Food is a necessity for human survival. Food is love. Food is pleasure. Food is also fraught with beliefs about its role in our lives. It shapes not only our bodies, but our perception of our bodies. According to NEDA (National Eating Disorders Association), “9% of the US population, or 30 million Americans will have an eating disorder in their lifetime.” They go on to indicate, “The overall lifetime prevalence of eating disorders is estimated to be 8.60% among females and 4.07% among males.”
Mallary Tanore Tarpley, author, journalist and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business, has offered her take on eating disorders as both memoir and text book called SLIP- Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. SLIP is scholarly and deeply personal.
As a seasoned therapist with clients over the years who have experienced disordered eating and as someone with a complicated relationship with food, I found the book to be informative and heart rending, and appreciated the inner sanctum view from one who has not only ‘been there,’ but continues to ‘be there,’ hence the title of the book. As is true in any form of recovery, there is a middle ground between active engagement with a substance of choice or behavioral addiction where relapse is always possible. I have told clients and colleagues about SLIP in the hopes that it will be a good guide for them as well.
What was the pivotal event that led to your eating disorder?
The trauma of losing my mother when I was 11 years old led me to develop an eating disorder. Throughout the three years that she was sick with metastatic breast cancer, my family and I equated her with a soldier in a battle and The Little Engine That Could.
Even when the cancer spread to her bone-marrow, her liver, and her brain, we were steadfast in our belief that she would “win the battle” and “get to the other side of the mountain,” as we used to say. Looking back on my mother’s medical records as I got older, it’s clear that she wasn’t going to make it and that my parents were trying to shield me from hard truths. I’ve since learned, though, that truth is often our best armor.
My heart is with you as you continue to heal from such a significant loss at such as early age. What supports did you have back then?
I’m an only child and have a very small family. My father was my biggest support, and I always knew he loved me dearly. Understandably, he was at a loss of what to do after my mother died. So, we both did what we knew how to do best: pretend we were okay. The morning after my mother died, my father went to work, and I walked to middle school alone. I read my mom’s eulogy without shedding any tears, and family members and friends praised me for being so strong and resilient.
But behind that happy façade, I was crumbling. The more time passed, the further away I felt from my mother. By age 12, I had conjured up an idea that maybe if I stayed the same size I was when my mom was alive, I could somehow be closer to her. Food restriction became a warped form of time travel. It was never about wanting to be skinny; it was about wanting to be small and safe.
What was your relationship with food prior to that?
I grew up as a food-loving child. People sometimes ask me if my mother had issues with food (largely because mothers have long been blamed for children’s eating disorders), but some of my favorite memories of food revolve around me and my mom. She didn’t succumb to the diet fads of the 1980s and 1990s, and I don’t remember her ever buying fat-free or low-fat foods, which were all the rage then. Instead of demonizing treats, she ate them alongside me. Our favorites were mocha-almond chip ice cream, Yodels devils food cakes, and Jiffy Pop popcorn (except for the times when she would accidentally burn it and set off the fire alarm).
When we went on our weekly mother-daughter outings to Burger King, we drank vanilla milkshakes and devoured 99-cent Whoppers. I would sink my teeth into the sesame bun. Ketchup and mayonnaise would ooze out the side, covering my fingertips and falling onto my shirt. Mom and I would shake our heads and laugh. We both knew that, had my father been with us, he would have been disgusted by all the sauce. He was, and still is, a plain McDonald’s hamburger kind of guy.
How would you define an eating disorder and how did yours impact your life then and how does it now?
An eating disorder is a serious health condition that affects both the mind and the body. These disorders — which include anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating disorder, ARFID, and other-specified feeding and eating disorders — often involve hyper-fixations on food, body shape, and weight. They can result in harmful behaviors around food and exercise, as well as cognitive distortions and ruts.
Eating disorders are not lifestyle choices; they are complicated illnesses that stem from a mix of physiological, genetic, environmental, and neurobiological factors. And they affect people in all different body shapes and sizes and are prevalent across all genders, ages, races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic statuses.
What makes it so daunting? As a therapist, I have heard from clients that paradoxically, it is an out-of-control behavior that is meant to give them a sense of control over their lives.
At the onset, it may seem like turning toward or away from food is a helpful coping mechanism. When I was acutely sick, for instance, I found that calorie counting gave me some semblance of control in the aftermath of my mother’s death; I couldn’t control what happened to her body, but I could regulate what I put in mine.
Of course, the great irony of eating disorders is that we think they’ll give us something we crave — control, attention, love, safety — only to find that they end up robbing it from us completely. In my attempts to stay little, for instance, I developed a disorder that grew unbearably big and left me feeling more out of control than ever before.
What prompted you to write your new book called SLIP?
SLIP is the book I wish I’d had when I was in the earlier stages of recovery. During that period, I read countless books on eating disorders, most of which were written by clinicians and/or individuals who were fully recovered. I found some hope in these books, but I didn’t see myself reflected in them as someone who was better but not all better. That lack of a mirrored image left me feeling deeply misunderstood.
I wanted to write a book from the perspective of someone who is better, but not all better. In doing so, I wanted to give a voice to the many people who still grapple with the imprints of their disorder. SLIP follows my own story, but it also weaves in narratives from others with lived experience, as well as the latest research on eating disorders.
What is it that you refer to as ‘the middle place’?
The middle place is the name I’ve given to the liminal space between acute sickness and full recovery. It’s rooted in the belief that recovery is possible but imperfect, and it’s a space where setbacks happen but progress is always possible. By giving a name to the middle place, I hope to remove the stigma and shame that so often accompany slips in the recovery process (hence the title of my book). The middle place acknowledges that slips aren’t grounds for failure but rather opportunities for growth.
This space has been overlooked for too long. In the eating disorder field, it’s often referred to it as “pseudo” or “quasi” recovery — pernicious terms that can make people feel as though they’re faking recovery or that it’s somehow not real. For the longest time, I thought I was the only person in this place because it’s so seldom talked about. However, when writing my book, I surveyed over 700 people with lived experience, and 85% of them said they could identify with the middle place. It’s a populous space that needs attention.
Would you apply that same concept to any addiction?
Yes, definitely. The substance field is more accepting of the idea that people are often “in recovery” from addiction instead of “fully recovered” from it. The middle place is an apt term for so many struggles, including addiction, autoimmune disorders, grief/loss, and more. I believe we are all and always navigating some sort of messy middle.
Where do our views about food and our bodies come from?
We learn about food and our bodies from our families, educators, doctors, and others who play pivotal roles in our upbringing and in our adult lives. But beyond people, we learn a lot about food and bodies from our society, which is very much steeped in fatphobia — a pervasive form of oppression that demonizes weight gain and people in larger bodies. People with eating disorders often experience an internalized fatphobia, driven by distorted thoughts about their bodies and fear of weight gain.
We are constantly bombarded by societal messages that tell us we should take up less space or that our worth is dependent upon our weight. This is true to the point where researchers many years ago coined a term called “normative discontent — the notion that most women experience some level of discontent with their weight, making that discontent more the norm than the exception. The term first emerged in 1984, with more recent research showing that this discontent is pervasive among men, too.
Are/were there situations that could trigger a tumble into active addiction for you?
I can’t say with certainty that there would be one definitive trigger that would make me fall back into my disorder. That said, I’m always cognizant of the fact that even though I’ve been in recovery for 25 years, my disorder still very much remains a vulnerability. Any time I go through a life transition or anticipate a stressful period, I take extra precautions to increase the likelihood that any slips I might have don’t turn into uncontrollable slides.
At one point in your description of your mom’s illness, the term ‘positive for anorexia’ came up. How is that different from anorexia nervosa?
After uncovering my mother’s medical records years after she died, I would learn that the doctors had diagnosed her as “positive for anorexia.” They were referring to the literal definition of anorexia: “without appetite.” It’s a clinical term that medical providers sometimes use to describe individuals who stop eating due to acute illnesses, often as they near the end of life. Being “positive for anorexia” is different from anorexia nervosa, the latter defined as “nervous loss of appetite” and a disorder of both the body and mind.
The day after your mother died when you were 11, you went to school. They hadn’t been notified of your tragic loss. What was your dad’s rationale for having you there instead of at home with him?
My father was doing what he thought was best by maintaining a sense of normalcy and trying to “move on.” For so long I had blamed him for shielding me from the reality of my mother’s sickness and death. But after interviewing him about this for my book, I considered the possibility that he had been exposing me to it all along.
The difference was that his reality wasn’t reflective of the difficult truths I’ve come to appreciate as an adult — the ones that confront you with news you’d rather not hear but deserve to know. They’re not the stuff of fairy tales but of real life, replete with unpredictable plotlines and endings. Complicated truths help us grow in ways that sugarcoating seldom can; they make us more attuned to gray spaces by widening our view of the world beyond black or white, positive or negative.
What do you imagine would have happened if you and your dad grieved together in the immediate aftermath?
It’s hard to say. There are moments when I’ve wished I could erase the painful parts of my past. If my life were a sketchbook, with big moments illustrated on each page, what would happen if I erased my mother’s death? Would the illustrations of my eating disorder then disappear? If one never existed, would the other have ever emerged? I realize I will never know the answers to these questions. But still, I sometimes search. I wrestle with the contradiction of wanting life’s hardships to be removable while accepting their Sharpie-like permanence.
Who were the supports that got you through the most challenging aspects of the eating disorder?
My father and paternal grandma were my biggest supporters, as well as my treatment teams at Boston Children’s Hospital (where I was hospitalized on five separate occasions) and at Germaine Lawrence (a now-shuttered residential treatment center where I lived for a year and a half.) Through therapeutic exercises that I did with my therapist at Germaine Lawrence, I began to see that my disorder was reflective of my worst memories of my mother: her controlling temper, her sickness, her death.
All along, I clung to only the best memories, but in reality, I was living out the most terrible ones of all. These two things were at odds with one another, my therapist said, because I had never dealt with the loss of my mother. To get better—to start separating myself from both the perfection and the disorder—I had to learn to grieve and to recognize my mother for who she was: beautiful but flawed. By acknowledging my mother’s imperfections, I could more easily accept my own.
Are you able to nurture and love yourself as you do your children?
I’m much better at this than I used to be, but I’m still a work in progress. Though I wish it weren’t so, I sometimes have to fake it when teaching my son and daughter lessons I have trouble honoring myself. When I talk with them about food and bodies, words flow out of me with hope and hypocrisy. “All bodies are worthy of respect, no matter how big or small, no matter how short or tall,” I tell my children, optimistic they’ll genuinely believe this — and well aware I believe it to be true for everyone but myself.
Even though my mind is unkind to my body, I keep critical thoughts to myself. I know my children are always listening and watching, even when I think they’re not, and I don’t want them growing up with a mother who insinuates that her body is a problem in need of fixing. When taking photos with the kids, I never demand a redo if my hair is askew or the camera angle is less than flattering. Instead, I look at the photos and pay more attention to the view of my kids than of myself; with my gaze fixed on them, I am happiest.
You have been on the publicity and book event circuit in anticipation since the book’s release. What emotions have arisen for you?
Memoirs, in many ways, are like mirrors. They hold a mirror up to the author’s life and invite readers to share in that reflection so they can more clearly see themselves and feel less alone. I’ve been reminded of this a lot while on my book tour, where many readers have told me some variation of, “I thought I was the only one.” After they heard me speak, or read my book, they realized that wasn’t the case.
When we think we’re the only ones, we stay small and silent. This is what I did when I was acutely sick with anorexia — an isolating disorder that took over my identity to the point where I barely recognized my reflection. I wanted to be as small as possible, and I was terrified of taking up space. If given the choice of a super power, I would have opted for indefinite invisibility.
Now, as a woman in recovery, I want to be seen. I’m taking up more space than I ever have before — on social media where I post book updates several times a day, in local and national media appearances, and on tour where my body is on display as I talk about my book in front of crowds. And I’m ok with that.
What is your vision for what this book will do out in the world?
I hope this book will reach people who with lived experience with an eating disorder, as well as clinicians specializing in these disorders, caretakers, and medical doctors (who typically only receive zero to two hours of training on eating disorders in medical school and residency). I especially want it to resonate with people who live in the middle place and have been overlooked.
Years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to write about life in the middle place out of fear of what people would think or say. But in more recent years, I’ve felt compelled to write about it and build community around it. Since my book SLIP was published in August, I’ve met so many people who have told me, “I’ve been waiting for someone to write a book about the grey spaces of recovery,” or “Thank you for putting words to my experiences,” or “This is the book I can most relate to.”
Writing memoir is no doubt an act of vulnerability, but it’s also a hard-won act of service. It’s the ultimate way to help people embrace their own imperfections and untidy narratives, especially when navigating life’s messy middles. I hope this book will help do that.
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Headshot Lizzie Chen
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
