Content note: this article contains descriptions of eating disorders and weight loss that readers may find upsetting.

When I was a kid, I rolled my eyes at the skeletal models I saw on the pages of fashion magazines. How shallow, I thought, when I looked at their razor-sharp collarbones and gaping ribcages, each bone as distinct as a piano key. How self-obsessed they must be to think only about maintaining the ‘perfect’ body. To waste all their energy on starving themselves to stay skinny. That could never be me.

Until, one day, it was.

I spent seven years mired in anorexia, and an additional two in bulimia. Anorexia is defined as “restriction of food intake leading to low body weight, typically accompanied by intense fear of gaining weight and disturbed perception of body weight and image”. Bulimia, on the other hand, is “regular, often secretive bouts of overeating followed by self-induced vomiting or purging, strict dieting, or extreme exercise, associated with persistent and excessive concern with body weight”. Those definitions are mostly accurate. But what they completely leave out is the emotional regulation that these diseases do for those who suffer from them. And that piece is the most addictive of all.

I’ve suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)  for most of my life. I remember the exact day it began, like a faucet of nightmares that, when turned on, slowly filled my brain with loud, vicious, all-consuming intrusive thoughts. Worries plagued me from the moment I opened my eyes until the moment I laid down to sleep again. The worries ran the gamut: what if I accidentally cheat on my boyfriend? What if I’m secretly a murderer, even though I’ve never hurt a fly? What if I’m secretly gay, even though I’ve always liked boys, even though it’s perfectly fine to like girls, I just need to know the truth or I’ll lose my goddamn mind? On and on. Endless self-torture.

The summer before my freshman year of college, I lost a significant amount of weight in a week. It happened by accident. I went with a church group to build houses in the Bahamas. I’m not religious, but my mother insisted I go anyway. “It will be good for you,” she said. “Good for the soul.”

On the trip, we weren’t served very much food. My diet consisted almost exclusively of nutrition bars and warm green apples. It made me light-headed, my brain fuzzy, my thoughts sluggish. I thought about food from sunup to sundown. How hungry I was, what I would eat for my next meal, when that next meal would take place. It was exhausting. Every night, I got into bed at 8:30 pm and slept like the dead until it was time to get back up at six. 

At the end of the trip, I liked what I saw in the mirror. I liked my tight waist, the gap between my thighs. I’d already had a healthy, slim body, but there was something addictive about looking for my soft parts and not being able to find them anymore. But what I liked the most – more than anything I saw in the mirror, more than the compliments I received from girls back home on how good I looked – was the silence. The deep quiet in my brain. After almost a decade of inner torture, the intrusive thoughts were just… gone.

In their place was a persistent focus on food. I went on a quest to ‘perfect’ my diet: no starch, no gluten, no candy, and absolutely nothing resembling dessert. I dove into research on the Zone diet, started digging for low-carb, no-bake, no-sugar, no-nothing recipes on every blog I could find. I loved it. The research absorbed me for hours on end, speeding me through the hours between shifts at my summer job—long stretches of dead time that I would normally spend inside my own mind, arguing with myself. At the end of that summer, I left for college believing that I’d single-handedly cured myself of OCD.

I was wrong, of course. I hadn’t cured anything. I’d merely traded one monster for another.

That is the great trick of the eating disorder. She is a siren sitting atop wave-splashed rocks, a demon a disguised as a beautiful woman. She coaxes you in with promises of relief – from OCD, from anxiety, from past trauma, from self-loathing, from anything that you’ve long prayed would go away – but once she has you, she’ll drown you without a second thought.

When I finally started to try to eat again, my anorexia morphed into bulimia. This is a far more common phenomena than most people know. You see, when you’re anorexic, your body doesn’t know that you’re starving yourself on purpose. Why would it? Self-induced starvation goes against the basic human instinct of trying to stay alive. So, when you suffer from anorexia, your body goes into survival mode. It thinks that you’re in a period of famine, and it does whatever it needs to do to keep you alive. But once you finally start eating again – and I mean really eating, full meals and not just half-portions here and there – your body thinks that you’ve finally come out of that famine. So, what does it do?

It starts to binge.

The scariest part of bulimia is the lack of self-control that you feel. I would unwrap a mini chocolate bar, telling myself that I would just have one as a dessert after lunch. But once that rush of sugar hit my mouth, I couldn’t stop. I had to have another. And another. And another, until suddenly all fifty pieces of candy in the bag are gone. That’s when the shame washes over you. That’s when you head for the toilet.

Though it might sound surprising, binging and purging is also a form of emotional regulation. It is an obsession and a distraction, just like starvation. I can’t really describe the feeling that came after a purge: relief, numbness, emptiness, calm. All the same things I so longed for when I was consumed with intrusive thoughts.

Knowing all of that, it’s no shock that recovery isn’t just about refeeding and gaining weight. That part is essential, of course (and incredibly difficult – I had to re-learn how to feed myself, like I was a child again). But returning to a healthy weight, whatever that weight may be, in only half the journey. Learning how to let in all the negative emotions that your eating disorder was covering up? That’s where the real work begins.

Guy’s Girl by Emma Noyes is out now in hardback, published by Penguin Michael Joseph

If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, you can find support and resources on the mental health charity Mind’s website and NHS Every Mind Matters or access the NHS’ list of mental health helplines and services.

If you are struggling with your mental health, you can also ask your GP for a referral to NHS Talking Therapies, or you can self-refer.

For information and help on eating disorders, visit eating disorder charity Beat’s website.

For confidential support, you can also call the Samaritans in the UK on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In a crisis, call 999.

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.