We’re Bad at Supporting People in Eating Disorder Recovery

Not everyone sees food as a friend, but everyone still has to eat (CW: eating disorders, addiction)

Photo by Gabor Monori on Unsplash

To this day, I can’t eat frozen yogurt without getting nauseous. It’s not the dairy that does it. It’s much more Pavlovian than that.

I grew up in San Diego, where frozen yogurt is a way of life. When I was 13, I got my first serious addiction. Like so many people, I was introduced to it by my friends. One friend in particular was a lot more hard-core than me, but it sort of spread through osmosis within our clique. It took me time to get addicted. At first, it was just something I did from time to time, almost just to fit in. It didn’t stay like that for long.

I’d sneak off all the time to indulge myself. I got good at hiding it. My parents knew something was up, but I’d deny deny deny if they ever brought it up and eventually they decided, if I wanted help, I’d ask for it. I didn’t. I loved my addiction. I felt like I had a cheat code, an escape hatch. All my energy could build up into a bomb of tension, but I had a magic trick to let off all the steam and return myself to cool, calm control.

My addiction was not to frozen yogurt. It was to binge-eating and making myself vomit afterwards. The frozen…