Wrapped

The story of how two women fought an eating disorder and learned how to become themselves again. *Due to the sensitive nature of this subject, the names of the two women have been changed to protect their identities. By Jeff Laboon


Jane Doe stared at the exam in front of her. She needed two-and-a-half hours to finish the mechanics exam. When can I throw up? When can I run? How little can I eat for dinner, she asked herself.



After leaving the lecture hall, Doe realized she had no idea what she wrote on her exam. During the full two-and-a-half hours, bulimia consumed her thoughts. This daydream was the tipping point for her. She returned to treatment. “I was an eating disorder, it was me,” Doe says. “Everything in my life was in some way connected back to bulimia.”

Doe is one of the seven to 10 million women in the United States suffering from an eating disorder, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Eating Disorders, or ANAD. Eighty-seven percent of those combating eating disorders report onset by the age of 20, according to ANAD. Though, the general public once considered eating disorders taboo, more now speak out about the terrors of these disorders.

Doe developed bulimia nervosa, or BN, at the age of 16. The University of Maryland defines BN as an eating disorder in which one binges and purges food. Bulimia eating results in a gradual loss of appetitive controls and mentally restricts one’s diet. Often times, the person induces vomit, uses laxatives or over-exercises to remove food from their system.

But, this behavior brought control back to Doe, who felt her life was over-scheduled. She developed a negative perception of herself both physically and socially that strengthened the disorder’s hold over her. “I was always telling myself ‘You could be better, you could be better, you could be better,’” she says, “Which translated into ‘You can look better, you can eat less.’”
Doe’s mother approached her during her senior year of high school, asking Doe to get help. She underwent four weeks of residential treatment and spent two and a half years free of behavioral symptoms, such as excessive binging and purging.

Her harmless decision to go to the gym more often and to eat healthier foods, though, drove Doe into relapse.

The simplest reminders of food and weight during relapse terrorized Doe and confined her to her bedroom. “Just even getting out of bed and having to go to the kitchen felt like a hardship on a lot of days,” she says. “And there were days when I didn’t. I literally would not get out of bed because doing anything other than staying in my bed felt unmanageable like it was going to be too hard.”

With the support of her family and friends, Doe quit her job and took fewer classes to eliminate some of the stress in her life. She started to openly discuss battling with the disorder, even creating a Twitter account last June to log her recovery.

The most important part to her recovery, Doe says, was to un-demonize food and to turn attention away from weight, which caused her sleepless nights until she finally threw away her scale. “There was a point when I would wake up in the middle of the night, panicking that I had gained 10 pounds, getting out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to step on the scale and reassure myself that it hadn’t gone up,” she says.

Doe hopes that someday she will reach a point where she is free of bulimia. She says two schools of thought exist on recovery, a 12-step approach in which one is always recovering and a place where one is completely free of the disorder.

Like Doe, Harriet Brown believes in a state of full recovery. Brown, whose daughter suffered from anorexia nervosa, has spent her career as a magazine journalist and professor researching and studying eating disorders. Her latest book on anorexia Brave Girl Eating released this fall.

The biggest challenge for Brown in facing her daughter’s eating disorder was convincing her that she was sick, something her daughter refused to believe even during her stay in an intensive care unit. Brown says the parents must take control of their child in this instance. “As a parent, I understand that what my child needed and what so many of them need is someone to sort of take charge of it, say ‘I’m not going to let you starve,’” Brown says.

During her daughter’s recovery, Brown found treatment facilities especially damaging because her daughter learned tricks on how to lose weight from other patients. This type of deception was completely uncharacteristic of her daughter, Brown says. It was important, though, for Brown to view the eating disorder as a separate entity. That her daughter lost control rather than changed. “Most people who are eating disordered do some pretty ugly things,” Brown says. “That’s just the nature of it. I had a child who wasn’t a liar or a big manipulator or deceiver and there was a lot of surprising behavior from her, but it wasn’t really her.”


Mary Doh saw a similar transformation in herself. Typically, she was very outgoing, but her eating disorder made her reclusive. Never a person to use alcohol, Doh found herself using alcohol regularly as a method of escape. She always encouraged herself, but when anorexia and bulimia took control of her, Doh became self-conscious. “I always thought highly of myself, and then, the disorder would tell me, ‘You’re such a piece of shit, you can’t do anything right, you keep failing, you’re such a failure, you’re never going to amount to anything,’” Doh says. “I always thought the opposite.”

Doh developed anorexia when she was 16 years old. She visited the doctor to receive some medication, which would lead to about five pounds of weight gain. So, that night, she started to record her diet and greatly increased her physical activity. She only ate foods in wrappers so she would know the nutritional value of everything she ate.

When she left home for college, Doh developed more bulimic behavior to the point where she could no longer function normally. She was not ready, though, to commit herself fully to recovery. After a brief period of happiness, she spiraled into relapse before returning to treatment.

She finds that therapy provides the most comfort because its fights the constant negativity of the disease with positive reinforcement. “It’s a constant affirmation and it forces me to continually not deny where I’m at, even though I’m constantly being pushed and challenged in a supportive way,” Doh says.

She thinks the general public focuses too much on the physical nature of the disease. Eating disorders at their root are mental health disorder. For this reason, Doctor Sarah Short, a nutrition professor at Syracuse University, says those trying to recover need to see both a registered dietitian as well as a psychiatrist experienced with eating disorders.

While eating disorders present physical problems because one is starving themselves to death, these disorders are really psychological, she says. One with bulimia does not see themselves accurately, so at a healthy weight the person may see themselves as overweight.


On November 7, Jane Doe saw herself again. She was no longer just an eating disorder. She was an engineer, a yoga girl, a runner, an artist, a friend and a sister. She could be positive again. “That is what recovery has been to me, discovering that there is a me and that I have a life,” Doe says. “I can like myself and that has definitely impacted me socially and professionally.”