While it can be difficult, recovery is possible. As told by our voices of hope.
Millions of people are affected by eating disorders, either personally or because someone they love is battling the disease. But hopes and dreams can sustain a person through difficult challenges and bring a person to a renewed place in their life. There are many ways that people find their way to recovery.
The National Eating Disorders Association wants to hear your thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams. Your stories of courage and recovery can inspire others who share your challenges and aspirations, and let others know that they are not alone.
We are a community and your voice is important to us.
Find Stories of Hope by Author
June Alexander
Lynn Chen
Laura Collins
Stephanie Covington Armstrong
Ellen Domingos
Peach Friedman
Carolyn Jennings
Allison Kreiger
Travis Mathews
Kristen Moeller
Robbie Munn
Mike Polan
Shani Raviv
Troy Roness
Ron Saxen
Elizabeth Showers
Corazón Tierra
Chevese Turner
Temimah Zucker
Each Story of Hope reflects the opinions and experiences of the individual author, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of NEDA nor its Clinical Scientific Advisory Council. For answers to basic questions about eating disorders, lists of treatment professionals in your area or just for a safe place to talk please call our Toll Free Information and Referral Helpline at 800-931-2237.
Hope for ParentsThe story I have to offer is one of hope and recovery! Something 2 years ago I did not think was possible.
The journey through my daughters 10 year battle with anorexia has been a long and difficult one. There has been many twists and turns, detours and crashes along the way. Almost to the point that this terrible journey might end in her death. Looking back over the years battling this disease with my daughter, I would offer some advice to those loved ones in it now.
Read Mike Polan’s full story.
back to top
TikvahMy name is Temimah Zucker. I am a 21 year old college student. My father is a Rabbi, I love Disney, I have a dog named Ferdie, and I suffered from Anorexia.
I started Queens College in Fall 2008 and some would call that time my one-fifth life crisis. Many of my friends had gone away to Seminary in Israel for the year (as is customary for the year after graduating high school), I was starting a new school, moved out of my house for the first time, and had been horribly betrayed by two close friends that summer. I developed a deep clinical depression and this was soon followed by anorexia.
Read Temimah Zucker’s full story.
back to top
“Is There Fat In That?”… a one woman show
From the time I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to go to New York City to “make it big.” For the majority of my life, I have been on some sort of a stage. At the age of eight, I began performing professionally in theater. At the age of twelve, I was performing across the country after winning the national title of Miss National Pre-teen in Orlando, Florida. At the age of eighteen, I was studying musical theater at The Boston Conservatory of Music and then earning my BFA in Acting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. By my late twenties, I had performed on off-Broadway, in regional theater, touring companies, cruise-ships, voice-overs, commercials, television, and film. I had worked with Tony nominees and an Emmy and Grammy award winner. I had modeled for several clothing lines and appeared on book covers, catalogues as well as Marie Claire and Latina magazines. And at age twenty-eight, I was a patient at the New England Eating Disorder Program at Mercy Hospital. A lost woman trying to figure out how I had got there and how an eating disorder had taken over my life.
Read Ellen Domingos’s full story.
back to top
Lynn Chen, Actress and BloggerI’m Lynn Chen. I’m an actress and blogger. I have two blogs – one is a community site for Asians about eating disorders and body image called “Thick Dumpling Skin,” and the other is a personal food blog called “The Actor’s Diet.” Whenever I tell people the name of the latter, they automatically snicker, “What’s the actor’s diet – cigarettes and coffee?” And then I tell them about my history with eating disorders. And they quickly shut up.
Eating disorders are serious, and no laughing matter. But growing up, I just figured it was a part of life. I grew up a in a family of overeaters, and used anorexia to balance my weight out as an adult, when I became an actress and fans/managers/family started making comments about my size.
Read Lynn Chen’s full story.
back to top
Hope at Every Age (or: Freedom at Every Age)My message is that there is Hope at Every Age. Recovery from an eating disorder is possible. Certainly early intervention is best, but if this opportunity is missed, my equally loud message is that hope for recovery is real at every age. Maybe you, your child or your partner has been fighting the eating disorder for decades, or maybe you discovered it only last week. You can beat this illness and be free to live YOUR life.
I developed Anorexia at age eleven, followed by Bulimia in my teens. I felt there was something wrong but didn’t know what it was. My illness was not diagnosed until I was 32. At 32, I appeared as a high achieving, mother of four who kept a full-time job, but bulimia, chronic anxiety and depression raged within. I felt very alone; I didn’t know others felt like me. I had some very dark days but deep within I WANTED TO LIVE, I wanted to be free to be me. With hope as a beacon, I set out to recover. This journey took two decades. Freedom gained, I began writing books to give hope to others.
Read June Alexander’s full story.
back to top
Soy hispana y me recuperé de la anorexiaCuando me miro al espejo veo a una mujer llena de curvas exuberantes, con unas cuantas canas en las raíces y una sonrisa amplia. Me veo y me siento llena de alegría, fuerza y gracia. Siento todas estas sensaciones maravillosas en mi cuerpo y en mi alma, en ese lugar donde cuerpo y alma viven en completa armonía.
He vivido feliz en mi cuerpo libre de trastornos alimenticios durante 15 años. Creo que la recuperación de un trastorno alimenticio es posible cuando nos abrimos a recibir ayuda, a recibir amor y a recibir el milagro de estar vivos. Comparto este mensaje de esperanza con mi comunidad, con la comunidad hispana en Estados Unidos y con las mujeres hispanas alrededor del mundo.
Read the English language version following the original full story
Read Corazón Tierra’s full story.
back to top
Beginning is How You Get ThereAt one time in my life I was a male model. Another time I was a standup comedian. To the world I probably seemed like a pretty cool dude: not bad looking, kind of funny, someone who had it all figured out. But I didn’t. I was a mess. I had an eating disorder that dominated my life, something I kept as hidden as humanly possible, telling myself, there’s no way I’m coming out of the closet, let the world know I’m ‘that’ guy.
Read Ron Saxen’s full story.
back to top
Peach FriedmanWhat I do know:
I used to hate my body, deny it of all pleasure, and give every ounce of my energy toward controlling my size and shape through restricting my diet and engaging in compulsive exercise behaviors. Now, I’m a busy mom and yoga teacher, and my energy goes toward a whole list of things I never even considered when I was sick. I can feel my baby boy moving around in my belly, and hear my 2-year-old in the next room babbling away, and more than anything else I feel blessed—blessed to have a healthy body, for sure, but also a healthy mind—one that focuses on things that make me and my family happy.
Read Peach Friedman’s full story.
back to top
Bringing BED in to the LightAfter nearly a lifetime of silence, I now find it effortless to acknowledge that I have binge eating disorder (BED).
It wasn’t always this way. Somewhere between the ages of five and seven, I discovered my connection to food and began a relationship that would shape most of my life. For me, food provided both comfort and stress, it signified love and hate, it brought me up and then down, it was my best friend and nemesis.
My mother was anorexic as a teen and as a young mother she coached me to distinguish between “good” and “bad” food and taught me the many rules and rituals she followed. Mom modeled her own uneasiness with her body and we dieted together often. We both acted on unexplainable urges that propelled us both toward and in retreat from food with equal vigor.
Read Chevese Turner’s full story.
back to top
Hunger Speaks Writing immediately became an essential partner in my recovery from binge eating. I was encouraged to keep a journal as an outpatient at an eating disorder clinic. In the two-and-a-half decades since, I’ve accumulated trunks full of filled pages. Journal writing remains a necessary practice in knowing what’s going on inside me.
As recovery progressed, I discovered that the poetry of others filled some hungry part of me never reached before. I played with creating poems—just for me. Shaping my experiences in disease and recovery into poetry was therapeutic and empowering. The process clarified details and connections, as well as switched me from victim of something into being an observer and a creator.
Reams of accumulated poems led to the idea of offering my work as my way of reaching a hand out to others in a cradle of understanding. Finding my own voice, creativity, and courage were integral steps of my healing. The collected poems cohered into the companion I longed for in the turbulence of disease and early recovery.
Read Carolyn Jennings’s full story.
back to top
Through Thick and Thin I recently received a book in the mail––it was the first copy of my new book, a memoir of anorexia nervosa. I picked it up off the front door mat where it lay swaddled in brown cardboard like baby Jesus in a basket. When my husband came home and I unwrapped it and held it bare in my hands for the first time, I said, "It feels a bit thin! I expected it to be… thicker." We both immediately recognized the irony in my statement, coming from the mouth of a recovered anorexic, and we laughed. Society accepts thicker books, "fatter" books, we call them tomes and consider them to be intelligently written, of value, containing substance. My book of 264 pages, however "thin" it feels, contains the weight of the decade of my Anorexia, which started at age fourteen and waned at age 24. I'm now 34 and ten years recovered.
Read Shani Raviv’s full story.
back to top
My Journey BackThe outcast, the taunted, the pretender, the funny guy and the jock. The slow transition of my social status throughout my elementary, middle and high school years are pretty dramatic. Interestingly enough, I never thought twice that what was going on at school, at home or with how I was feeling may have been somewhat different from everyone else. Getting teased, not fitting in, having a split family and worrying about anything and everything were 'normal,' right? That is exactly what I thought throughout my childhood, adolescent and teen years.
My parents divorced when I was five years old. Early memories are tainted by fighting, trying to be the 'perfect' son and worrying how everyone else viewed my life. Perfectionism was a term that I knew nothing about. Little did I know that perfectionistic tendencies were planted from a very early age by both family and society. I did not see much of my father and was raised in a nearly all female family. With no one of my own gender to identify with, I clearly developed a "Type A Personality," and slowly began to analyze and control everything on my own.
Sports had always been part of my life. Every year, especially after grade five was filled with non-stop, action packed sports scheduling. From early on, I clearly was not a stand out, but I loved being part of something bigger than myself.
I was always the 'average' guy in high school. I did not think I was blessed with good looks nor did I think I had what it took to grasp the 4.0. I never fit into a specific group or received a lot of attention from the opposite sex; I merely thought that I was accepted solely because I had to be there. Finding and mastering my sense of humor to cover my pain was a coping skill I learned to use very, very well.
Read Troy Roness’s full story.
back to top
Digesting the TruthWhen I look back at my years trapped in the bowels of my eating disorder I still find my recovery nothing short of a miracle. I can hit the rewind button and identify my earliest issues with food. At five years old I began to refuse to eat my mother’s cooking. As a single mother, she worked full time and barely had enough time to think about the dinners she prepared but I couldn’t see that. I only noticed the lack of attention paid to her dishes and the lack of seasonings. Each night the dinner table became our battlefield, with me refusing to eat even though I knew food for us was a luxury not to be taken for granted. She insisted rather strongly that I eat while I stubbornly held my ground and refused to take one bite. This was the only time in my life that I could summon the courage to stand up to my powerful mother. It was also the one time I was able to emerge victorious.
Read Stephanie Covington Armstrong’s full story.
back to top
Story of HopeIf you saw a picture of me in 1983, you would see a pretty, 5’6” tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. That’s not what I saw when I looked in the mirror. My thighs curved out where they should curve in. My nose was too big and lips too small. Standing sideways in the mirror I couldn’t tell if my feet were too big or my legs too short, something I first noticed at age ten, but by seventeen, I was sure that something wasn’t right. My mother was on the “Dolly Parton Diet” and that sounded good to me. I never managed to sustain this diet for long, but more importantly, people noticed. They noticed and commented. They said, “Have you lost weight?” but I heard, “You look great!” Ahh, attention. Just what I had been craving.
Read Kristen Moeller’s full story.
back to top
I Chose to LiveThe popular female artist, Superchick has a song entitled, “Courage” where she gracefully writes about her battle to overcome an eating disorder. I was first introduced to this song in the summer of 2008 by my younger sister, shortly after returning from a thirty day stay at a residential eating disorder treatment center in Florida. This is not the type of music a former men’s college lacrosse player would be listening too, but in March of that year, my life changed forever.
Read Patrick’s full story.
back to top
Living in the NowI started my eating disorder at age 13 the moment that I noticed a little pocket of fat at my bikini line. I will never forget that moment. I was wearing a turquoise swimsuit with a ruffle—a swimsuit that I loved and felt so feminine in—but with that negative thought that “fat is bad,” my happiness with that swimsuit began to dissipate. It was in that moment I decided to eat less. Little did I know that experiencing a slight weight gain was normal in becoming a woman.
Read Elizabeth’s full story.
back to top
My Story of My EDTen years ago, my battle with bulimia was in full swing. My days were consumed by an illness I never expected, nor wanted, in my life. When people think about eating disorders, they often think that they are a choice- someone probably wanted to lose weight and it got out of control. This is not the case! Eating disorders are not choices; they are illnesses and they are also the leading cause of death among mental illnesses.
Read Allison’s full story.
back to top
Gay Males and Eating Disorders ~ As Seen through a Filmmaker's Lensby Travis Mathews
Coming out of the closet isn’t usually someone’s idea of a good time. There’s always the perceived risk that the receiver of the news is going to drop you into a box labeled discard.
Read Travis’s full story.
back to top
Swimming Upstreamby Robbie Munn
While the road maps for physical ailments are fairly well laid out in detail and there are distinct crumbs to follow, the road atlases for psychiatric illnesses are, pardon the pun, still all over the map. Eating disorders have only recently been recognized as true psychiatric illnesses rather than “harmless phases that will pass.” All these factors contribute to the length of delay in appropriate response from family to professional. These unnecessary delays add to the complexity and severity of the symptoms, once true treatment is finally found. Through my daughter’s long and desperate struggles, I would learn that I already knew what anorexia looked like, smelled like, felt like. I had already almost drowned once as a child and again later as a young adult. I just didn’t know what to call it then.
Read Robbie’s full story.
back to top
If I knew then what I know now...If my daughter developed anorexia NOW, instead of back in 2002 when I knew nothing about eating disorders, boy would I do a great job!
I’d know all about how the illness works, what recovery looks like, all the theories on what causes it, the evidence behind different treatment approaches, the role of nutrition, and the best way for parents to respond. I’d have met lots of families who had been through it, I’d know countless fully recovered survivors of the illness, and I’d be aware of all the great work going on to help patients and families.
Read Laura Collins’s full story.
back to top
|
 |
