually, I'm worth more than that. But sometimes I do and in this case I think it was well worth it. Nicole's answers to my questions were insightful and I think add depth what's been written about the topic.

Book review: Purge: Rehab Diaries by Nicole Johns

And I'll have an interview soon with author Nicole Johns. She's reading in Minneapolis on April 24th too.



Purge chronicles Nicole Johns' memoir of her time in a eating disorders rehab center in Wisconsin for 88 days in 2004, when she was 23 years old, for EDNOS, a term meaning Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. The writing is stark, interspersed with clinical documents like her intake documents, guidelines from the clinic, and the $24,500 bill for her treatment ($15,500 was covered by her insurance).

While anyone who's read any other first-person accounts of eating disorders, or lived with one, will find much that's familiar here--stuffing one's feelings with food, trauma, body dysmoprhia--there are several things different about Johns' story. She isn't a stick-thin anorexic, but rather a woman who's a size 9, who struggles with being at the upper end of the weight scale in the clinic. Yet by constantly purging (making herself vomit), she's wound up in the hospital and suffers from heart problems and had a concussion, along with other medical issues that will be with her for a long time, if not forever. She's also bisexual, though that isn't presented as a factor in her diagnosis; in fact, it's treated, refreshingly, as a nonissue, and seems to be a given to Johns.

When she writes things like, "My body has lost its integrity," it's something many, many women can relate to. Yet this is not a self-help book or one with a moral lesson per se. Johns is not holding herself up as an example, and in fact alludes to the danger of doing so when she writes that Marya Hornbacher's memoir Wasted is considered an "eating disorder bible" to many women suffering from eating disorders, and was banned from the treatment facility she attended.

Sometimes the point of view here is challenging, and I wished she had given us a little bit more of a glimpse of her current life, to see whether the back-and-forth nature of her attitude toward her eating disorder, which is omnipresent in the text presented, still holds. Yet Johns keeps her focus firmly on her time in treatment, with occasional hints of her growth in the years since. There are humorous moments, such as when one resident asks about the vibrator policy of the center (the therapist doesn't think they're allowed) and going skating with the elderly. There's repetition here that while probably deliberate, at times makes for tepid reading, but does mimic what surely was the repetitious days involved in her treatment.

Johns is at her best when telling the stories that are likely the most difficult for her; not the details of how and when and what she purged, but her feelings about and experiences with her family, and the possible date rape from her college advisor. These are told in a stark, direct way that serves to highlight these stories.

Purge is not an easy book, but an important one that will speak to those who've suffered eating disorders, known people who do or simply want to know more. The closing scene is a tearjerker, and highlights one of the biggest takeaways for me of Purge: the lasting, often life-threatening physical damage that can be done by bulimia. The medical reports that are included here certainly don't have the passion of her writing, but they can be just as chilling. Johns is open about how she didn't think she was doing that badly because she wasn't scrawny, and that is a reminder that one's outside appearance doesn't tell the entire story.

Read this: Purge: Rehab Diaries by Nicole Johns

Well, two things: 1. I haven't read this yet but I want to and will very soon. 2. I pretty much want to read everything Seal Press publishes (and I am so not saying that just because they published Dirty Girls) - I've felt that way for years. They are probably the first imprint I ever truly followed, and have been for about a decade.

With that out of the way, I can say that while I have a bazillion books I'm reading/want to read, Purge: Rehab Diaries by Nicole Johns is right at the top of the list. It's just been published and is based largely on her journal entries started in rehab. You can read more at her blog.

I think this book, along with Harriet Brown's anthology Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Body Image, and Weight and the YA anthology Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? edited by Marissa Walsh are all going to be very important contributions to the literature around both eating disorders and body image. The Carolyn Mackler essay in Does This Book... is a must-read for YA fans as well as any fiction writer who's ever been mistaken for her characters.



Here's what Kirkus wrote (via Nicole Johns):

A young writer recounts the trials and treatment of her eating disorder.

Midway through graduate school, 22-year-old Johns checked herself into the Wisconsin Eating Disorders Center, where she would spend 88 days trying to break the self-destructive regimen of restricting and purging that had plagued her since age 13. The memoir tracks her time at the EDC and the many harrowing experiences that led her there. Since she technically wasn’t underweight or morbidly obese, and still menstruated, the 130-pound Johns was diagnosed with EDNOS, or an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, what she terms an “island between anorexia and bulimia, a no-man’s-land that borrows from both diagnoses.” Years of limiting herself to 500 calories per day and compensating when her intake exceeded that by popping diet pills, chugging Diet Coke, purging and frantically exercising when overwhelmed all resulted in Johns developing multiple health problems, including severe heart irregularities. The author often narrates in present tense and occasionally second person to mimic the compulsive urgency of her fraught state of being: “There is no way out, so you binge on and purge an entire tube of Pillsbury rolls (half-cooked—you are too impatient to wait for them to bake), an entire box of chocolate Malt-O-Meal, a pint of Godiva ice cream, and a mug of chai tea.” Spare and unyielding, Johns’s prose distills the pain of her self-loathing while objectively charting the efforts of the center’s staff to help her and her fellow “Sisterhood of the Starving” curb and, hopefully, overcome such frenetic tendencies.

A revealing glimpse into the trauma wrought by eating disorders—especially important for the afflicted and those who care for them.