Empty

by Susan Burton

When I grew up, in the 1980s, binge-eating disorder wasn’t on the list of things you could have. I knew anorexia; I knew bulimia. But there were no after-school specials or first-person magazine stories about binge eating, which wasn’t recognized as a formal eating disorder diagnosis until 2013.

Binge eating is not just overeating. It’s eating in a way that feels involuntary and out of control. It’s eating tons of food far past the point when you are full—“full,” an irrelevant word.

And it’s eating without purging—eating without vomiting or taking a laxative. The way it began for me is not unusual. I was anorexic first, and then I started bingeing. Later I went back to anorexia. Many people with eating disorders cycle through more than one of them.

Eating disorders are characterized by secrecy. Even after I stopped bingeing, I told no one about it.

Eating disorders are primarily women’s illnesses and exist within a patriarchal culture that diminishes female suffering.

“Fix my eating” didn’t mean “get help” or “recover.” To me it meant “eat perfectly.”

“We hide in plain sight, in our bodies.”

I knew even her insides; that small stomach gurgled. I’d lain my head there at night while she read. Hers was the female body I learned first, and in a million complex ways, it will be forever connected to mine.

In the morning I weighed less than ever. There was a thrill in me when I saw the number on the scale. Oh, the power of lightness!

was in the dangerous early stage of anorexia: The world responds to thinness, and the girl subsists on its compliments.

warn her of the peril: organ failure, cognitive impairment, the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness—is

Anorexia had slowed my metabolism, and now my body held on to fat, defending against starvation.

“Would my whole life have been different if I’d allowed myself to feel full?”)

EATING HAD changed me. I had no control, and I hated myself for it. Once

I resolved to fix myself, always swearing, Tomorrow I’ll be better, and sometimes I was. I didn’t “eat bad,” as I called it, every day, and while I was gaining weight, this actually made me look good.

It had its downsides: For years I exercised compulsively. The runner’s high made me feel omnipotent: Why talk to anyone about my problems? I had my own way of solving them. And swimming, the sport that kept me sanest as a teenager, put my body on display.

It seemed to me we had done things in the wrong order. We had all started with alcohol. But coffee, which was actually helpful, should have been the first thing we learned.

By the time she told me this, I was familiar with the particular desperation of being a woman alone at night in a kitchen.

Other girls just had their bodies and put food into them and didn’t think. Or they did think but in a normal way. I could tell by the way they said it: “I am getting so fat.” They weren’t wrecked by food in the way I was; it didn’t define them.

Like all eating practices I adopted, veganism was intended to fix me. It offered limits as well as the promise of a higher plane. And it made me calm to cut things out. A diet that contracted rather than expanded felt like a way back to who I used to be.

Eating always needed to be figured out first, always had to be fixed before anything else could begin. It was always the thing that got in the way.

Food didn’t give me energy anymore. It depleted me.

But I couldn’t change my perception. I saw everything on me as extra.

It wasn’t subtraction; it was recalibration. It was an attempt to restore a steady state, both physically and emotionally.)

Back then it seemed to me that exercise was fundamentally different from vomiting or laxatives.

Multiple times a day I repeated this mantra: Hunger will set you free. Hunger, that was my trick. There was no gum-chewing or fizzy water or fiber. That was the whole thing of my anorexia: Just don’t eat. I was empty. Being empty meant I was always ready, always prepared. Empty for exercise, empty in case of an emergency. I was always ready for surgery, ready to go under, ready for general. Empty enough to go out at night and have room for a Frosty, even though that was not a thing I would ever eat.

Not eating was the same as binge eating: Both made food the primary determinant of feeling; both ways, I was controlled by it. Hunger was no different from excess. But